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View submission: BETA: Weekly Round-Up and Newsletter | 2020-04-03
I also wonder if blocking the mod-messages account would mean I can’t get newsletters from any subreddit.
As far as I know it would. I promised the Admins a very large write up with feedback after this and it is definitely something I already plan to point out. *Some* subreddits I subscribe to I'd like to see what they use the feature for, but others, I really wouldn't need it from, so if it is a "Opt-Out" for everything, not on a per subreddit basis, it is definitely an imperfect system.
In any case, we *very* much anticipate the opt-in/opt-out issue to be the most commonly brought up one. I'd note that while it isn't something we have control over, it is one which either way we have split thoughts on. Making it Opt In has clear advantages in *ensuring* that only people who really want it are getting it, but it hits the same issue I talked about elsewhere where it is very, very hard to reach a large segment of a subreddit. Even a *wildly* popular thread is only going to get 100-200k views most days.
We have the occasional barnburner which skyrockets past that, but for more mundane things like META announcements? I dunno... maybe 5k users see them?
So if we do a thought experiment for this. We'll have a real number in a few days when the survey is completed, but estimate 50 percent of users say they plan to continue getting this, 25 percent say they don't know, ands 25 percent say they plan to opt out. Assuming the survey responses are roughly representative of the general tenor of the subreddit, that is *500,000 users* who would want to get this message. But we would *never*, no matter how hard we tried, be able to let them know about it through the normal tools available to us - making a META thread and stickying it, basically. So we're in a Catch-22 where the only way to tell those users about it is to use that very feature.
Is it worth sending it out despite the then roughly 250,000 users who don't want to get it and will opt out from it? Personally I would say it is. Ideally, they will only be getting it the one time and opt out anyways, of course, so it is something we don't need to worry about long term. This is only in A/B testing, so it is only a portion of the subreddit getting it, and if the numbers end up looking like that... we'd *probably* continue with this, although there are other factors to consider of course. If the numbers aren't as good though, let's say they are reversed? Might not be worth it then to push to the whole sub, even if, ideally, it is just the one message to the non-interested.
In any case we'll have a better picture of things in a few days hopefully.
There's nothing here!