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.
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.