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aeturnumlast Sunday at 3:52 PM2 repliesview on HN

Zero emails is not low noise - it's zero noise. I agree that I sometimes want zero noise from companies whose products I am using...and also it depends on what is in the noise? Sometimes I find unexpected signal.

I would say that email is inherently a somewhat noisy channel. You have little meta-data about how appropriate and timely a message is, so often you are sending in the dark. There are many downsides to the protocol and its place in our lives but it does carry a lot of important communication.

Basically...I just don't know what communication medium would allow a company that makes app icons to keep their customers in the loop about updates & concerns related to the product. Are you gonna install a Font Awesome app?


Replies

Ferret7446last Sunday at 9:44 PM

Easy, let the user opt in to email updates about new products, rather than automatically "opting" them in when you force them to use their email to create an account

another-daveyesterday at 1:20 PM

> Basically...I just don't know what communication medium would allow a company that makes app icons to keep their customers in the loop about updates & concerns related to the product. Are you gonna install a Font Awesome app?

What companies _used_ to do is have "Subscribe to our newsletter" on their site - either for non-account holders, or as a separate checkbox when setting up an account.

Same with email frequency — would be trivial to add "when do you want to hear from us?" as a question "when we release a new font / when we make changes to a font you've purcahsed / only account related".

We have the patterns for all this already established.