Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreyf | Hacker News Reader

I think those "hurt" in both stories are making something about themselves that really isn't.

The point of a girl "rejecting losers" on a dating site has nothing to do with the losers and everything to do with reinforcing her self-image of "the kind of girl who turns down 10 guys a day". Same with the people who write long e-mails saying "you suck": if someone is looking for it, they can find a lot of evidence people around them suck. The point of writing e-mails about it is to build up one's own confidence, heal some hurt, or vent some frustration about some issue completely unrelated.

The stories are really about people creating a self-image and protecting an identity (call it "reflexive brand management", if you will). While I'll concede that they're narcissistic in their disregard for how their actions affect other people, I think both are natural and healthy in terms of their own psyche.

View on HN

The dating site story left out the dozens of real losers who emailed her things like "hey ur hot" or "You might think I'm out of your league, and it's true that I make a lot of money, but I'm actually really into chicks with big legs." I don't buy the scenario that she got eight well-written, nice, well-targeted messages in a single day and didn't get at least that many messages from jerks. Unless she's got some kind of bizarrely good filtering set up, or is on a really, really niche site, those kinds of messages outnumber the earnest well-spoken ones. This is a case where tidying up an anecdote for dramatic effect completely changes its meaning. Her comment was probably aimed at the real losers in her inbox rather than the appealing ones mentioned in the story.

Plus, for a woman, being on a dating site is all about volume control. She probably only has time to go out with one new guy every week or month, so she picks the best guy out of the dozens of men who contact her every week. The rest are just noise. They're a boring and pointless part of her day. Calling them "losers" is unjustified, but none of them heard her, and she isn't obligated to spend an hour a day responding personally to every guy who emails her so he doesn't get his feelings hurt.

If by "really, really niche site" you mean "any site that charges money," that's about how it works, I believe.

The point of her story, though, is that she deleted all the messages, and implied that she regularly deletes all the messages—she's not going out with any of them; she's fishing with no hook.

Let's assume her womanly duty obligates her to go out with one new guy from the dating site per week. To accomplish that, she'll have to respond to approximately... one guy per week. Heck, let's be generous and say two. That's eight guys per month out of three hundred emails. Even assuming she never responds to two guys on the same day, she'll delete every single email over 70% percent of the time.

That also assumes that she chooses her dates exclusively from the guys who contact her, forgoing her right to contact any men proactively.

That's an unsound strategy—what if the perfect guy comes along moments after you make arrangements to see someone else for the week? You just delete the message without reading it?

The better strategy is to always read the messages, filtering some out as irrelevant to your interests, and then putting the rest into a priority queue based on appeal. That way, a better guy will jump to the head of the queue, and be contacted the next week.

Come to think of it, is there a dating site that automates this? "Getting Things Dated?"

I wonder if you can get the same effect by writing the email but clicking the "Delete" button instead

Yes, you can. At least it works for me.

You definitely can. I write awful horrible insensitive scathing emails to people, and then delete them in the morning without sending them. I get the catharsis, and I don't lose any friends (actual or potential) in the process - everyone wins!

The scary part is that delete and send are pretty close to each other in gmail.

How many times have you deleted an email when you wanted to send one?

In Gmail? Zero, because you can undelete.

If you act fast, you can unsend too.

how?

Enable "undo send" in labs and then just hit 'z' (assuming you have keyboard shortcuts enabled too).

Yes, absolutely. That's why I never fill out the To field when writing an email that I'm not sure I should send.

Without "To" field you risk to forget who you are angry at.

I type it into the top line of the email, cutting and pasting it to "To" right before I send. Helps prevents those "oops! sorry I sent you the previous email before compelting it because I accidentally hit the Send button."

I usually append an extra character to the To: email address so it bounces in case I accidentally send it

Just make sure it's not a dot: http://www.dns-sd.org/TrailingDotsInDomainNames.html

Undo

People in hospitality do that with their inner voices rather than blowing up at customers all the time.

In these occasions I find myself writing a draft of a letter, then re-writing it 5 or 6 times as my anger subsides. What starts out as a 10-page tome usually turns into 3 paragraphs of "Hey, this wasn't so great, Here's how I'd love to see it done."

I once heard someone say, "The quality of a man is measured by the size of his drafts folder relative to his sent folder."

> I think both are natural and healthy in terms of their own psyche.

questioning why you're harboring beliefs that construct a self-identity that causes you to send "you suck" emails just cuz you're having a bad day seems healthier than practicing reflexive brand management.

call it "examined brand management" :)

Ok, so even if we accept your hypothesis, that doesn't change the root message of the article, which is to remember the other end of the line is a person just like you.

The explicit goal of the user may be different, but shooting someone down for pleasure and tearing someone down to pull yourself up often look to be one and the same, and have many of the same side effects.

Nicely said. Whatever it is you say/write to someone says a lot more about you then the recipient. Also as a recipient you should know that you control whatever emotions you have when reading a letter or listening to someone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com