Comment by Aurornis
12 days ago
> Always judge an author by the length of their text.
Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text.
Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid to speak out or discuss nuance because it was too many words, and you didn't want to use too many words.
There is such a thing as balance. For some reason it tends to be very easy to go overboard in either direction.
Also, any metric ceases to be a good metric the moment it becomes a goal.
I have observed both of the above statements in many different contexts, they seem to be (somewhat) universal rules for human society.
I've also observed the third direction, which is the message storm.
That's when someone breaks down their point into multiple separate messages, one sentence at a time, when a single coherent paragraph or two would have worked. Why send one message when you can send 7 in rapid succession?
It's arguably the most annoying method of communication because it spams your notifications and you have no idea when someone has finished dumping.
I think that is in line with what I said: a balance is best. I have seen the opposite of what you described: long messages with no paragraph breaks. Not great either.
Dumping every sentence saves up tokens in human mind ;-)
Tangential but it kinda irks me when people just put their initials when signing off on an email. It seems like unnecessary brevity in a world where you can type your name once in your emails signature line and never worry about typing it again.
How about not writing the name at all? It's already in the email header.
support@domain, info@domain, purchasing@domain, sales@domain, etc
I can quickly imagine several situations in which one might speak to a public facing individual but still like to say "I was told by {sales rep} that {statement} was the case" or "{Employee} in support assured me this would be resolved in {timeperiod}" or "I had an excellent conversation with {employee} and want to ensure they'll be getting any commission due to them because they really convinced me more than your website"
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Eh, I'm ambivalent. Letters in the mail have a From and people still sign them and some people even date them even if there's a post mark. At this point though it's more work for me to remove my signature. Plus my signature has my phone number.
“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”
little offtopic, but speaking of, someone just made a coding agent plugin that makes it save tokens by speaking like caveman