As a user, I’m accustomed to being autosubscribed. Every time I provide my e-mail address, I am accustomed to the inevitable onslaught of junk mail, an ever-expanding deluge that asymptotically drives the signal-to-noise ratio of a once-useful medium toward zero. My inbox, formerly a site of productive work, hobby discussions, and family updates, now overflows with clothing-sale announcements, political fundraisers, frequent-flyer statements, crowdfunding launches, and a relentless stream of ever-more-incremental order updates: order confirmed, order preparing to ship, order shipped, order arrives tomorrow, order delivered, leave a review.
As a user, I have accepted the monotonically increasing unread count as a fact of life. I maintain two e-mail accounts: one for “entirely junk mail” and another for “mostly junk mail.” (This Discourse account is attached to the former.) I have given up with creating mail rules, which require constant gardening. Despite recognizing its futility, I use plus-addressing and forwarding aliases, which exacerbate problems logging in and contacting customer support.
As a user, I expect the continued erosion of the Internet by growth hacks that drive the almighty metric of engagement at the expense of all else. I expect to dig through byzantine settings menus to opt-out of notifications, and am unfazed with the dichotomy of “Accept” or “Remind me in 7 days”. I am unsurprised that this contagion has spread from online businesses to communities via the bridge host of social networking, normalizing the idea that communities cannot thrive on the merits of discussion alone.
As a user, I lament that open source software, which itself grew organically from a community of programmers who foresaw business interests superseding those of users, now perpetuates the same misaligned interests.