Don't send automated "community milestone" emails

Question

I just got a lovely little email...

Congratulations for hitting a quarter-million points on Ask Ubuntu! Few people will ever make as big a difference teaching others as you have.

Did you know that your posts have been seen by literally millions of people across the Internet? (Yes, I counted.) When we started this whole thing, it was based on a crazy idea that there was a community of users willing to share their knowledge simply for the satisfaction of helping others get better at what they do. But we never envisioned that individuals like yourself would give their time SO GENEROUSLY that they’d hit 100,000 points — but here you are, over a quarter-million reputation!

You should take a lot of pride in what you’ve accomplished here. There are a lot of smart people in this world, but it is a rare gift when someone comes along who can also teach what they know to others so effectively. I’ll be damned if you didn’t change our little corner of the Internet for the better — and that’s what it’s all about.

You are truly the best at what you do.

Robert Cartaino
Director of Community Development Stack Exchange Inc.

The thing I like about Stack Exchange sites is that despite its slightly robotic nature, there's usually a human somewhere influencing it by upvoting, editing, flagging, whatever.

These "Well done, chap!" emails aren't just obviously automated (sent at 00:00 UTC with next-to-no personalisation), they're also being sent by Robert, who is very much no longer the Director of Community Development. This post is not about the tone-deaf exploitation of a great former employee. "We need to clean house when we fire people!" is not the lesson here.

If one of your users hitting 250K means anything to a human at Stack Overflow, send a real email. If it doesn't, don't fake it for my benefit!

If you want that person to feel valued, you could...

• Spawn a meta post so their community can acknowledge it.
• Poke the site mods and give them a chance to collectively say something.
• Feature them on the site or network somehow.
• Literally anything that included a person who's actually interacted with me in some way.

Automated emails just cheapen the whole thing. I don't feel any sincerity. If anything, reading it made me feel less appreciated now I know it's a robot. And sending it addressed by somebody who I've had a few decent human interactions with just made me angry.

Answer 1

I think this is an excellent idea. To be precise: to replace auto-generated mails with one or more of the suggestions made in the request.

Similar to the recently suggested Replace the 100k and 250k swag ... it would really not cost much money to improve status quo.

It would only require some people at SE Inc. to sit down and be creative.

There are so many things that could be done that show real appreciation that only require just 5 or 10 minutes of some human being doing some research and writing down a less automated email.

So maybe SE Inc. could hire a team of people responsible for managing the interactions with the various communities, and writing distinct responses to such milestones could be one of their responsibilities.

Answer 2

Another aspect related to this: Sometimes even high reputation users might be among problematic users of the site. (For example, I could imagine a typical FGITW user having a rather large reputation, while some part of their activity might be actually detrimental to the site.)

I have also seen a situation when some user used email of this type as an argument in some debates, that their approach to dealing with some issues is the correct one. (The argument being along the lines: Look, I have even received a congratulation from Director of Community Development Stack Exchange Inc. They would not praise me if I was doing something wrong.)

So perhaps when such email is sent to a user, it might be useful to consult also moderators of that specific site - at least in cases when the user in question has history of past suspensions.