Reply-All
(Warning: maybe because it's 1 April, the post below contains a bit of irony. When you find it, feel free to keep it.)
You've seen them - congratulatory e-mails flooding your inbox, even if you're not on the receiving end of the celebration but merely a member of the cheering crowd. Thanks to "reply-all", they happen. I personally don't mind them much, but some people do take mild offence in being faced with the challenge of having to mark swathes of "congrats!" messages as read.
There's something to be said for both sides here. On the one hand, such a broadcast message, e.g., a promotion announcement, can be seen as primarily meant to notify the crowd of the news. Reply with heartfelt congrats, rejoice in the fact, cool, move on. On the other, the broadcast does have a social aspect to it in that it encourages the crowd to cheer, and he cheering gets amplified by itself.
Of course, there's an easy remedy. Instead of putting all recipients on CC, putting them on BCC and keeping just the intended recipient of the congratulations in the "To:" field will reduce the recipients of the "reply-all" flood to just the subject of the celebration and their manager (or whoever sends the message). The parties put on BCC can be mentioned in the message, for transparency.
I sense an actual research question in this: Will CC-reply-all flooding incentivise more people to congratulate the person, or will the ones who want to do this do it anyway? Is there an amplification effect in "reply-all"? If so, what does it amplify more, cheering, or grumbling? Does BCC-messaging have a contrary effect?
Who's in for doing an empirical study?
Tags: work, hacking, the-nerdy-bit