On Vox: Helping restore balance.

There's a curious feature in Postcrossing, a feature that users can activate or deactivate at will. It's called "send to repeated countries". It's relatively new. According to the FAQ page that explains it, enabling this feature will cause Postcrossing to stop trying to diversify your random card destinations. Instead of sending mail to as many countries as possible, it will target the "heavy hitters", i.e. countries with most active users and most sent cards. They claim that checking this box will help the system maintain balance, without disturbing the diversity of postcards being sent to you. This is very important, because nobody wants to see images of USA and Finland time and again, right?

In any case, I selected this feature a couple of months ago, and tried to analyze the effect. First of all, you see a dramatic increase in American, German and Finnish destinations. This could be expected, as they are the most intensive Postcrossing users. Second, the far-east countries disappear almost completely. You rarely get China, Taiwan or Japan. There is no visible effect on received cards, so they're keeping their promise. All in all, the card turnaround increased from around 15 per month to 25, which is good for me (more sent = more received).

But the greatest benefit of all is this: you finally get to send cards to people who can understand English! I am sure that Chinese and Japanese people come with the best of intentions, but their level of English is usually pretty basic. I don't even dare to use cursive, as there's no chance in hell they'll give the back of the card a second glance. All in all, I'm happy with it. The Jane Smiths and Matti Virtanens can expect to get more Israeli cards in the near future.

Originally posted on wildernesscat.vox.com