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Comment by bayindirh

14 hours ago

I believe this is combined with something I call "asymmetry blindness". They may say "but we send an single e-mail per month, this can't be bad".

We the users get a barrage of e-mails everyday because every marketing team is thinking we only get their mail, and it makes our lonely and cold mailbox merrier.

No, users are in constant "Tsunami warning!" mode and these teams are not helping.

If they were sending just one per month I might actually read them occasionally. It's the three a day from the likes of aliexpress that get deleted without a second glance.

But yes, you're absolutely right - "no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood".

  • That marketing team only sends 1 email a month, but the 25 other marketing teams at the same company also only send 1 email a month.

Our subscription product costs less than expensive coffee. Unused RAM is wasted.

  • Again, no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood: if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable. Usually people already have their coffee-priced budget allocated to something. Like coffee.

    (Incidentally, this is why mobile gaming uses so many anti-patterns, to make people keep making "just one more" tiny purchase)

  • I guess the people you quote also missed that not all of us work in Silicon Valley and can afford those expensive coffees every day. I’d like an estimate of how many Nescafé powder coffee cups I’d have to skip per month to use their subscription.

Indeed. I received 28 unwanted emails of this kind in January so far (just counted), which is a bit more than once per day, despite quite avidly unsubscribing from this kind of emails. This month I had to unsubscribe from ChatGPT and GitHub emails of this kind too, although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently.

  • > although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently

    Dark pattern. They know you'd spot immediate abuse , so they delay until you are likely to have forgotten whether you opted in.

  • >unsubscribe from ChatGPT emails

    Really? I've never got a spam from them. Hell, I just searched and I'm not really seeing anything from them after the point where I signed up.