I built notifyplex.com because I wanted the benefits of it for myself, but I wasn’t sure who else would want to use it. While it was interesting and fun to build, the gap between what senders want and what receivers want might be a long bridge to cross.
The balance of annoyance
Email and other digital “communications” are often an adversarial game where senders try to buy or manipulate people’s attention, and recipients have to ward off as much intrusion as possible. We either have to painstakingly unsubscribe from each unwanted sender, or mark them as spam or ignore the in-box altogether. We spend energy trying not to be the victim of communications but at the same time we still want to know certain things, which are sometimes buried among all the junk.
Twitter addresses this with the theory that everyone can talk and you only listen to who you want. Your only choice is to follow or not follow; but really we care about the relevance of the content, not just the sender. Some platforms use AI to guess what we want to see, but this takes away our control.
Broadcast media deal with a similar thing – If they run too many ads they lose listeners and that could collapse their ad revenue, but if they run too few, they are missing revenue. They find that special balance of annoyance that is on the edge of what people will accept.
Classifying and censoring
My thought with notifyplex is that you should be able to say everything (like twitter) but you should be honest about classifying what you are sending. That way recipients can decide in a clear way (not using a mystery AI algorithm) which items to receive. The sender still has to play the “balance of annoyance” game because they know that by misclassifying or underclassifying, they will lose readers.
One of the first people I asked about it when it was in production was someone who has a large email list concerning local business. That person knows that people remain on the list because they trust her to only send things that are appropriate. Most weeks there are a few emails which sometimes contain something I am happy to learn about, and the other ones are easy to delete, so the balance of annoyance is mostly in my favor.
She acts as a censor on my behalf because she sometimes rejects requests to send out information. That’s good. There are breakdowns though: Everything goes through her and she’s busy, and she doesn’t do a lot of editing. For example sometimes the subject line is something like “Fwd: re: Pls send to your contacts!”, and the email body is a nested chain of emails that I would have to dig through to even understand what it is about. Major formatting fails are common.
Qualified messages
Using sales terminology of “qualified leads”, a “qualified message” would be one that the recipient wants. If a sender is honest about classifying over a long period of time, and it is formatted consistently to be easy to read, their subscriber list will grow and most messages will be qualified. If they are inconsistent or send too much without classifying, messages will be unqualified and people will unsubscribe.
Notifyplex.com should make it possible to build up very large and highly qualified audiences through trust, rather than through the adversarial system we are used to. That’s because it allows senders complete control over classifying, using the terms specific to their organization; and it allows recipients complete control over message selection using the sender’s system of classification.
With notifyplex we can think about sending out huge amounts of information knowing that recipients can be highly selective. It’s okay that most messages don’t reach most people; what matters is that the right people receive the gems of information they want.
Is it useful?
I believe that notifyplex will only be useful if we are willing to shift from adversarial to trust based communications, and if senders can envision the benefits.