News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a c... by mumblemumble on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @03:26PM (#25753024)
It's a second level of organization/subscription so that you can have more fine-grained control over how much you get spammed.

News groups and mailing lists don't scale super well, in that, when you subscribe, you then get sent everything. Maybe not terrible for the 5-10 emails a day from my kid's playgroup's email list, but absolutely awful for trying to keep up with a team of 100 people.

Re:If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a c... by twic on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @04:26PM (#25753981)
In a newsgroup, you don't get sent anything. You can go to the group and see what's new. If there's a particular thread you're not interested, tell your news client to ignore it; if there's one you're particularly interested in, tell your news client to watch it:

https://superuser.com/questions/458136/thunderbird-watch-or-...

Re:If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a c... by fiddlerwoaroof on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @03:38PM (#25753241)
But the solution is exactly the same: create a new mailing list or newsgroup under the sort of circumstances where you’d add a topic to a forum or a channel in a Slack workspace. Open source projects, for example, will have foo-announce, foo-user, foo-devel, etc.

Or use digests, mail filters/folders and a convention for tagging message subjects.

Re:If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a c... by mumblemumble on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @04:13PM (#25753755)
So, that's the top level. The 2nd level would be more analogous to individual email threads within those groups.

Once you get down to the individual conversation level, the fine-grained management bits you talk about are not good UX, they're band-aids for dealing with bad UX.

Re:If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a c... by fiddlerwoaroof on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @04:16PM (#25753809)
Well, whether they’re good or bad UX depends on assumptions about whether the second-level categorization is more meaningful organization-wide or on a user-by-user basis.
Re:If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a c... by dredmorbius on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:13PM (#25757109)
when you subscribe, you then get sent everything.

1. Killfiles

2. Contextually-scoped lists. If a topic is of limited concern yet intrusive, split it to a separate list. Moderation and management may be necessary. Technical teams should be scoped correspondingly. 100+ team members is excessive, 3-15 far more typical.