Monday of this week I got an email from Twitter with a digest of stuff. Once I realized what it was I deleted it. First, I never signed up for this email. Second, Twitter never told me this was starting and gave me the chance to opt out. This totally smacks of the crap Facebook does (why I do little with Facebook) and is entirely disrespectful to users.

Why am I automatically opted in? If the new ‘feature’ was really awesome you could let me know about it and you know I’d sign up. But Twitter knows that many users will never opt in because it’s another annoying email. They also know that most users will just keep deleting it and not unsubscribe. This means they can show investors that XXXX people want and get our digest email, here are the numbers.

It’s just like showing off your pageviews to advertisers. They look awesome but really don’t mean much to advertisers. If I was an advertiser I’d rather be with a site that had less pageviews but more people clicked through on my ad and started paying me for whatever I do. One day they will wake up to this and pageviews will be seen as a stupid metric.

Investors are rarely going to ask if the email numbers actually mean anything about engagement.

If, like me, you want to stop this stupid email from Twitter, David Cialo has a [post with instructions][notwit].

[notwit]: http://52tiger.net/disable-that-twitter-digest-email/ “Disable Twitter Digest Email”