4 ms·

I don't know how these estimates are made or if they are even close to being true, but it always surprises me that there is claimed to be 50x daily emails than

by krick 6y ago

I don't know how these estimates are made or if they are even close to being true, but it always surprises me that there is claimed to be 50x daily emails than daily google searches. I've seen these numbers several times before (never sourced, ironically), and this one always seems weird. People don't even open any websites other way than googling the name, and most people don't send dozens of emails daily. I think the only way you can get 300B daily emails is if you multiply every automatically sent email by the number of recipients.

huac 6y ago
probably includes spam emails too
CydeWeys 6y ago
> and most people don't send dozens of emails daily. What you're missing is that the vast majority of emails aren't sent individually from one person to another; they're sent by programs. In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Looking through my emails now I have an incredible volume of GitHub notifications and various other auto-generated emails. In total I definitely receive hundreds of emails per day. And I don't actually do that many Google searches per day (maybe only a couple dozen) mainly because I tend to go back to the same websites over and over again, and the browser URL bar autocompletes the name rather than performing a Google search on the name of the site. You really have to go out of your way these days to perform a Google search on the name of a site rather than just go to the site directly.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Much of that flow could be replaced by RSS-based notifications and the like. E-mail might be justified when you want your stuff to be auto-archived, but perhaps any message you would delete immediately after skimming it should just not be sent in the first place.
  - thephyber 6y ago
    A side effect of Moore's Law is that as computing gets more powerful, the things humans do with computing can afford to get sloppier. Bill Gates famously said "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer" in the 1980s. We could probably do most of what modern computers do with far less than 32GB of RAM, but that assumes that our software is much more optimized for compact runtime than they are.
    - dkersten 6y ago
      We need the 32GB so that slack can use 30 of them.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Yeah, it could, in theory, but it hasn't been, and I doubt it will. So the volume of email continues to be what it is, and thus, is much larger than the volume of Google searches. You've mode-switched from descriptivist to proscriptivist.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by krick 6y ago

huac 6y ago

probably includes spam emails too

CydeWeys 6y ago

> and most people don't send dozens of emails daily. What you're missing is that the vast majority of emails aren't sent individually from one person to another; they're sent by programs. In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Looking through my emails now I have an incredible volume of GitHub notifications and various other auto-generated emails. In total I definitely receive hundreds of emails per day. And I don't actually do that many Google searches per day (maybe only a couple dozen) mainly because I tend to go back to the same websites over and over again, and the browser URL bar autocompletes the name rather than performing a Google search on the name of the site. You really have to go out of your way these days to perform a Google search on the name of a site rather than just go to the site directly.

zozbot234 6y ago
> In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Much of that flow could be replaced by RSS-based notifications and the like. E-mail might be justified when you want your stuff to be auto-archived, but perhaps any message you would delete immediately after skimming it should just not be sent in the first place.
- thephyber 6y ago
  A side effect of Moore's Law is that as computing gets more powerful, the things humans do with computing can afford to get sloppier. Bill Gates famously said "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer" in the 1980s. We could probably do most of what modern computers do with far less than 32GB of RAM, but that assumes that our software is much more optimized for compact runtime than they are.
  - dkersten 6y ago
    We need the 32GB so that slack can use 30 of them.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Yeah, it could, in theory, but it hasn't been, and I doubt it will. So the volume of email continues to be what it is, and thus, is much larger than the volume of Google searches. You've mode-switched from descriptivist to proscriptivist.

deleted 6y ago

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