To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by thesz » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:44 AM UTC

The converse is also true. Say more to have less replies.

When writing business email, be an epistolary writer. Imagine what you vis-a-vis will feel or do or need at the moment they receive your letter and address that.

Basically, to have less replies is to save time for you and your correspondence. They will not take [1] their time answering with questions and you will have more time not answering their mail.

This is where programming (and business) needs empathy in full.

[1] I thought about using "waste" there but declined that after some consideration. They will not waste their time creating a reply to you - because they'll show you your shortcomings. But they will be more productive in case you hit all the spots and your email does not need to be answered.

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

#112

Post by dennisgorelik » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:46 AM UTC

1) Netlify traffic dropped 4x in May 2020 [1]

2) Email - is very small part of Netlify traffic (0.99%).

3) $97.1M funding. Last round - $53M on Mar 4, 2020 [2]

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/netlify.com

[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...

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

#113

Post by kyle_morris_ » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 3:40 AM UTC

Has there been an analysis of comment length and replies/upvotes?

I've got to assume the length of your comment correlates with engagement.

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

#114

Post by Pxtl » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 6:21 AM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #97

Pxtl wrote: post #77

Now that everybody's remote, I think there's an important conversation about respecting the reader's time that needs to happen. 1) Brevity. 2) Get your terminology perfect . Asynchronous "who's on first" sucks . 3) When discussing anything on the web, start with a hyperlink. I can't see your screen, I can't scroll or inspect your screenshots. Expecting the reader to hunt down the resource that you had one ctrl-C, ctr…

> Asynchronous "who's on first" What does that mean? "On first"?

I just mean the repeated loops of miscommunication based on the fundamental misunderstanding of a single word. "Who's on first?" is a comedy sketch where two men are discussing a man named "who" and various other people with misleading names.

I've run into many times where a person has said a similar but distinct term - like they said "repo" when they mean "branch" and then burn 5 minutes of time while two people are confused by the fact that nothing the other person says makes sense.

It feels like the latency-time of writing makes shaking this mess out take 5X longer than spoken conversation.,

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

#115

Post by owaty » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #105

stuff4ben wrote: post #38

Let me give you some advice...talk less, smile more, don't let them know what you're against or what you're for. Until that is you get their attention, then make the deal. Cuz if you want to get ahead, fools who run their mouths off wind up dead (broke).

> don't let them know what you're against or what you're for Why not?

It's a quote from Hamilton, the musical.

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

#116

Post by owaty » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 7:47 AM UTC

I would find it quite annoying to get any of those emails.

When I give you my email, it's not because I actually want to hear from you; it's because you've made it the only — or the least shady — way to sign up. I do not want to hear from you or answer your questions, especially before I've decided that I like your product and care about it.

So any such email I immediately mark as junk, and the fact that you sent it to me will go the "cons" column when evaluating your product vs the competitors.

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

#117

Post by chimen » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 8:09 AM UTC

owaty wrote: post #116

I would find it quite annoying to get any of those emails. When I give you my email, it's not because I actually want to hear from you; it's because you've made it the only — or the least shady — way to sign up. I do not want to hear from you or answer your questions, especially before I've decided that I like your product and care about it. So any such email I immediately mark as junk, and the fact that you sent it…

Life must be really hard if you get to that point where a welcome email coming from a service you signed up for a trial is so "annoying" that you "immediately mark as junk".

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

#118

Post by chimen » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 8:16 AM UTC

dennisgorelik wrote: post #112

1) Netlify traffic dropped 4x in May 2020 [1] 2) Email - is very small part of Netlify traffic (0.99%). 3) $97.1M funding. Last round - $53M on Mar 4, 2020 [2] [1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/netlify.com [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...

I'm one of those that dropped and moved to Firebase. The monthly payments were topping somewhere at $130 for a static website with 700-800 daily visitors and Netlify was starting to corner me into paying extra for every little detail possible. I clearly felt that onboarding was off and it's time to milk every cent.

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

#119

Post by GlennS » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 8:58 AM UTC

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.

Somewhat surprised Microsoft haven't done something about this since they bought LinkedIn. It surely doesn't reflect well on their brand.

Are people at Microsoft OK with working alongside people who do this scummy stuff?

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

#120

Post by 0898 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #9

Maybe if you made it a two word email and removed the signature it would get 16x the engagement. Or if you had an empty email and put the question in the subject you’d get 32x engagement. Attention spans these days are terrible.

> Attention spans these days are terrible.

The most popular podcast in the world lasts for 3 hours. I don't think it's true that attention spans are getting shorter – long form content has never been more popular.