Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

gkogan.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 127 posts

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#41

Post by lpolovets »

dkersten wrote: post #31
lpolovets wrote: post #23

I had a similar experience at LinkedIn in its early days. Back when we had maybe 500k members, we A/B tested the hell out of our invite messages. These messages were critical because no one had heard of LinkedIn at the time (~2004ish) and no one knew what social networking was or why they would want to sign up. And getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us. We A/B tested many invite email for…

> getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us So important that you resorted to every dark pattern in the book, it seems. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I don't know any of my tech friends who haven't had a bad experience with linkedin tricking them into spamming invites or similar.

I'm very frustrated by dark patterns, too. IIRC those came well after I left the company in 2005, and I'm disappointed they're there. I think trying to get users to spam invites is especially annoying and lame: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/953059635522502656

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#42

Post by lpolovets »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #32
lpolovets wrote: post #23

I had a similar experience at LinkedIn in its early days. Back when we had maybe 500k members, we A/B tested the hell out of our invite messages. These messages were critical because no one had heard of LinkedIn at the time (~2004ish) and no one knew what social networking was or why they would want to sign up. And getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us. We A/B tested many invite email for…

Interesting, I wonder how much of it may have been due to other reasons than just the brevity. I wonder how much of it might also have been due to that, e.g, people generally enjoy helping other people, and so are likely to respond positively to what appears to be someone else outlining what they'd "like" for you to do.

It's hard to be sure, but my guess is the effectiveness came mostly from the brevity. Because at the time no one knew what LinkedIn or social networking were, so most users wouldn't know if the invite was spam or not, whether accepting the invite would help the other person, etc. Today there's more social pressure to accept LinkedIn/Facebook/etc invites from people you know.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#44

Post by dkersten »

lpolovets wrote: post #41
dkersten wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us So important that you resorted to every dark pattern in the book, it seems. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I don't know any of my tech friends who haven't had a bad experience with linkedin tricking them into spamming invites or similar.

I'm very frustrated by dark patterns, too. IIRC those came well after I left the company in 2005, and I'm disappointed they're there. I think trying to get users to spam invites is especially annoying and lame: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/953059635522502656

I'm glad you agree and weren't part of it! Apologies for suggesting you were.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#45

Post by Spooky23 »

scott_s wrote: post #28
skj wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my managers gave me some guidelines here. If it's more than 100 words, cap it at 100 and schedule a meeting. It clearly is information-dense to the degree where a quick question/answer session will be helpful. From my own experience, I make sure to never ask more than one question in an email. If you ask more, people will answer the first and ignore the rest.

I still find it useful to write those emails, even if I'm asking to talk to someone. The email serves as an agenda, it forces me to reason through the issue, and it serves as a long-term record of the issue. But the request for the meeting should come first .

It depends on the context, the workplace, and how you do it.

An agenda is an agenda, which is different than an argument/position that would be in an email. Usually when I get something like that, it's intended to be an "anchor" or written record of something that the other party wants. That triggers more bullshit email, as now a more formal artifact of whatever conversation happens in the meeting is needed.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#46

Post by epistasis »

gre wrote: post #43

This will work until everyone is sick of getting short emails asking for feedback.

My thoughts exactly... and also it will become harder to distinguish emails at a glance.

A quick win for the first few spammers that do this, with the end result of degrading the overall utility of email for everyone.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#47

Post by cnity »

formerly_proven wrote: post #17

The shorter the email the more believable it becomes that it was specifically written by a human directed at you, not a mass-used template. If you feel like you get an automatic email, you're not going to respond, because you don't want to talk to a computer. If, on the other hand, you can suspend your disbelief and entertain the fiction that someone named "Valerie" at E-Corp personally contacted you, you are infinit…

That's one thing, but another thing that is not listed as one of the possible reasons is simply that the original email is just verbose and _bad_. Imagine a person in real life gave you that spiel, of course you'd be put off.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#49

Post by daguar »

This is neat! That said, I don't think the statistical size makes this a conclusion you can draw:

- "a reply rate of 1% (1 in 100 users)"

- "a reply rate of 4% (1 in 25 users)"

- "a reply rate of 8% (1 in 12 users)"

Sorry to say but... we really can't draw a conclusion like this strictly from these kinds of numbers.

Totally possible these conclusions ARE true, but I'd test at a bigger scale and/or with qualitative research with users.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#50

Post by knownhoot »

davnicwil wrote: post #30

I've recently launched https://boxci.dev and have a 'leave your email if you have questions' box on the landing page. People have been leaving their emails, but surprisingly, even though the intent is very clear (I think), almost nobody has actually replied when I've emailed to open the conversation. The kinds of response rate percentages ( My opening email is nothing like as long as the first one in this article, bu…

I wonder how many of the users that complete the form mistake it for a newsletter subscribe, as that's commonly where subscribe widgets live.
Post reply on HN