As with all things, this is a context where the important information was on-platform and the emails were opt-in subscriptions. YMMV.
> It seems like a low cost to maintain people who subscribed but never loaded a tracker image.
On the contrary. Each send costs. This adds up. It also adds cost to the overall processes involved due to unbounded growth in possible recipients.
Reputation with service providers is another concern. Google, for instance, will punish a sender's deliverability if enough recipients never open emails. Failing to clean your list impacts the ability to deliver to active users.
> What percentage of your addresses never phone home?
These were an extreme outlier. Such that it's simpler to send an email communicating the pending removal unless they opt-in.
> So pruning them from your list would remove potentially lucrative customers.
These decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Links themselves are also tracked. Those users also weren't actively clicking emails either.
On the system I was cleaning up, something like 20% of outbound emails had _zero_ engagement.
> You know, I wonder if there's something here that a next-generation language can't get in on, some sort of help to provide to the developer who says "OK, I'd like to upgrade this package for people, could you please help me ensure that I'm not going to break anybody in the process?"
Russ has proposed a "go release" command that is intended to help with that process. It's probably simple right now, but has lots of room to grow in that direction.
On the flipside, I see a lot of tools pushed that are more complicated, less flexible, and far buggier than the old tools. And then inevitably in a few years they're deprecated in favour of something newer and shinier and the old tools are still perfectly fine (e.g. Make).
The risk is still there for dependencies, but it helps that the community for the most part follows "a little copying is better than a little dependency" as an adage.
The problem I ran into was where I wanted to test service restarting in a systemd based environment. Older releases using sysvinit work perfectly fine.
I'm having trouble finding data that is using the same methodologies. The CIA World Fact-book specifically seems to be lacking data for Australia.
It would be good to see some solid data, because one thing that surprised me while travelling in the USA was the extreme poverty I saw just down the road from extremely wealthy neighborhoods.
Not to say that Australia doesn't have its own set of problems, particularly in Indigenous Communities, but this seems to operate at a wholly different level.
> It seems like a low cost to maintain people who subscribed but never loaded a tracker image.
On the contrary. Each send costs. This adds up. It also adds cost to the overall processes involved due to unbounded growth in possible recipients.
Reputation with service providers is another concern. Google, for instance, will punish a sender's deliverability if enough recipients never open emails. Failing to clean your list impacts the ability to deliver to active users.
> What percentage of your addresses never phone home?
These were an extreme outlier. Such that it's simpler to send an email communicating the pending removal unless they opt-in.
> So pruning them from your list would remove potentially lucrative customers.
These decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Links themselves are also tracked. Those users also weren't actively clicking emails either.
On the system I was cleaning up, something like 20% of outbound emails had _zero_ engagement.