In all seriousness, by far the best professional discussion i have ever had was at a company in 2000 which ran an internal NNTP server. For me, that combined the relevant strengths of email with a format more suited to active multi-party discussion.
I do think it's a useful model for private discussions, with plenty of supporting software. It wouldn't be bad for internal company use. But it doesn't have animated emojis and trophies, so no one would use it now.
Google Groups used to be handy for shadowing a bunch of Usenet groups, but that's gone now. I'm not sure how much Usenet exists these days.
In all seriousness, Reddit is the modern successor. I dislike a lot about Reddit; their UI/UX is a contender for the worst in the entire world; and they provide a forum for a lot of the most unpleasant people in the world (not quite 4chan bad, but pretty bad). But at the end of the day, Reddit is where most threaded public conversations moved to.
The sweet spot for me would be something like Discourse or even an old-school PHPBB. Slack has a similar problem to IRC - it's ephemeral and the answers don't show up on Google.
NodeBB's a lighter and more performant alternative to Discourse.
It didn't, as long as your server didn't distribute binary newsgroups, which where the only thing requiring a substantial amount of space. Furthermore, servers had no obligation to keep a long retention history, and could limit it to a few months if they wanted so.
Yes, I vote for NNTP. In my previous life I used to run a local NNTP/Usenet/Fidonet gateway, storage was not an issue at all, but bandwidth was.
Some of the most interesting applications of NNTP would never connect to the legacy usenet network, which as you mention is/was a mess.
The NNTP distribution model was you could take whatever subset of feeds you wanted and keep them however long your storage and bandwidth allowed. Back in the day, a 56Kbps link worked pretty well. A T-1 meant you could pick up the funner binaries feeds. You don't need some multi-meg JS frameworks to read that content. Now, it works fine with GigE and multi-terabyte storage. There's even an RFC for running it over TLS.
Reddit is the modern replacement? Things are that bad?
I think Google Groups killed Usenet when they made a web interface for it. It was flooded with people who didn't understand how it worked. There was a definite turning point at that time, and I cancelled my subscription.
Mind you, newsgroups had their dark aspects, too. Some binary groups had contents you'd prefer not to see - simply because the public at large was not really aware NNTP exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
It was when the flood of incomers was large enough that the enculturation process failed.
People introduced me to Usenet and told me to lurk on any group for a few weeks to see how people communicate before jumping in.
I remember coming back to school in the fall of 1993 and there were all these new people on the forums asking dumb questions. People would reply "Read the FAQ!" and they would just ignore it and ask questions already answered in the FAQ
I remember people making filters and kill files for anything ending in @aol.com
Axiom 2: There are vastly more windbags and vicious people than there are knowledgeable and mature people.
Axiom 3: Online moderation / gatekeeping is imperfect.
Axiom 4: Successful moderation depends on a few keystone people.
Lemma 1: A community of knowledgeable, mature people will be under perpetual assault by entropy. The internet baseline of know-nothing gasbags and vicious, damaged people will be pounding on the gates of any community.
Lemma 2: Some of the horde will bypass any gatekeeping and moderation to land blows on the knowledgeable and mature people. They'll be repulsed, and some will leave the community.
Lemma 3: The keystone moderators are inevitably among the people subjected to these blows. After a serious blow or one blow too many, some will get fed up and leave, and moderation will get worse, increasing the rate of knowledgeable and mature people getting repulsed by their own community and leaving. A hole will form in the fortifications, and the barbarians will flood in, driving out everyone mature and knowledgeable.
Thereom: A knowledgeable, mature online community that is open to new users will eventually collapse into the internet baseline.
Corollary 1: If you're knowledgeable and mature and currently part of an open online community you love, you too will eventually get repulsed by it and leave. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Corollary 2: There are several knowledgeable and mature people here on Hacker News. They're here entirely because of dang. He is our keystone, weathering the assault of the barbarians for all of our sake. When he throws in the towel, we're done.
Truer words were never said about Hacker News.
I think he's paid. I hope he's paid.
Being technical is a pathway and IQ only identifies how fast you can travel down that pathway. Someone who started before you but who moves slower can still be far beyond you or have gone down paths to treasures you would never discover because you with your high IQ decided it was dumb.
Mailing lists work because they work best with old-fashioned email. Old-fashioned email just works better. It requires a certain level of training to use properly (e.g. how to do inline quoting etc.). This is a good thing. But people seem reluctant to learn skills as an adult, especially when it comes to IT.
More importantly, mailing lists rely on etiquette (netiquette) to function well. This is essential for any interactions between responsible adults. But nowadays people have been trained to expect coded rules. They are used to operating in a playpen where they can test the boundaries with no consequences, like children.
Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
I think netiquette breaks down the moment you have a diverse group of participants. (Early Usenet) and (Fidonet) were comprised of very knowledgeable participants of very similar cultural milleus. Usenet was mostly scholarly, young, white, and male (the standard demographic of academics at the time, I'm not trying to insinuate anything more than that), and Fidonet was more diverse because it was less tied to academia but was also very specific. That's not to say something like netiquette couldn't be enforced, but I also think it's correlation and not causation that early Usenet and Fidonet had meaningful conversations; I've been in Discord/Matrix rooms with mostly highly educated people with similar outlooks on life and they rarely require moderation, even with varying strong opinions.
> Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
This just comes off as angry and elitist. Discords are there for regular people to engage in conversations. I don't think putting up these barriers to engagement is relevant for anything other than selecting for technical trivia or ability. If you want to actually select for a good community, I agree that moderation is important, but not using technical barriers. I'm glad the internet is such that nowadays I'm not just talking to some other person who is interested in heavy metal, anime, gaming, and programming (as it was until the late-90s for the most part).
however the real (search) power of the mailing lists is of course that you have the mails locally for the lists where you are subscribed to...
i remember forum searches becoming so heavy, site wide search forms had to be hidden behind sign up walls... and it was mostly poor keywords search, forget about full text.
with local emails at least i get a shot at organizing and searching for it. try saving a local copy of a forum thread...
For thousands of years prior to the invention of HTML email, back unto the ages of cuneiform on clay, people managed to express themselves. Entire competing schools of rhetoric developed to teach people how best to express themselves, long before any form of electronic mail existed. Some of those schools focused on eloquence and interest, others on brevity and clarity, and those were both possible with plain text written by reed pens and ink on papyrus. I wonder whether relying on HTML for one's expression is really better than cultivating a writing style that suffices to convey one's thoughts independently of the medium used.
That's great because mail readers have supported threading for decades. It's pretty essential for using a mailing list.
Most mail readers support it, but not Microsoft ones. Somehow they managed to ruin this simple feature. This caused Google to reinvent it in the early 2000s and announce it like it was an innovation of their own.
I’m almost certain thunderbird soft wraps plaintext emails when composing rather than inserting actual line breaks for that reason.
Besides, shorter lines are easier to read and parse; I’d take an 80 columns width text anytime over a 120+ cols, like more and more people tend to use.
That event was called Eternal September, and netiquette has never been the same, or so I am told.
Timeless advice. Still applicable in tech thanks to open-source software, even as people lose agency in other areas.
If there was less potential for abuse through spam, scams, or (less likely but still worrying) targeted attacks then I would be much more likely to use email for regular communication outside of work.
I have the same issue with a guy in another state. I know everything he rents from Redbox and everything he buys from harbor freight.
But that was way too much effort. I don’t bother now. My Gmail address (josephg) is a cornucopia of junk. It gets the pay slips from a mechanic, lollypop orders, delivery notifications for shoes, Indian cell phone bills, and all sorts of things. I declared bankruptcy on that account years ago and moved on.
From my experience, spam/abuse is more likely with addresses used with online shops (the smaller ones seem to get hacked quite often) than with mailing lists.
Think of it this way: The Linux people and many other OSS projects have no problems with mailing lists.
That's a very biased view ("many people work like that so they like it") and I disagree.
I think that email based development is a fence to contribution. At least for myself.
Despites being of that generation, I really started contributing to open source when the GitHub model appeared (and previously in the Perl world thanks to rt.cpan.org, a ticketing system with both web and e-mail interfaces). I prefer to have communication centered about one project to be hosted with all the other data about the project instead of having everything in my inbox.
Few open source projects start nowadays with a mailing list based development process. I can't even cite one.
Most of the projects on https://sr.ht/ (basically all that aren't only mirrored there from somewhere else) do (as it did itself).
It hasn’t gone away. It’s usage has changed though.
Yeah, Slack is even worse than email for most uses. At least with email you have conversation threads that consolidate discussion on a topic that you can actually find later. My experience with Slack (and similar) that that everything gets fragmented immediately, to the degree that you can never put it back together again.
IMHO, Slack is only good for a few narrow cases (e.g. replacing long coordination email chains, organizing lunch).
While if I start a slack discussion, the thread is in once place, and everyone sees the state in real time, so the thread is more coherent and easier to follow.
Just recently I spent an hour unbundling a mail chain with layers of poor quote - reply - ask for clarification - further reply.
The way we use slack is start a top level topic and group all related discussion in a thread.
Same at my company: Top level comments initiate a thread, and all responses must be made as comments within the thread.
If I had my way, I'd take it a step further and require that Slack be treated like a message board, not a chatroom. If you have something to say, then say it all at once in one cohesive paragraph or set of paragraphs -- just as we do here. I do not want to be pinged multiple times in rapid succession while someone sends every thought they have in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, e.g.:
>> hi
>> can you help me with a problem?
>> i need to do x with y but i'm not sure about how to handle z
>> oh wait
>> nvm
>> figured it out
Awful.
I'm not saying email is perfect or always works well, it just seems to naturally work better more often in some ways.
> The way we use slack is start a top level topic and group all related discussion in a thread.
My company has not been disciplined about that, and even when threads are used new ones get started to continue the same topic relatively frequently.
I love the bad search, the poor integration, and the web interface to a product with the functionality of an '80s app. It just burns so much time, but hey the wasted hours are all chargeable and that sure pays the bills.
Basically, mailing lists are just a "special" email account everyone can send/receive emails to/from.
For example this is the norm on many Debian mailing lists. Or at least some people firmly consider it a norm, and will grouch at people CC'ing them.
The fact that this varies from list to list, and it's not encoded in software and you're just supposed to know which style to use, and that people then blame the human senders for not getting it right all the time, is among the reasons that mailing lists can be an unwelcoming medium.
I guess that's something. I've made "the leet list" of my own and encouraged friends to join (my friends are in their early 20s, so they are not quite acquainted with email, lol) and this worked out. The slow pace is a feature and people seem to be loving it. https://lists.sr.ht/~badt/leet
Zulip is a better than most chat for that, because you commit to a topic, which adds order and caring.
But it's still fast, so it's tempting to writz anything you thinl about.
When I'm on my phone I stop commenting on HN midway quite often because the effort is not worth it. On a computer, it's too easy to type.
I've never used Zulip, but realistically, how does it differ from Slack's thread system?
The second thing is that Zulip's UX is fantastic. You can zoom in and out of conversations with a single keystroke, and the UI is responsive and does exactly what you want. Slack is so slow on my new Ryzen that I frequently out-type it, and half my keystrokes end up interpreted as channel-switching keystrokes, so I end up having typed something random in a random channel instead. Fuck Slack, sincerely.
With longer comments I usually quit because the editing required to sound like a halfway intelligent person is way harder on a phone. I imagine some other people can nail their first draft, and others just don’t care how they come across.
Usually, a heavy email thread will start with a multi-paragraph essay, and try to get to some sort of consensus from the participants. Where google docs lets users comment on a specific phrase or word, and have a discussion thread based on that highlight, Google Docs makes it possible to have a conversation about a specific part of the document. By allowing for shared editing, Docs allows someone who came later to rewrite words or phrases (if that user is allowed to).
If I'm working on any sort of a doc - engineering design doc, marketing copy, whatever - with multiple people, both email and slack fall short compared to a Google Doc. It's got a specific use case, so it's not remotely a replacement for slack or email, but there's a lot of good, focused communication happening in those comment margins.
Like you, I much prefer mailing lists over any sort of web forum (discord included). I hate Swift’s forums. I like the Python mailing list. One idea the reasons is that in the mailing list, I get to pick my tool (my mail client), and you can pick yours. We’re leveraging an already strong communication ecosystem of tools.
1. Moderation tools on mailing lists are extremely rudimentary. A healthy community _needs_ moderation of some sort.
2. A lot of tooling is necessary to make a good mailing list experience. I would expect an inclusive community mailing list to have a web interface for posting and searching, and a separate interface for searching.
3. There's no documentation on setting up email clients to use mailing lists and it isn't a trivial/intuitive process. The email spam problem has made the registration process non-intuitive and often drops emails to/from the list.
4. There's very little documentation on setting up your email client to use a list properly. What are best practices for organizing your inbox around a mailing list? How do you reply to a list? How do you quote a previous response?
5. There's no easy basic flow for folks to get started with. The power of more "modern" approaches is that the default web interface is highly opinionated. This makes it easy to join and easy to participate. When there's no basic flow to use, folks never get to the basics before they get to a point of wanting to customize their flow.
I think a blessed mailing list flow using a webmail client, a web newsgroup/BBS interface (which doesn't exist now sadly), or a blessed email client workflow would go a long way to making mailing lists accessible. Unfortunately because mailing lists are only popular among tech people these days, I doubt you'll see much work on this.
With Google's abuses coming to light I'm actually glad it didn't pick up.
And sadly most modern search engines don't rank these conversations highly in searches. There's a treasure trove of unbelievable hidden ideas out there that you'll never come across because search algorithms prioritize garbage, corporate churned content.
Source: I help run some discussion mailing lists.
The real problem with mailing lists are businesses who have a vested interest in permitting spam to be delivered to users' inboxes.
And for finding stuff, you are absolute right, anything deemed relevant gets archived to my Notes instead.
People love to say email is a bad technology, but my hypothesis is that other messaging tools have succeeded because people use email improperly. Email is a highly manual medium and degrades rapidly unless people use it well. When people behave selfishly or rush (lazy subject line changes, reverse chronological messages, lazy quoting & replies written deep in old messages, off subject replies, etc.) email gets hard to read.
I'd argue that is a bad technology, at least for a general-use tool. I admit that I don't use mailing lists but I don't see how they have any advantages over a well-implemented forum. Trying to run a project over email and building an archival service to cope with it seems like a reversal of priorities.
Linux [1] and Mediawiki [2] are two communities finding success with email lists. In those examples, the list archives can be read like a forum. Replies must be sent by email. It seems like the archive browser could benefit from a UX upgrade.
That being said, the old Usenet was indeed a place to properly discuss. I can even remember a time before that, of using FidoNet, a BBS-based messaging platform. The quality of discussion in the proper channels there was pretty great.
Hate discord since you can't jump in a conversation that happened 30 min. before, as it would get mixed with the current conversations. Now they have the threads, and the `in reply to`, but I feel that they way they did the threads don't help for separating the conversations and keeping them on long-term
Jesus no. Please, just no. There is a reason why people are favoring Discord, Slack, Facebook Groups and whatever else over the old strongholds (mailing lists, IRC):
- anything email based (including usenet) requires you to expose (at least) your email address to the general public, meaning you will get hounded by spam
- mailing lists (by design) have to break common anti-spam schemes and it's difficult to get the workarounds done correctly, so you'll end up fighting your spam filter all the time to read the emails you want to read
- mailing lists require strict moderation to avoid people abusing it for spam, which leads to issues when the sole moderator goes off on holidays and no new mails come through.
- mailing list management tools are often enough a pretty horrid/inconsistent mess
- for each mailing list you join (and want/need to stay in longer), you have to setup folders and filters in your mail client/provider, and you have to follow the incantation of the specific mailing list to opt out, whereas IRC and Discord make organizing and leaving easy
- mailing lists and many IRC channels end up being publicly indexed in Google which may or may not be in your interest
- many mailing lists and IRC in general restrict incoming content to plain-text or limit file sizes which means it's hard to enrich a question with screenshots, videos or binary files.
- mailing lists are asynchronous and don't support different modes of communication that do not require exposing your phone number publicly - it's not (easily) possible to have a quick call to quickly solve an issue, yet a 1 minute phone call can transport much more density than wasting half an hour playing email ping-pong
I'm sad about IRC though given that there hasn't been any major reaction to Slack and Discord, which led to an erosion of its userbase and then the final implosion of Freenode.
They (and news groups) are better for a different kind of discussions, and especially for digging out things that have been previously already discussed, and already contain a solution to your problem. Good luck doing that in instant messaging software.
In short, pick a right tool for the job.
What's more, not everybody follows etiquette:
- reply and just keep the original message at the bottom
- reply in between the original message
- reply at the bottom with the original message on top
- Some mix quotes and then reply to some parts in the original
And then how do you link to users or messages from your email client?
Plus who wants to have 5 different email accounts for 5 different mailing-lists? And why would I respond in a manner that allows the world to see my private email address?
I heavily disagree that emails are the way forward in this regard (maybe even in any regard).
You seem confused. Signing up to multiple mailing lists won’t require you to have multiple email addresses, and at the same time they don’t require you to subscribe using your main email address either. Many email hosts will give you as many mailboxes as you like, either using plus–addresses or just new mailbox names.
> And then how do you link to users or messages from your email client?
Every email has a unique message id. Simply include a message id in the body of the email, and your email client should turn it into a link (provided you happen to have that message available). If your email client doesn’t do that, perhaps you need a better email client.
> They are unbrowsable and who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion?
It really sounds like you need a better email client, or you just need to learn how to use the one you have better.
I have heard this sentiment a lot and tried a lot of email clients and personally I still don't enjoy using any email client for this task. A properly designed forum software is always going to be easier to use for its express purpose than a mail client.
Which email client does?
It has some restrictions that I occasionally want to relax though. It doesn’t keep a complete database of all message ids it has seen in your inbox, just a list of the ones it most recently pulled into a summary. For example, if you pull up a summary that includes the latest 100 messages in your INBOX, then the links will take you to any message within those 100, but clicking on a link to a message older than that just tells you that it can’t find the message id in the summary.
I just put the emails into a folder, skipping my inbox, and browse them at my leisure.
What kind of mad person dumps listservs directly into their inbox.
I like managing this client side rather than trying to figure out how to fix this on the server for everyone.
The kind of mad person who tries to use a Hey.com email account with a listserv...
- incentivizes thoughtful consideration before sending
- increases reliability of the list as an archive
I feel like Slack would have been a lot nicer for those discussions iff you could sign up to one and sign in to many. I have way too many slack items in my password manager. It's a pain having to making changes to multiple ones.
I really don't want to get a new phone just for this...
Now I understand why Google's mail service automatically classifies any alerts the user signs up for from Google's mailing list service as spam.
There used to be a third participant in that flamewar, a brilliant analog IC designer whose hobby was ruining s.e.d by posting off-topic political flames and trolling. His participation ended a few years ago when he apparently died of cancer. I say "apparently" because there was no obituary, no funeral, no mourners. His family won't talk about him. He had been so proud of his granddaughter.
It's unfortunate because there are/were a lot of talented and knowledgable people on s.e.d who could be talking about circuits instead of flinging dung at each other.
Flamewars are an ugly Usenet tradition. Usenet also provides great mitigation tools (killfiles/scorefiles).
Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations.
Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works. It's hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours.
And yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly winding down. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. It might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on StackOverflow conversations aren't what they used to be. Only e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some organization start to have "why send an e-mail while you could send Slack message". Thankfully those organization usually bless users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones /s
Too bad Google Wave didn't pick up.