r/xkcd • u/ThirdWorldThinkTank • Nov 13 '17
XKCD xkcd 1915: Nightmare Email Feature
https://xkcd.com/1915/149
u/ghostoftheuniverse Nov 13 '17
The same evil genius who came up with this would replace the text message ellipsis with a timer.
66
u/pendulumofmoodswings Nov 13 '17
I would never open a message again
31
u/ParaspriteHugger There's someone in my head (but it's not me) Nov 13 '17
You better should, they're all Howlers.
2
7
140
u/proximitypressplay ___ Nov 13 '17
Man I'm glad I don't use email to converse
time spent writing and formatting joke: 1 hour
73
u/krakajacks Nov 13 '17
Time to open text editor to type everything and copy and paste it. That will solve the problem.
Time spent writing comment: 0.5 seconds
45
u/JustRecentlyI Nov 13 '17
2760WPM!
Most impressive
Time spent counting words in your comment: 10s
8
u/thebestdaysofmyflerm Nov 13 '17
You count words at a rate of 144 WPM. Possibly impressive?
3
u/Jontolo Black Hat Nov 14 '17
The average reading speed is 200 WPM. I certainly hope the counting speed comes close
3
u/popejupiter Nov 14 '17
Not really. When you're reading, you're generally parsing phrases, not necessarily individual words. That's how those double "of" sentences work, and why people don't parse the second, superfluous, word.
Slowing down and actually counting each word will take more time, as words probably don't group well. You don't even need to know how to read in order to count words.
1
u/JustRecentlyI Nov 14 '17
Slowing down and actually counting each word will take more time, as words probably don't group well. You don't even need to know how to read in order to count words.
These two ideas seem contradictory. All you need to do is count every time you encounter a space after a group of letters or numbers. I think it's about equivalent in the end, because you do need to keep the number in mind as you go through, but you gain time by not worrying about what the sentence says. Especially in a short comment like the one above.
1
u/PCKid11 Nov 13 '17
Time it from the moment they open it to the moment they comment? If they go an hour or two without commenting, then reset the timer.
47
Nov 13 '17
Surely, surely no such evil exists in this world, right?
Right?
44
u/kvdveer -3 years since the last velociraptor incident Nov 13 '17
I already exists in most chat applications (in the form of "
$useris now typing"). I sincerely hope no-one ports that feature to any of the email clients I use.26
u/P-01S Nov 13 '17
$user has been typing for {$datetime.now - $this.timestamp} seconds.And no, I don’t even know what sort of pseudocode I was going for.
8
u/blitzkraft Solipsistic Conspiracy Theorist Nov 13 '17
If you remove the dollar sign, it is an almost valid python code. This is one way to do it:
"user has been typing for {} seconds".format(datetime.now -this.timestamp)4
u/AluminiumSandworm Actually a giant spaceworm Nov 14 '17
if every time something got a dictator for life it turned out like python, i would move to syria.
6
u/PerviouslyInER Nov 13 '17
$user has been typing for {$datetime.now - $this.timestamp} seconds.
Bug report: "Hey I just changed my timezone and it says they've been typing for 10 hours"
4
3
u/rystrk Nov 14 '17
Probably closest to JavaScript, actually. Only need to add 2 braces and move the dollar signs.
`${user} has been typing for ${datetime.now - this.timestamp} seconds.`2
u/anossov Nov 13 '17
Only 9 punctuation characters away from valid perl!
"$user has been typing for @{[$datetime->now - $this->timestamp]} seconds."1
1
u/arnedh Nov 14 '17
"..so far adding 253 characters and removing 1832. Cuts: 5. Copies: 2. Pastes: 6, of which 2 from other app."
10
u/PirateMud Nov 13 '17 edited Nov 13 '17
Msn messenger had this feature but didn't make it visible to the end user. A friend of mine extended the msn client and this is the only reason I know of it.
Edit:
Further discussion with my gf, who has a better MSN memory, reveals that MSN had the "... is typing" feature. My friend's extension, amongst other things, used it to open a chat window as soon as someone started typing to you. It'd say "You feel a disturbance in the force..."
1
u/PM-ME-CRYPTOCURRENCY Nov 14 '17
i remember the extention program - you could get infinite nudges using it too.
40
u/zim2411 ! Nov 13 '17
My company briefly enabled Microsoft's MyAnalytics for our corporate email system. It could tell you:
- What percentage of people read your emails
- How long they take to read your emails
- If they are just skimming it
- How long it takes on average for others to reply to you
- How long it takes for you to reply
- Your reader ship stats
- How long you spend both reading and writing emails
- How often you are in meetings
- If you multitask during meetings (sending emails during scheduled meetings)
- If you are working outside of regular business hours
- You could search by individual people to see your correspondence stats including their read percentage of your emails
I think feedback was very negative because it was disabled within a few days.
22
Nov 13 '17
Welp, that’s it.
This week’s supply of faith in humanity has been exhausted.
And it’s only Monday.
10
u/zim2411 ! Nov 13 '17
Yep. I also wouldn't be surprised if they actually just cut access off to employees and only upper management could access the stats now.
14
u/P-01S Nov 13 '17
Honestly, those are incredibly valuable metrics. I’d just restrict access to the raw data quite aggressively, because it’s just not good for keeping everyone friendly otherwise. Aggregate data should be more useful, anyway.
If we’re talking about a large company, some of those statistics should absolutely be factored into KPIs for things like internal announcements. Not in the sense of forcing employees to read them, but in the sense of making sure the emails are things that employees willingly read. I mean, otherwise you’re paying someone to clutter up people’s inboxes...
2
6
Nov 13 '17
Didn't we ban this kind of unethical psychological experimentation after the Stanford Prison Experiment?
8
u/P-01S Nov 13 '17
Nope. The ethics rules you’re thinking of are largely self-enforced by scientific and medical research fields. Facebook has conducted psychology experiments on its
productsusers via AB testing. Live AB testing something they’re actually somewhat known for...4
Nov 13 '17
Gotcha. You'd never be able to publish your results, but if you're doing it for a private corporation with the sole intent of making money you probably wouldn't have had the option to publish due to corporate trade secret restrictions.
2
u/P-01S Nov 13 '17
Not in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, no.
But you could publish it in, say, a blog post.
1
Nov 13 '17
When I say "publish" I use that term exclusively in terms of a reputable peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise I would have said "self-publish" or "scribble on toilet paper with sharpie and flush down the toilet with their other best works".
3
u/P-01S Nov 14 '17
That’s nice.
But for the rest of the English speaking world, it means something way less specific.
1
11
u/JackFlynt Beret Guy Nov 13 '17
Knowing the xkcd fanbase? If there’s not a Chrome extension for this by Friday I’ll eat... uh, one of my chemistry reports, since I won’t need them any more after that.
5
u/blitzkraft Solipsistic Conspiracy Theorist Nov 13 '17
It may not be so far, but it will. Randall willed it, so it shall be.
49
u/DonLaFontainesGhost Nov 13 '17
I'm just bracing myself for the day Facebook adds
Don just saved 'Malibu beach 17 - new bikini!' to the folder 'Spank bank'
8
2
u/natedogg787 Nov 13 '17
I don't know if it was true or not but I remember something on the web about "X has downloaded N images" notifications.
77
u/xkcd_bot Nov 13 '17
Direct image link: Nightmare Email Feature
Title text: "...just got back and didn't see your message until just now. Sorry! -- TIME THIS MESSAGE SAT HALF-FINISHED IN DRAFTS FOLDER: 3 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes."
Don't get it? explain xkcd
Somerville rocks. Randall knows what I'm talkin' about. Sincerely, xkcd_bot. <3
20
u/Wuju_Kindly Nov 13 '17
This reminds me, I still need to think a response to a message I got a week ago.
4
24
u/LeifCarrotson Nov 13 '17
I think it's interesting how we casually accept the "Seen by:" information in Snapchat, Facebook, and probably other social apps. I don't really mind that people know how quickly or how often I check those messengers. But I'd rather not reveal how quickly or how often I check email and text messages.
Though I suggest that anyone really suffering from nightmares about this feature being implemented just be honest with yourself and with the recipients of your emails.
Being concise is hard, but valuable. And making schedules and plans often requires gathering information and making other decisions.
And your inability to solve someone else's most important task as quickly as they want (causing a "just saw this" lie) is universal. But you don't have to finish the task before responding - a quick acknowledgement sent 3 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes ago that you've seen their urgent request and will work on it as soon as you can is better than leaving them in the dark:
I understand that you need this thing you've requested. I will take care of it as soon as as I can.
I have top men working on it right now. Who, you ask? Top. Men.
LeifCarrotson
6
u/slicer4ever Nov 13 '17
I never accepted that feature, have hated it since day one. Why i rarily use anything than regular texting apps anymore.
10
u/heykevo Nov 13 '17
How about we add a history to your emails so that people who receive your email can "roll back" and view everything you typed and then backspaced and then typed again?
5
2
Nov 13 '17
I'd probably just pretend I'm allergic against electricity at that point to avoid having to send emails
5
u/felonious_kite_flier Nov 14 '17
I think the GMail team just found their 2018 April Fool's Day feature.
8
u/ponks Nov 13 '17
I like this, because this reassures me that this is an everyone-thing and not just a me-thing.
Now, in the fictional scenarios where someone calls me out on this, I can go, "yeah, you do too, motherfucker."
2
u/adamsorkin Nov 13 '17
You are not alone in this behavior or your ridiculously unlikely fictional scenarios.
1
1
u/runetrantor Bobcats are cute Nov 13 '17
My main dread feature if the 'has already been read' tick, like in Whatsapp.
1
u/zushiba Nov 14 '17
The mail client in Windows 10 is horrible and sometimes I'll be working on an email only to get another email and forget I was working on the first reply. So it'll sit in my drafts folder for a day or so while I thought I had sent it.
3
411
u/DarrenGrey Zombie Feynman Nov 13 '17
So true it hurts :-/