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We (Custora, YC W11) are hard at work on exactly what you're asking for: https://www.custora.com/home/tour_lifecycle
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It definitely sounds like a lot of emails in my article. But let's say you never engage with the service. You might receive 2 in 2 months and then never hear again. Smart, not abusive. While I mentioned reminders often as it's easiest to describe, "Teach me something new." is exactly right. Engaging mailers should offer help, tips and such.
I would agree with AznHisoka. Periodic mails are like shouting in the room to gain attention. When everyone else is quiet, it works like a charm. The others pick up this trick. Soon no-one can hear anything, and those who do not want to be disturbed, wear earplugs ;-) That's precisely what I did with my Gmail account when it became near-unusable after I used for several signups for startup services which I eventually…
Someone needs to build this. Now.
Happy birthday James! You're the reason I blogged about this. Your email asking me to blog about the email template stuff got me thinking about this too haha.
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In the Real World™, a tl;dr is called an "Executive Summary." It's a nice way of saying "Here's what this writeup means if you don't have time to read it or aren't bright enough to understand it fully."
If you want to communicate your meaning to people who do not have time to read your entire text, the solution is to put a clear, short summary first within said text, in proper English. A cryptically brief, ungrammatical special section is hugely suboptimal, and a labeled intro section is wholly unnecessary in a 10 page essay like this. Simply write. If you have not clearly communicated the essence of your article in…
If I see a big block of text that I don't want to read—or don't have time to read—I'm not even going to read the first sentence.† I'm going to stick it in my ReadItLater queue and forget about it. If you don't want to say "tl;dr" specifically, fine, but do distinguish it from the text following it in some way.
Saying "Executive summary: X" is great: it'll be appreciated by the people who want it, and everyone else will just find it perhaps a bit dry in style, rather than actually insulting or offensive. Plus, the people who—based on your summary of the text to follow—turn out to not care to read any further, will have more time to do other things. (This is also what Email Subject lines are for. We use those for even the shortest of emails, don't we?)
† Note that I have this form of "wall-of-text disgust" because so few people write well enough to make reading the first few paragraphs a valid way to extract a summary of the text. Usually all I can pull from the first three paragraphs or so of an essay about, say, "how we solved the X problem," is a very detailed description of the X problem. It's a lot easier to convince people to write a one-sentence summary after the fact, than it is to teach them proper essay-writing style and convince them to rework everything they write to imbue it.
http://turbo.paulstamatiou.com/uploads/2011/08/picplum_step1... Slightly OT but I find something very confusing about the styles of the 3 tabs in that screenshot. Each tab seems sort of different when really you should just have an on style and an off style.
So one YC startup (Picplum) is begging for a service that another YC startup (Custora) has evidently already built and is publicly promoting? Maybe YC is too big :)
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In the Real World™, a tl;dr is called an "Executive Summary." It's a nice way of saying "Here's what this writeup means if you don't have time to read it or aren't bright enough to understand it fully."
> In the Real World™, a tl;dr is called an "Executive Summary." Umm, no. "tl,dr" means "I didn't read it, don't think that you should, and now I'm going to tell you how smart I am." Executive summaries are written by people who bothered to read {whatever}. Some are even written by folks who aren't tooting their own horn.
Plus... calling Summary a 'tl;dr' is somehow informal and ok, me thinks.
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That says a little bit more. Do you treat it as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, or as a classification problem? It seems like a sequential decision making problem, so RL is appropriate but AFAIK there is no RL algorithm that generalises over states while still retaining some error bounds. I suppose you could brute-force a Bayesian solution via MCMC.
There are two big problems that we deal with. First is estimation of customer lifetime value. We use a latent attrition model, which is the 'pattern matching' The second is figuring out which promotions/emails go to which people. This is a supervised learning problem. We train the model with users past responses to discounts and their past behavioral states (which are the posterior probabilities from the latent attri…