Automatically Unsubscribe from Unwanted Emails with 'Leave Me Alone'

lifehacker.com

10 points·jivings··5 comments

I liked this part but couldnt this be problematic? : You can also look at the senders that most other users unsubscribe from.

It's not phrased very well in the article, but I think what the author is referring to is that Leave Me Alone assigns a score to each sender and as a feature of that you can see how many other users unsubscribed from it.

For example when looking at a subscription it might say "60% of other users unsubscribed from this mailing list".

You can actually see specifically what other people have unsubscribed from.

Would this cause those which get unsubscribed the most to remain the most unsubscribed? pardon me for not knowing the right term. Like social proof, it causes the action to be done more than if left unmentioned?

Probably not such a bad idea if there's some people who would unsubscribe if told everyone else is unsubscribing.

The ranking system is calculated as a percentile - so the mailing lists are only ranked in relation to each other, rather than directly from the action taken.

Also % of unsubscribes is only a portion of the algorithm used to calculate the overall score.

The intention is not to say "this is something you should unsubscribe from because everyone else is unsubscribing from it", rather to say "based on our information, this mailing list is lower quality than most others, so you should check if you still want it"

How is that problematic?

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