Marion's Blog

I for one, cannot always remember why I decided to subscribe to a newsletter or check the RSS feed - it may just be that I read one article I liked and decided that it may be worth following the conversation around it, or that I was hoping for more of the same quality. But over time, you accumulate a number of these subscriptions that you find you don't want anymore and you want to get rid of them.

Recently two things happened - first of all, I deleted an ex-colleague's email account but since I am the CTO and therefore also administrator for our email system - I ended up getting all of the emails delivered to my mail box as the email address was not longer valid but carried our domain name. I was astounded at how many (often pointless but hey that's another story) sites she was actually subscribed to. And one by one I started unsubscribing from those sites. Doing this you quickly discover that all these sites have their own way of doing things - either seemingly purposely hiding where to unsubscribe, to sending you to and fro in their effort to convince you to stay on their site.

The other thing that happened is that we sent out a larger mailing to our own member database, and I instantly got a number of responses from people that were obviously just as frustrated with the unsubscribe process on our end, as I had been in the situation above. But what struck me was that the emails I received were quite often simply rude. "how dare you", or "f... off with your email" were just two examples. I started thinking about why people felt the need to write in that manner, whereas they simply could have written "please remove me"... so I responded in person to a number of these angry emails and lo and behold, got very polite and thankful emails back from real people instead of the ogres I thought them to be from our first "correspondence". It got me thinking about this, specifically on what it is that triggers such an insanely angry email from otherwise perfectly normal folks. And I think I figured it out...As I had experienced myself - apart from the frustration that you feel when these sites make it impossible to leave, you often times do not even get a response when you do write to them. All too often, the companies that you want to unsubscribe from, really don't seem to care whether you exist or not. Once you are on their list, it's probably only a way of claiming higher subscriber numbers that translates to higher advertising fees they can ask for placement on their site. (and this behaviour is definitely NOT limited to obscure little sites, the Twitter's and Facebook's of this world seem to be the worst of all) And it is precisely the fact that people are cottoning on to the fact that they are being used and that at most they are being responded to by an auto-responder - that makes them so incredibly mad. It's like they want to get heard, and keep raising their voices louder and louder to get attention and since no-one replies anyway, you can use the worst language in the world..

But then, if you DO get a normal response, from a real human being - it is right back to a regular conversation where the usual protocol for behaviour applies.

So where does that leave our own procedure? Well - it's now both easy and immediate. We don't want to hold anyone against their will, it's no good for the quality of our site nor for our members to do so. But I will always watch those emails from members come in myself, and respond whenever I see frustration. Because at the end of the day - I strongly believe that even though we live in a digital age, with remote connections and social networks online - we still all want that human connection.