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Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

shouldisendit.com

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Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#41

Post by tomsmeding »

andischo wrote: post #23
diminoten wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does this mean something like crowd sourced scoring of sentiment does better than algorithmic detection? Or do people suck just as badly?

Short answer: yes, crowd sourcing would work better. Long answer: It's difficult to determine how good/bad people actually are at detecting the correct sentiment, as data sets containing phrase/sentence sentiment pairs are often created by majority decision of human taggers. E.g. 7 people are given the same training examples and whatever most of them choose is then used as "correct" answer (gold standard). This might…

Then again, I assume those texts are written by humans for humans. So isn't the "correct" sentiment exactly what humans tend to make of it? And if humans aren't very good at detecting the sentiment, maybe the writer is at fault, not the readers.

I think letting a number of people read the text and choosing the majority vote as the text's sentiment might not actually be a very bad way of determining that.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#42

Post by nothrabannosir »

Completely tangential (but it's HN so that's what we're here for ey): if that video represents what normal people look like when they're having an "off" morning, then I am the actual Antichrist.

There is some real potential for comedy in that video, you're missing out :) Turn up the Grinch factor by at least 10. At 00:16, put a "beat": Change the pace, the colour balance, the framing, everything. Lovey dovey intro, music, la la, then BAM waaa waaa nuclear alarm sound, zombie hand slams on alarm, which breaks, etc. (As a matter of fact, show an actual zombie!)

Right now, that "bad morning routine" to me basically looks like... what I imagine the Dalai Lama does in the morning.

Oh and if you're gonna burn toast; actually burn the toast! Black. Burn the house down black. Smoke everywhere. And the car, just show it completely totalled. Like, just the frame is left, somehow. When the meeting's canceled, idk, the office building is just destroyed and it's this person looking out over rubble.

(I assume you probably cobbled this together from stock footage, in which case you're obviously limited by what's available. Still worth looking if you can find some much darker shots? :) basically try and exaggerate much more.)

[edit: sorry forgot to say well done. it's not bad at all, and I think you did really well on the "upbeat" bits. all the more potential for contrast!]

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#43

Post by dwaltrip »

tomsmeding wrote: post #41
andischo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: yes, crowd sourcing would work better. Long answer: It's difficult to determine how good/bad people actually are at detecting the correct sentiment, as data sets containing phrase/sentence sentiment pairs are often created by majority decision of human taggers. E.g. 7 people are given the same training examples and whatever most of them choose is then used as "correct" answer (gold standard). This might…

Then again, I assume those texts are written by humans for humans. So isn't the "correct" sentiment exactly what humans tend to make of it? And if humans aren't very good at detecting the sentiment, maybe the writer is at fault, not the readers. I think letting a number of people read the text and choosing the majority vote as the text's sentiment might not actually be a very bad way of determining that.

It might be correct to say that a group of humans is interpreting the sentiment "incorrectly" if they don't have all the relevant context / information.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#45

Post by ac4tw »

nxc18 wrote: post #18
ac4tw wrote: post #15

I've had a conversation about something like this nearly every year that I worked in Corporate America. Interesting to see it get built (I can't speak to the history of other implementations). Those past discussions were around an MS Outlook add-on to disable/gate the send button if the email draft content was too egregious. A few questions I had about your product: * How would you monetize? (If you're thinking of do…

There have been a few implementations in the past, including tonecheck. https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/tonecheck/

Thanks for that--I concur with TC that "At the very least, their graphics are quite amusing"

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#46

Post by ryan-allen »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #26

It's a neat idea, but after too many sarcastic, "clever", trying-to-be-funny, defensive, et al emails in my career I have a simpler heuristic. If I have to ask myself "should I send it?", the answer is no. Leave it in drafts (with no one in the to: line!) until either things have cooled down and I delete it, or there's more perspective and it's actually ok to send. I have too many fails to tell, but the worst ever wa…

A similar anecdote in How to Win Friends and Influence people (which I read 15 years ago) has had me leave many an email in drafts.

It's cathartic to write, but you don't need to send. Almost every time I re-read the draft a week later, I'm glad it stayed a draft.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#47

Post by cabaalis »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #26

It's a neat idea, but after too many sarcastic, "clever", trying-to-be-funny, defensive, et al emails in my career I have a simpler heuristic. If I have to ask myself "should I send it?", the answer is no. Leave it in drafts (with no one in the to: line!) until either things have cooled down and I delete it, or there's more perspective and it's actually ok to send. I have too many fails to tell, but the worst ever wa…

Put a rule in outlook to delay emails in the outbox for 2 or 3 minutes. Gives you a chance to delete after you vent.

This also helps in a compliance-heavy environment to give time to correct if something is accidentally sent.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#48

Post by dustingetz »

baxtr wrote: post #34
ianmcgowan wrote: post #26

It's a neat idea, but after too many sarcastic, "clever", trying-to-be-funny, defensive, et al emails in my career I have a simpler heuristic. If I have to ask myself "should I send it?", the answer is no. Leave it in drafts (with no one in the to: line!) until either things have cooled down and I delete it, or there's more perspective and it's actually ok to send. I have too many fails to tell, but the worst ever wa…

Great. I apply something I’ve came across: - if you question whether you should send an email, call the person - if you ask yourself for too long what to say on the phone, go and see the person Has worked well for me

- Does the email fit in a slack? if not, delete it, go open slack and type the message into the slack box, then copy paste that into the email and send.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#49

Post by geowwy »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #26

It's a neat idea, but after too many sarcastic, "clever", trying-to-be-funny, defensive, et al emails in my career I have a simpler heuristic. If I have to ask myself "should I send it?", the answer is no. Leave it in drafts (with no one in the to: line!) until either things have cooled down and I delete it, or there's more perspective and it's actually ok to send. I have too many fails to tell, but the worst ever wa…

The real value of this tool is as an objective measure of how pleasant your communications are.

Now that Codes of Conduct are the norm rude/abusive behaviour is not tolerated, but this can cause problems because one person might see rude and abusive behaviour where another person does not.

Having a tool to objectively measure incorrect words and thoughts would be a great way to protect developers from themselves.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#50

Post by genidoi »

palakchokshi wrote: post #33
sakopov wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what I was going to post. At the very least I was expecting a demo of the product after all the nonsensical "bad day" blabber. But it never came and I still had no idea what I was looking at.

This comment and the one above it in the thread are perfect examples of use cases of "Should I send it?"

On the contrary they seem like perfectly rational responses to an introductory video that is redundant at best and patronising at worst.

I was dissuaded from installing it because I assume the products quality would reflect how little the founders seem to understand people in thinking that it's necessary to accurately detail what a poor start to the day would look like.

The video should be a simple gif demonstrating how an email with a negative tone is detected and turned into a positive tone. People are smart enough to figure out how that could be useful.

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