[jlund-molfese]

In the old days, you'd take a survey on a McDonald's receipt and get a coupon for a free fry or something. These days, every product will sign you up for a newsletter without consent, ask for a review, or beg you to spend your time on a survey after the smallest interaction. Everything from the Art Institute of Chicago to Cava (a fast casual restaurant). And it's not just once, they'll send you reminders too. In-app, the prompts stack up on each other. I dread opening Jellyfish because I know I'll have to click through more than one pop up every time I want to check something quick. No, I still don't want to go to your conference, I'm trying to get work done.

Why can't they at least offer something of small value, like 10% off your next food order, or some API credits, so it's a fairer exchange? I guess because everyone's doing it, no individual product gets penalized for annoying their users.

There are exceptions of course, like Kagi. But they're far and few between.

[QuadmasterXLII]

Kagi has the world's most pleasant engagement retention email life-hack, which is that if you don't use it for a whole month, they'll email you telling you that they refunded that month's price. I don't have a specific dollar cutoff where this is acceptable, but applying the categorical imperative, if every customer retention spam or nag I received came with $14 I could retire.

[kranner]

When they send these 30-question surveys, surely they must be aware that the people who respond are not a random sample of the customer population but a sample of the subpopulation that is willing to take a 30-question survey for them?

[gherkinnn]

Simple. Your mistake is assuming that these surveys used to gather actual information.

The 30 questions satisfy all of the bikeshedding smoothbrains in the survey-design-committee. The survey itself isn't used to make informed decisions to improve the product, but entirely to justify the manager's impact and thus everybody's bonuses.

[pixl97]

Oh, sometimes they are used to change things, and when implemented it seems like everyone is mad and they act shocked because all they see from surveys is people wanted a change.

[MisterTea]

> ... ask for a review, or beg you to spend your time on a survey after the smallest interaction.

This one is the most confusing to me. I go to Home Depot and buy some of the most mundane items: conduit hangers and toilet paper. I then get email spammed 2-3 times to review "toilet paper" and "conduit hangers" as if people are dying to read the reviews on a friggin conduit hanger or roll of TP. So I did just that. Conduit hangers: "Hang pipe like a porn star!" Toilet paper: "Lets you dig deep with confidence! No s*it finger for this guy!"

[avhception]

Often, they'll ask for the review before I even had the time to really use the product. Like, I've just laid my hands on this thing, how am I supposed to know anything yet?!

[TheNewsIsHere]

Last week I got a survey following a pre-sales support ticket I raised with StarTech.

I respond to those when I’m satisfied. I was, so I clicked the link. The first question was multiple choice. The second was a free text response field asking me about my trust in the brand. It was a mandatory question (one question per page).

So I just closed the window and never completed the survey.

Even the surveys have gotten ridiculous. Don't waste my time asking me to write you vaguely prompted essays that you’re just going to use Copilot (the survey was via MS Customer Voice) to aggregate anyway. If it was a simple NPS or other multiple choice survey, or one where I could skip a prompt asking for unstructured thoughts on brand loyalty, I’d have finished it.

[ozim]

I have trash mail box that I don’t really open besides clicking confirmation links.

I also use Firefox relay just to vary stuff a bit to throw wrench into tracking.