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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

Posted on

Changelog: Customized emails to catch folks up on posts they might not want to miss

We have created a new type of email called DEV Digest, which will help inform folks about some of the more interesting things happening on-platform based on the tags they follow. It's more for the casual dev.to reader than the folks who come back daily on their own. Feel free to turn off this email in your settings.

How often does it get sent out?

This email will go out "every so often" depending on how each individual member takes to it. Basically, we use an exponential backoff algorithm to send it less often if people have indicated through their actions that they aren't all that into it.

It will serve to catch folks up on things they might have missed since the last instance of the email. People like to stay up to date in a variety of ways, and this should serve a big segment of the community who lean on email.

Mac was primarily in charge of this feature and did a great job building all of the complicated logic that this sort of thing requires.

Top comments (6)

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

Hey @nestedsoftware , we need a description of "exponential backoff" here. :)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

It's an incredibly useful algorithm to have in one's grab bag. 🙂

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nestedsoftware profile image
Nested Software

Hehe, yeah I’m actually working on adding one more article about exponential moving average/low pass filter to my my little series about statistics :)

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Joshua Ballanco

Saw one of these in my inbox yesterday, and I love it! One small (or maybe not) request: would it be possible to get this in the form of an RSS feed? Personally, I've been making an effort to try and keep my inbox more for communication that needs immediate attention and then use RSS for my daily "what's up" information needs.

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Daniel Golant

THIS IS REALLY AWESOME! How does this work with Jess's update emails?

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Rémy 🤖

IMHO, this is a terrible idea. Not for dev.to, but for humanity in general. I'm tired of seeing algorithms deciding what I want. But that's just my opinion.