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Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails

40 points by dominikgro ↗ HN
Dan Ariely and I are looking for ways to help people with high email load. One idea was Shortwhale, which we've tested for a few months now. The idea is super simple: It's a place to tell people how you prefer email and it offers a simple contact form that adds the necessary structure to email. Although technically trivial, it works extremely well for Dan. We have ideas on how to expand this but first we'd like to know if someone else might find this useful too (we know that this is only a solution for people who get tons of (unsolicited) email).

Underlying to all of this is the idea to put more demands on the sender (there are things to pick from a drop-down and people can create multiple-choice emails, which allows the receiver to answer with one click). However, what we found is that it can also make it easier for people to write Dan because it actually removes some demands from them: they know that he doesn't expect any formalities and the structure helps them too. And, above all, senders are more likely to get a response (and quicker).

Please have a look:

http://shortwhale.com

As an example, here's Dan's Shortwhale page (he links to it from his website and in his email signature):

http://shortwhale.com/danariely

HN, we'd love to hear what you think.

Many thanks, Dan Ariely and Dominik Grolimund

PS: If you're interested, Lifehacker published an interview with Dan where he talks about "how he works": lifehacker.com/im-dan-ariely-author-and-professor-and-this-is-how-i-1615748781

25 comments

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babo
Well, this is a verbose form asking me to keep my message short. Or shut up, even better. Nice.
lnanek2
Looked through the web site and form and whatnot. I don't think people would go through an extra form to contact me, but I can see how it could be useful for people of note like that.

When I clicked in I was expecting this to be some sort of email filter that rewrote emails to be shorter (either by humans or by new summarizing algorithms) or a human virtual assistant to help follow some more complex rules than filters allow to help pare down inboxes. Seems like those would have a broader market.

dominikgro
Yes, maybe. The main idea was to influence behavior (on the sender's end) somehow. This is along the lines of a lot of Dan's research. It goes a long way to tell people how you prefer email, what topics you're interested in, etc.
FiatLuxDave
I agree that it goes a long way to tell people how you prefer email. However, enforcing those preferences (through something like shortwhale) is different than expressing your desire and then hoping that users follow those desires while emailing through ordinary means. In other words, there are two ways of forcing a user to follow those desires - technologically or through force of implied disapproval (with whatever outcome that disapproval would hold, such as non-response). Might this difference be a good opportunity for A/B testing, and perhaps thereby helping Dan's research?

I suspect that the force of disapproval would be just as effective as the technological force for 'meaningful' emails, but would lose effectiveness for less meaningful emails (where Dan's disapproval doesn't mean much to the sender).

If so, then the real issue may be that Dan is getting too many emails from people who don't care what he thinks. The classic way to deal with this is to have one address for people who know you (and care what you think) and another for the unwashed masses. The problem with the classic solution is that it requires someone to monitor the unwashed email, or you suffer the opportunity cost of ignoring possibly important messages from people you don't know (yet). I wonder if Dan is already using this method, and shortwhale is only for the unwashed email address, thus reducing the cost while keeping the opportunity?

api_or_ipa
Your biggest challenge will be with users. Just imagine if you tell someone "Just email me using shortwhale.com/danariely". My mom and most non-hn friends would enter that in the "To:" section of their email client.

Users are stupid, and email is unfortunately an overdeveloped idea from an age long past. Attempts to replace it invariably face resistance from the multitudes of users who wouldn't react well with change.

I like the idea and recognize the need for a service like this, however.

dominikgro
Thanks for the feedback. Agree, if you say it in a conversation, but it works well for Dan because he links to it from his website: http://danariely.com/about-dan/
politician
You could easily extend this to support email forwarding.

e.g. danariely@inbound.shortwhale.com -> danariely@gmail.com

Messages sent to the inbound email address receive automatic replies with a link to the site, or for bonus points, an HTML form (for email clients that aren't ancient and terrible).

papaf
Could it be setup to work like email whitelisting? When an unknown sender sends an email they get an autoreply back with a link to shortwhale.
jasonshen
I love this idea and the videos where Dan agrees or disagrees with you are hilarious. Email overload is real and I think the form is a fairly unobtrusive way to filter contact.

Edit: It's also up on ProductHunt now: http://www.producthunt.com/posts/shortwhale

politician
I think it's a fantastic idea to create Comment Forms-as-a-Service. Two thumbs up for including a FAQ with Videos. Do you have an enterprise version for corporate contact/support pages? I'm only half joking.
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huhtenberg
I can see how it may work when someone needs something from Dan. However if I am contacting him for his own benefit (something as mundane as reporting a typo on his website) I am most certainly won't jump through these hoops.

This is not too different from those obnoxious anti-spam services that require you to click on a link and solve a captcha before delivering your email to the recipient. That's just a No, because you make me do extra work for your own convenience even though I am already ultimately doing you a favor by replying to your email.

In other words, this form works as a mechanism to discourage emails from people who don't need anything from the recipient.

anvildoc
This puts too much burden on the sending user. I think a better idea would be something that reads the email, categorizes it, and provides a short one or two sentence summary of what it's about.
felix
Am I expected to watch 15 minutes of videos in order to understand how and what to email Dan? It's an interesting choice - in the context of efficiency and saving time - to decide to put in videos (and some >3 minutes) to watch in the FAQ.

While I appreciate that a lot of email is a problem for many people - solutions need to be aware of the preciousness of everyone's time not just yours (the recipient's).

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Kluny
I can see this as being really helpful for university profs, for making it more difficult for students to send vague, impossible to answer questions about assignments.
aed
Seems like this will most effectively work with high profile people / people in demand.

As an average Joe, my thought process:

- I'm not going to make my friends and family contact me this way. It's just too impersonal. If a friend insisted I contact them this way, I probably wouldn't bother.

- I can't enforce this at work, as much as I'd like to. Not to mention I'm cc'd or included in on a lot of emails that go to multiple people.

But for people like Dan Ariely, this could work great.

danariely
Thanks for all the comments.

I think that the real issue is how to create a world in which we help the people getting our email understand us better -- including if and when we need an answer.

Email is currently sorted by time, and this is not representing correctly when people should stop their work and attend to it -- shortwhale is trying to solve this.

I also don't think that shortwhale is just for busy people, since distractions are bad for all of us.

Now, I getting back to work

Dan

argonito
LOVE it! I have been in love with shortmail but never used it much because they were very unreliable, and finally closed. My e-mail overload comes from singups and newsletters not people, but it is a great tool to hide e-mail on a blog or twitter.

One request though. Could you check your gender form. I have twice changed to female, and it still shows male and refers to em as male.