Five Ideas for a Better SLOWLY Experience
Because we could all benefit from reading more high-quality texts.
When I’m not working on novels or discussing them with people around me, I like to pass the time with an app called SLOWLY – yes, its creators trademarked the name in uppercase letters. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past three-plus years, it’s a nice little service that allows you to send letters to people all over the world… the old-fashioned way. What does this mean? Well, the farther your counterpart is from your physical location, the longer missives take to arrive. It’s a wonderful exercise to improve and keep your writing skills sharp, and has led me to meet some truly amazing individuals who have changed my life for the better. Besides, you can collect lots of cute items like stamps or avatar elements, and even exchange photos and audio with those contacts you really trust.
Even if SLOWLY is a laudable idea because it makes you focus on virtues like patience and eloquence, some of its most glaring weaknesses still make it a pain in the rear to use. I’ll describe the ones who piss me off the most, as well as some ways to correct them once and for all. For the app’s sake, I hope the SLOWLY Overlords™ read these words and implement some of them down the line.
1. SLOWLY is about letters, not texting
I’m sure it has happened to a lot of you – getting all excited about a new letter arriving from a faraway place, sometimes taking two-plus days to reach your inbox. Then, as soon as you open it, your faces drops upon seeing said “letter” is shorter than a freaking SMS. No greetings, no introduction, nothing you can hang from to craft a decent reply. A rather typical – and embarrassing – example is as follows:
Hi, I’m (name) from (location). I see we have several things in common. Hope we can be friends!
That’s it. Not even a damn signature or a farewell phrase. Frustrating, isn’t it? Makes you want to bang your head against the nearest wall or, even better, slam the head of whoever dared to sent that tripe against the nearest wall. No one is charging you 10 kopeks per word to use the app, for crying out loud! This isn’t a Correos y Telégrafos office!
Why does this happen? Because the minimum limit SLOWLY sets for letters is a mere 100 characters. Not words, characters. I’m sure you guys and gals might be saying, “Hey, A.I., sometimes brevity is better,” but this isn’t even brevity. It’s bollocks, pure and simple. To prove my point, I’ll show you how a 100-character sample looks like thanks to the timeless Lorem Ipsum:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed eiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et d
Yup, that’s exactly 100 characters for you. Writing that first sentence correctly would bring its length to 124 characters, still more than SLOWLY’s bare minimum. And the whole quotation often used to test design layouts is 431 characters long, spanning 66 words.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed eiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequat. Quis aute iure reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint obcaecat cupiditat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Now that you know why this first issue is so irritating, it’s time for a solution.
Culling the weak
I’m taking the title from an awesome map from Heroes of Might & Magic III to illustrate my idea. To increase the overall quality of users on SLOWLY, it’s about time to establish a stricter minimum limit to send letters. 500 words, the same amount of text you can fit in an A4-size sheet with any mainstream word processor, would “cull the weak” by eliminating a sizable amount of users who see SLOWLY as just another clone of WhatsApp, Telegram or other IM apps. Plus, a longer minimum limit would mean people who do use the service keep their penpals engaged with more interesting, detailed messages. It’d also help new users hit the ground running and get used to high writing standards from the get-go.
Since photos and audio files are supposed to supplement a missive, attaching them before sending it shouldn’t count as a way to bypass the new minimum limit.
2. Auto-match stinks
A common rookie mistake – one I fell for, no less – is leaving the auto-match function turned on, hoping someone worth our time and effort finds us by chance… or the other way around if we decide to spin the roulette. Sadly, there’s a better chance of any of us hitting 61 home runs in a single NPB season than that actually happening. This feature was a mistake from the very beginning since it foments laziness, aiding and abetting the behaviors I described above. Nuke it ASAP and permanently replace it with the current “Suggestions for you” feature, which selects some profiles with interests similar to ours and, one might think, similar time using the platform.
3. Profiles don’t display enough key data
SLOWLY gives all users the option of filtering potential penpals by interests, country, or profile bio. However, only premium users get the chance of sorting other people by service time – e.g. only newbies – or city. Another irritating bug in the platform focuses on people who put “(…)” or a bunch of senseless emojis to bypass the “with bio” filter. The powers that be can easily solve this issue by setting a minimum length for bios; something between 100 and 300 words would do wonders, encouraging users to describe themselves in the best way possible within those margins. Languages employing special alphabets, like Chinese, Korean or Japanese, qualify without any issues as well because their characters can be grouped in syllables. Emojis, on the other hand, fall short because they’re technically symbols, not words or characters.
As well as the sent/received ratio, which can sometimes be misleading, a better stat to add for all users, whether free or paid, can be summed up in two words – “reply percentage,” or RPCT. Ghosting is a frequent issue on SLOWLY1, and identifying users who barely reply to the missives they get can save the rest of us a lot of disappointment. Of course, letters reported and/or declined for a sensible reason, like spam or solicitation, wouldn’t count against this percentage. Might I suggest a simple formula?
100 * (Letters received and replied at least once / Letters received and not replied/reported/declined) = RPCTSo, a hypothetical user who has received 1,154 letters lifetime and replied to 989 of them would have…
100 * (989 / 1,154) = 85.7 RPCTRP can serve as a basis to set a “ghosting percentage,” or GPCT, which is pretty simple to calculate.
100 - RPCT = GPCTNo one expects every single SLOWLY user to have a perfect reply percentage, but a few decimals’ difference can make a significant impact in the long run for all parties concerned. Just think about records in athletics or auto racing, to name a couple of examples.
4. The House Rules aren’t enforced properly
Though the Overlords™ have made clear enough that their creation shouldn’t be used as a networking or dating app, some morons insist on treating it exactly like that. A collection of dedicated users at the SLOWLY subreddit – yes, there is an actual subreddit about this here platform – have highlighted the worst offenders under a flair called “Spam, Scam & Oddballs,” which you can check out in all its disgusting glory here. Sex freaks, spammers, scammers, beggars, people who don’t even understand themselves, they’ve got it all. It’s the best show in town, people!
Even if the powers that be can defenestrate these offenders, they rely entirely on user reports to actually know where these people come from and what they’re sending. Yes, detecting such content is quite easy because it has poor/no spelling, no line breaks or punctuation, claims to be from a specific country but only “interested” in the local languages instead of fluent, etc. Effing eyesores, all of them, with an extremely warped sent/received ratio to boot. It’s true we users must be vigilant when interacting with any modern app or service and a great deal of progress is based on the grassroots, but some tweaking from the top would do wonders to clean the place up a bit.
Savaging the scavengers
Humans are great moderators as long as they aren’t overstretched and have clear guidelines on what deserves to be thrashed – unlike what happens in, say, Facebook, Twitter et al. Therefore, a good idea to squash this plague of freaks ruining the service means going back to the basics: enforcing Slowly’s House Rules.
No spam or solicitation.
No contact details in the first letter.
No flirting without consent.
No pushing to send photos (I’d rephrase it as “No pushing to send media” to include audio messages).
No racism, bullying or violence.
Artificial intelligence has come a long way since the days of Deep Blue. It powers translators, designs websites, and even helps with customer service. AlphaGo, that famous Google AI, learned to play the game better than world champion Lee Sedol by analyzing millions of combinations and strategies to place Go pieces on the board. It evolved into AlphaZero and later MuZero; both expanded their repertoires to chess, shogi, and Atari titles, but the latter wasn’t taught the rules beforehand. Scale-and-node comparisons aside, the SLOWLY Overlords™ could try delving into the AI realm to flag letters and profiles which violate the service’s House Rules. It would “savage the scavengers” who can’t keep their pants up, their collection plates behind their backs, or their ridiculous “give me your WhatsApp/Instagram/Snapchat/QQ” right off the bat.
A combination of user report data and other patterns it learns along the way, like a special “rejection ratio” derived from declined letters sorted by reasons defined by the app itself, can isolate and ban probable (and repeat) offenders before they become an out-of-control mosquito cloud. Yes, I’m channeling my inner Mutare once more – this concept comes from the second map of her HOMM III campaign, titled Dragon’s Blood.
5. Generic and/or repeated stamps
Considering SLOWLY has nearly 800 seals available to collect, many of them region- or holiday-exclusive, not sending them to your penpals is downright embarrassing. Sure, some users might not have that many to share, but at the very least they should strive to switch them whenever possible. You can unlock plenty of free seals on certain days or by doing certain tasks; there are a whopping 27 achievement stamps available as of this post’s writing, including two you get for becoming a premium user. Also, the Time Machine function can gift you an item from the past that you don’t currently own for a nominal 25-coin fee. The World Explorer works the same way but with country stamps.
Considering you can earn currency by watching in-app ads regularly, there’s really no excuse to increase and strengthen your display case once in a while. All it takes is a little consistency and effort, for most worthwhile things in life carry extra degrees of difficulty. My own treasure trove still has a loooooooong way to go to reach the top, though it’ll eventually get there.
You just have to ask other users to send their stamps and reciprocate their gesture, or include a link to your display case in your profile. If you feel a bit lucky, consider making an investment once in a while to get some sweet seals. Black Friday is the best occasion for such an expense because you get two coins for the price of one.
Gathering the Legion
About actually sending stamps, I think the standard seal, in plain white with a blue line down the middle and a curvy border, should be discontinued or at the very least declared ineligible to send. I mean, virtually every single SLOWLY user unlocks it after registering, and it makes no sense whatsoever to gift your penpals something they already have. One more thing: it’s a staggering lack of etiquette to actually send it. It shows you either don’t care about showing others you care – sorry for the cacophony – or can’t be bothered to experiment with the app’s most exciting feature, which is a damn shame. Why gather just the Torso of Legion when you can go the whole nine yards and acquire the entire Statue of Legion?
For users who own a rather large assortment of stamps, like yours truly, keeping tabs on which ones we’ve sent to people over time is no easy task. Unless you can come up with some sort of special spreadsheet to register your endeavors and note the seals you receive from others, the other way is backtracking to the very beginning of such epistolary exchanges and check every seal manually. Tedious, eh? My thoughts exactly. A reminder saying something like, “You’ve already sent (Stamp Name) to (Penpal’s Username)” that becomes active after clearing a set number of sendable seals – e.g. 50 or 100 – could save users a lot of time… and some face. As an old Spanish-language proverb goes, “las cuentas claras conservan la amistad.”
Just in case you’re inclined to ask, this subtitle doesn’t come from Mutare’s campaign – sorry, milady – but from the second map of the Unholy Alliance storyline. You can guess at this point that I absolutely love HOMM III, right?
Whew, that was a lot of writing! I’m sure I’ll get a truckload of flak for this post, and the plausibility of my proposals can be debated, but I think there’s no harm done in making these suggestions... and you commenting on them. Besides, I wanted to get this little essay off my chest for a while.
Until next time, folks!
Not every instance of ghosting is reprehensible. In fact, there are several scenarios where users have no other choice, but such a topic deserves a separate entry that I might write in the future.