
Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails - clairecrombie
http://www.shouldisendit.com/
======
ianmcgowan
It's a neat idea, but after too many sarcastic, "clever", trying-to-be-funny,
defensive, et al emails in my career I have a simpler heuristic. If I have to
ask myself "should I send it?", the answer is no. Leave it in drafts (with no
one in the to: line!) until either things have cooled down and I delete it, or
there's more perspective and it's actually ok to send.

I have too many fails to tell, but the worst ever was an email from a middle
manager I didn't know at BigCo, cc: upper management. It blamed an issue on my
team at the time, and I took it as an attack. For once there actually was no
issue, and in my reply I managed to subtly rub in that they apparently didn't
understand how their own dept. worked. CC: upper management still of course.
It worked too well, and the person called me crying an hour later because they
looked like an idiot to the big cheeses. As soon as we talked on the phone,
they became a real person to me, and I felt like the utter dick that I had
been.

Moral of the story, there are real people with real feelings on the other end
of your words. It's almost never worth it to be a dick, slightly off color, or
sarcastic, save that for in-person ;-)

~~~
geowwy
The real value of this tool is as an objective measure of how pleasant your
communications are.

Now that Codes of Conduct are the norm rude/abusive behaviour is not
tolerated, but this can cause problems because one person might see rude and
abusive behaviour where another person does not.

Having a tool to objectively measure incorrect words and thoughts would be a
great way to protect developers from themselves.

~~~
mgkimsal
> Now that Codes of Conduct are the norm rude/abusive behaviour is not
> tolerated, but this can cause problems because one person might see rude and
> abusive behaviour where another person does not.

I dare say "abusive behavior" has never been "tolerated", but our individual
and societal recognition of "abusive behavior" is different now than earlier.

------
andischo
Having written my bachelor's thesis on how negation in sentences affects their
sentiment: it is really, really difficult. Even just differentiating between
negative/neutral/positive sentiment is successful only about ~65% of the time
(depending on the source material). Text based Irony/Sarcasm detection is
still an unsolved problem (most of the times even for humans, as it is
strongly context dependent, not to mention missing indicators such as tone of
voice and body language). Basically, you are way better of listening to your
own intuition rather than using a computer to flip a coin.

~~~
diminoten
So does this mean something like crowd sourced scoring of sentiment does
better than algorithmic detection? Or do people suck just as badly?

~~~
andischo
Short answer: yes, crowd sourcing would work better.

Long answer: It's difficult to determine how good/bad people actually are at
detecting the correct sentiment, as data sets containing phrase/sentence <->
sentiment pairs are often created by majority decision of human taggers. E.g.
7 people are given the same training examples and whatever most of them choose
is then used as "correct" answer (gold standard). This might not be the real
correct answer though. However, even if we accept this gold standard to
actually be the absolute truth, most humans only have a correct detection rate
of about ~80% (this is a very rough number, as it depends strongly on the
source material, e.g. Tweets, product reviews, etc.). Still, this is way
better than computers perform at the moment.

~~~
tomsmeding
Then again, I assume those texts are written by humans for humans. So isn't
the "correct" sentiment exactly what humans tend to make of it? And if humans
aren't very good at detecting the sentiment, maybe the writer is at fault, not
the readers.

I think letting a number of people read the text and choosing the majority
vote as the text's sentiment might not actually be a very bad way of
determining that.

~~~
dwaltrip
It might be correct to say that a group of humans is interpreting the
sentiment "incorrectly" if they don't have all the relevant context /
information.

------
nothrabannosir
Completely tangential (but it's HN so that's what we're here for ey): if that
video represents what normal people look like when they're having an "off"
morning, then I am the actual Antichrist.

There is some real potential for comedy in that video, you're missing out :)
Turn up the Grinch factor by at least 10. At 00:16, put a "beat": Change the
pace, the colour balance, the framing, everything. Lovey dovey intro, music,
la la, then BAM waaa waaa nuclear alarm sound, zombie hand slams on alarm,
which breaks, etc. (As a matter of fact, show an actual zombie!)

Right now, that "bad morning routine" to me basically looks like... what I
imagine the Dalai Lama does in the morning.

Oh and if you're gonna burn toast; actually burn the toast! Black. Burn the
house down black. Smoke everywhere. And the car, just show it completely
totalled. Like, just the frame is left, somehow. When the meeting's canceled,
idk, the office building is just destroyed and it's this person looking out
over rubble.

(I assume you probably cobbled this together from stock footage, in which case
you're obviously limited by what's available. Still worth looking if you can
find some much darker shots? :) basically try and exaggerate much more.)

[edit: sorry forgot to say well done. it's not bad at all, and I think you did
really well on the "upbeat" bits. all the more potential for contrast!]

------
Sujan
For anyone wondering how it works:

> \- The chrome extension doesn’t read the content of your web pages.

> \- The chrome extension only reads your highlighted text when you click the
> extension smile icon.

> \- Your highlighted text is passed from your browser to our API where the
> sentiment is calculated, we do not store in any way the text you highlight.

[https://www.rarely.io/work/should-i-send-
it](https://www.rarely.io/work/should-i-send-it)

~~~
sailfast
I appreciate you for saying that you don't store the text, but the fact that
it has been sent, processed, and then returned means that this practice could
change any time and I'd never know.

If I were to use this for work-related reasons it would need to live in a more
on-prem / secured format where I could ensure this via controls.

------
notatcomputer68
I find gmail's undo send works wonders for me.

30s is usually enough for me to go from "hell yeah, that'll show em" to "fuck
fuck fuck, what did I just do"

------
mnsc
I'm a "tech dude" who have struggled with emotional control. I used to think
"I don't have that many emotions, I'm so rational" which many heated emails
proved wrong. But I have worked hard at recognizing and naming feelings and
emotions and trying to figure out where they come from,and I'm doing quite
well now I think. So this is something I would have liked in the past but this
is just a glaring symptom of a problem of people acting without knowing what
feeling is in control. Sad.

(What workes for me is "non violent communication" btw, google it)

------
lettergram
IMO add a gif of the system working right on the front page (similar to
[https://getstation.com/](https://getstation.com/))

It’ll drive more conversions.

Also after working on sentiment analysis for a long time, you should let each
user build their own model with tensorflow.js. That may be a down the line
kind of thing, but otherwise your model will be fairly inaccurate.

I say this having worked heavily in the space:
[https://hnprofile.com/](https://hnprofile.com/)

~~~
def8cefe
It doesn't seem like HNProfile is particularly accurate. It seems to interpret
terse comments as unhappy, and all my interests listed come from a single
comment thread a couple months ago discussing Canadian regions instead of
anything technical I have talked about.

I will say that I'm unhappy that you've built a chart on what you percieve my
mood to be and published it without my consent.

~~~
lettergram
It's not particularly accurate, which kind of is my point... I was able to get
right around 80%, between myself and others manually tagging the dataset.

Funny thing, even with myself and others tagging the content, there is a high
variance in our scoring. Meaning - accuracy is in part the eye of the
beholder.

Also, if you think that this is intrusive -- imagine the NSA reading your
personal email

~~~
rapnie
Yeah.. from them I don't expect adherance to GDPR. You however are commercial,
have no Privacy Policy, and collect, analyse and publish to the public user
data (which in many cases is not anonymous, or can be easily de-anonymized)
without their consent.

The fact it is not particularly accurate makes this even worse.

------
shazam
_Great PowerPoint. Really LOVED how it took you 100 slides to explain mood
analysis._

Positive mood.

~~~
brianmcc
"Aye, right".

Author concurs!

------
cranjice
Sorry but what on earth is this demo video blathering on about? half way
through it's still setting the plot to some hypothetic bad day. Get to the
point!

~~~
sakopov
Exactly what I was going to post. At the very least I was expecting a demo of
the product after all the nonsensical "bad day" blabber. But it never came and
I still had no idea what I was looking at.

~~~
palakchokshi
This comment and the one above it in the thread are perfect examples of use
cases of "Should I send it?"

~~~
genidoi
On the contrary they seem like perfectly rational responses to an introductory
video that is redundant at best and patronising at worst.

I was dissuaded from installing it because I assume the products quality would
reflect how little the founders seem to understand people in thinking that
it's necessary to accurately detail what a poor start to the day would look
like.

The video should be a simple gif demonstrating how an email with a negative
tone is detected and turned into a positive tone. People are smart enough to
figure out how that could be useful.

~~~
palakchokshi
The feedback might have been good but the tone of those comments had hint of
snark. Considering the product is to help you remove negative sentiment from
your responses I would say they were good use cases.

replace blathering and blabber with more constructive words

------
ptk921
Looks interesting, I'm excited to try it out. I had trouble parsing the
"Understanding Mood" paragraph. Consider this a pull request.

> What if you could get a mood score for emails you receive or send? A way to
> quickly sense check what you are about to send without your bias emotion or
> when receiving an email remove your current mood or maybe a currently
> negative relationship with the sender.

ShouldISendIt provides a mood score for emails you send or receive? When
sending, quickly get a sense of the mood that your message communicates from
an objective algorithm. When receiving messages, our tool can help you see
past your current disposition or preconceive notions of the sender's intent.

------
diminoten
Hey, so I've wondered for some time now how social media sites might benefit
from a sentiment analysis score applied to their users, who are then given
more or less moderation ability based on the result of that score.

Obviously tons of edge cases, but what do y'all think of this? Combined with
Slashdot's "king for a day" moderation style, could this solve some of the
lingering issues present in social media?

I'd love to sit down and talk to someone about this concept for awhile, see
where the idea goes. I'm _super_ sure it's come up before, I just wonder what
the state of the art is.

~~~
bevan
Peepeth.com is experimenting with features like that. Currently, posts get a
toxicity score from a Google API before they're even posted, and users are
asked to confirm if it's above a certain threshold. Lots of false positives,
but it seems to be reducing profanity.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder.

~~~
diminoten
Very cool! Looks crypto focused at the moment, but sounds like you're
innovating in the community moderation space. I'll definitely check it out!

------
iamdead
Does anyone else remember that this feature was present in old versions of
Eudora on the Mac? It would literally put icons of chili peppers on your
emails to say how spicy they were.

------
ac4tw
I've had a conversation about something like this nearly every year that I
worked in Corporate America. Interesting to see it get built (I can't speak to
the history of other implementations). Those past discussions were around an
MS Outlook add-on to disable/gate the send button if the email draft content
was too egregious.

A few questions I had about your product:

    
    
      * How would you monetize? (If you're thinking of doing so?)
      * Have you considered integrating with other messaging?

~~~
nxc18
There have been a few implementations in the past, including tonecheck.
[https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/tonecheck/](https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/tonecheck/)

~~~
ac4tw
Thanks for that--I concur with TC that "At the very least, their graphics are
quite amusing"

------
zschuessler
Cool execution of an idea - congrats on launching!

This could get share traction if users were able to submit a message and make
it public. My friends/coworkers had a phase where we did that with this tool:

[https://headlines.sharethrough.com/?headline=a%2520test%2520...](https://headlines.sharethrough.com/?headline=a%2520test%2520headline%2520to%2520share)

(PS - If you're running an adblocker, this website is broken, might need to
disable temporarily)

------
bitwize
Pitch it to Linus. An endorsement like that could be a huge marketing boost.

"With Should I Send It? I don't sound like a huge jerk whenever someone tries
to get a patch merged that's fucking braindead^W^Wnot up to kernel quality
standards. Thanks, Should I Send It?!"

I'm being lighthearted, but not really joking: Linus is really looking for
something like this to help keep the rage down in his correspondemce.

------
tobtoh
As someone who recently switched back to Firefox, I've come to realise how
many of these useful Gmail addons are strictly limited to Chrome only.

Firefox has been terrific for everything else, but it's surprised me how much
functionality I've built into Gmail through addons and how it's almost a
showstopper for me migrating to Firefox.

------
gumby
Can you invert it? This makes me think of Decker's wife in Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep who adjusted her mood organ (designed to dispense
psychiatric drugs each morning to stabilize your emotions) to make her
depressed and miserable.

"Your message is insufficiently vitriolic. Send anyway? (y/n)"

------
vinayms
I guess this is an English only tool. Does it account for non native speakers,
like an Indian and Ukranian corresponding in English? Either way, while I can
see that developing tools like this is fun and engaging, I won't trust the
results.

------
borski
I've been using Boomerang's 'Respondable' feature for quite some time and it
is absolutely awesome. It's rare that I'm 'off' but it's a nice way to catch
when I am.

------
meow81
I wonder how it compares to IBM Watson's Tone Analyzer:

[https://tone-analyzer-demo.ng.bluemix.net/](https://tone-analyzer-
demo.ng.bluemix.net/)

------
newshorts
Are they storing your emails?

Meh. It’s a simple sentiment analysis, probably even using google brain.
Probably not worth giving up the data to this service

------
RyanShook
Let people try it without installing a Chrome app.

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echan00
Oh cool stuff! I was thinking about building something similar, how to get in
touch?

------
bg4
If you have to ask, the answer is no.

------
clairecrombie
Thanks for all the feedback. Will have a look through them all

------
xte
I pretend to be mature enough to understand my mood and the influence coming
from it in my mails, thanks.

Beside that I do not use webmails (except rare occasion) nor Chrome...

~~~
7dare
You do know the post wasn't written specifically for you...? It might benefit
other users

