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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

>How is the first example any less creepy than the second example?

It's not. The whole concept of 'read receipts/tracking' in general, whether it's email or messaging or whatever is starting to get to me.

I've never actually heard of a positive use for them and I know they've personally caused me stress before as well as people I know and people's stories i've read.

I honestly can't see the desirability about a feature that allows you to see when others have read your message.

Even in your examples, they cause stress, the marketer and the love letter writer are stressed waiting, the person receiving the letter if they knew reads were being tracked would be stressed.

It really creates a strange conversation dynamic and the more communication methods that have it, the more uncomfortable I find communicating to be.

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The reason is that it increases expectations without a concurrent increase in agency.

People tend to describe this dynamic as "always-connected" or something similar, but that verbiage really just scratches the surface of the underlying mechanics. At it's heart, it's all about trying to increasingly make "your time" into "my time", and that's not fair if you go back to our basic assumptions about what makes us human and why freedom is important.

Almost every dystopian sci-fi novel includes the theme of humans in some way being enslaved to machines, and this dynamic is the beginning of just such a thing. Here, the machine is not yet a machine but rather another person, but the outcome is the same; it starts to become a form of "attention slavery".

It makes me think about how we see this sort of thing actually becoming possible with YouTube. Soon algorithms will be able to create stuff that will be sufficiently entertaining. Dreadful.

I mean, I've already spent nearly half an hour looking at zooming into the mandelbrot fractal. But... that's different...

I'm the author, I totally agree.

Read tracking is very useful when you deal with people who don't check their email. I know some old people who "got hacked", and as a result they are scared of email and won't check it unless called and told of something important. (emailing semi-private pictures and directions is often useful)

Instead of using this creepy surveillance technique, how about calling them to ask if they read your email?

"Telephone anxiety", is a thing, as I've come to learn recently about some of my cohorts when I'd ask this very question:

"did you call and ask this person for the follow-up you're claiming they haven't given you in three days?"

I had no clue-now I'm not going to press the matter and push the person into it, yet at the same time here we're sitting on a decision being left open by one person, and not being acted on at all by another.

Makes for some interesting manager decisions, it does.

Telephone anxiety is easy to create.

Take a kid, who has a phone, and a peer group with elaborate customs around using it, which include never, ever calling someone without texting first. Maybe your best friend and main squeeze, as a special privilege.

Then the parent insists the child pick up the phone whenever they call. Also, there are spam calls, and the occasional genuine emergency.

Presto, the phone ringing is automatically Bad News, and as the child grows to adulthood, they associate phone calls with trouble, and subconsciously feel like an aggressive, bad person, if they have to make one.

And they're right.

Phone calls are, after all, even more aggressively demanding that someone else's attention be, right now, dedicated to dealing with you than any tracker.

Then the parent insists the child pick up the phone whenever they call. Also, there are spam calls, and the occasional genuine emergency

Coming from someone who had a parent who liked to LIE (yes, straight up bold faced lie) about there being a “family emergency” because I didn’t answer each and every single phone call they made fast enough (surprise, teenage me had a job and I couldn’t just stop making pizzas because dad wanted another check-in) I completely empathize

> I honestly can't see the desirability about a feature that allows you to see when others have read your message.

When placing an order via email it's really useful to get an automatic confirmation that the order has been read.

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