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I remember how often it was posted on /. back in the day, and how it effectively shut down any discussion about fixing the real issues with email in any kind of

• kazinator 7y ago
  There is no debate-silencing coercion involved in posting a link to a humor piece. The debate stops spontaneously, because the participants are too stumped to respond to the ways that the form managed to anticipate serious flaws in their ideas. If you can't defend your ideas in the face of some piece of net humor written years earlier, what good are those ideas? That piece is in fact the encoding of a requirements specification; it shuts down the debate because it intrudes into it with some real world requirements that e-mail has to satisfy, and continue to satisfy while it transitions to something new. (Some of it is plain wacky, too, but not all). A lot of programmers are very good at pretending requirements don't exist; they think that design means inventing your own requirements and making everyone else follow them. But a world-wide electronic mail communication system isn't an editor, video game or toy compiler.