This morning my phone dinged with a fresh notification–a new email! What oh what could it be?
I rush over to check while thinking “I need to unsubscribe to a lot of stuff so I get fewer non-urgent dinging notifications.”
Well shoot, that’s disappointing. It’s Disqus Digests, one of the biggest wastes of dopamine anticipation ever.
It simply sucks.
Disqus itself is great as a commenting system. I’ve been there since the beginning and have mostly enjoyed its evolution.
And then they did this interruptive, irrelevant email.
Well why does it suck, you say.
Every one of these “Digests” sends a few comments from a blog conversation in which I’ve already participated. That means it’s very, very likely that I’ve seen the comments before.
So I open the mail, see something I’ve already read, and curse Daniel and Company for enticing me into wasting my time, and cursing myself for falling for it.
So I unsubscribed.
Here’s the other side of the criticism–the optimism of dissent: it would be better (and not that hard for that talented crew) to send thematically relevant comments from other sites. I already know AVC.com and was just there a few minutes ago. Don’t send me comments from there. I’ve likely seen most of them, and if I haven’t it’s because I’m not really interested in that conversation anymore. Been there. What’s next?
If instead you sent me links to other conversations that you know I’d be interested in because I send you a boatload of signals just by commenting (let’s see… my comment, the comment I responded to, responses or lack thereof to my comments, likes I get, likes I give, other Disqus sites I visit, Disqus sites I where I comment, etc, etc) and you have tons of signals of relevant comments, people, blog posts from across the Disqusophere, well, let’s just say you can approximate something that is far superior than a lame summation of a few comments that happened at the shindig I’ve already dug.
I was hoping to post something more startup-y for my first post in a month, but maybe here’s the lesson for startups: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
Anyone other lessons here?