4 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: BETA: Weekly Round-Up and Newsletter | 2020-04-03
I don’t see how a one time mailer would be any more effective than the stickies you think most users ignore. Most users will also ignore your one time spammy newsletter. Also, allowing messages will annoy people to have yet another inbox from which to clean junk. Please, this should be opt in for any such messages.
Comment by Georgy_K_Zhukov at 04/04/2020 at 13:07 UTC*
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
It certainly will be more effective! The question is whether it does so in a way that is balanced, which is what this BETA test of the feature is hoping to determine through A/B testing. A sticky *only* gets seen by users who actively browse the subreddit when it is stickied. Even if we are very charitable and assume most subscribers browse at least once a week, that means that the *chance* of the sticky being seen is 1/7 (we have different stickies almost every day). *But*, if we also assume that users who are interested in that kind of post are equally distributed between all browsers, we're only reaching 1/7 of the users *interested* in whatever we stickied.^1
To be clear though, we have **NO** intention of rolling this out for everyone on the subreddit without very serious consideration of the feedback - both positive and negative - and accomodation of the various concerns being raised. The *biggest* one is opt-in versus opt-out, and I would direct you here[1] for the most relevant chain on that as I don't want to just be reposting it several times.
1: I would add one more thing here, as I'm surprised no one has actually asked it, namely "Why didn't you do a META discussion/Survey asking about this *before* you sent it off?" because this also speaks to this issue. If we did that, the results would skew *massively* to the users who browse very often. Right now the survey is majority users who browse weekly or less, and only 10 percent is from those who browse daily. But if we just posted it like that, it is the latter who would make up the majority of survey respondents, and *their views would not be at all representative of what most subscribers want*. So anyways, it is a slightly different matter, but the issue you do raise is closely intertwined with this one. To have any sense of the viability of this issue, we have to run an A/B test like this as opposed to *only* polling the subreddit, because stickies *don't work*.