Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord
by Miraste on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:41PM
(#28554009)
> Email is a highly manual medium and degrades rapidly unless people use it well.
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.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord
by mch82 on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:55PM
(#28571333)
I don’t have a strong point of view yet.
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.
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.