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I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists. Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immedia

by xlii 5y ago

I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists. 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.

twic 5y ago
Mailing lists? Bring back usenet! 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.
- superkuh 5y ago
  Just be the change you want to see. I've been posting on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk sporadically again for a couple years now. https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ is a great group that provides free text group access and posting.
  - walterbell 5y ago
    > Just be the change you want to see. Timeless advice. Still applicable in tech thanks to open-source software, even as people lose agency in other areas.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  It was because of people, not the medium. Usenet was a great place for discussions, especially (but not only) on technical topics, by and for relatively competent people - at the beginning most people using it were from the academia. At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely broke that paradigm. 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.
  - Multicomp 5y ago
    > At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely broke that paradigm. That event was called Eternal September, and netiquette has never been the same, or so I am told.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      Kids these days have no respect for saving bandwidth with their inane top posting.
  - sp332 5y ago
    Yeah, when AOL allowed Usenet access.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    I think it's a bit of both. Most people under 30 have only known the type of email emitted by Microsoft products, Gmail, spammers and retailers etc. To these people, bottom-quoting is the only option that exists (mail readers like Gmail will hide your message from them if you attempt to do top or inline/correct/sane quoting)). HTML mail is normal and expected. Proprietary attachments with "invitations" and the like is normal and expected. It's just a completely different thing to what those users were using back then. 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.
- shuntress 5y ago
  My problem with using email for communicating with strangers is that my email address feels like it must be a closely guarded secret known to only a select few or given out only when there is no other option. 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.
  - pvarangot 5y ago
    I envy you if you can guard your email address. I have a six digit name and initial of last name Gmail address and I get email for more Pedros with a last name starting with a V that I wanted to know existed. It's so broken... Last week I had to create a new email to sign up for Playstation Whatever because they won't let me "recover" the account someone on Brazil created with my email even though they can't have ever possible validated the email.
    - twobitshifter 5y ago
      This happened to me with someone’s bank account and they didn’t have confirmation so I kept getting emails with pii after that, including the recovery phone number, address, etc. (I alerted the bank to their issue)
      - metalliqaz 5y ago
        I have a first initial last name email from the early days of gmail. The amount of PII and private conversations I've received is incredible. Someone on the other side of the country tried to email himself his business loan application... twice.
      - josephg 5y ago
        Hah that happened to me a few years ago too. HSBC emailed me all the login details for someone’s internet banking account. I emailed back saying they had the wrong email address for their customer. They said if I wanted to change the email address on the account I’d need to go into a branch to do it. It took several attempts back and forth before they finally just disabled internet banking again for that account. 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.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > usenet It hasn’t gone away. It’s usage has changed though.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  I used Usenet quite a bit in the 80s/90s, and ran a Usenet/NNTP server for a small ISP for a while. I miss a lot about it, but it wouldn't work well today. Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. And it was unregulated and unmoderated, which is a laughable idea now. There are just too many bad actors to even consider it. 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.
  - VLM 5y ago
    NNTP does not equal Usenet. Some of the most interesting applications of NNTP would never connect to the legacy usenet network, which as you mention is/was a mess.
  - wott 5y ago
    > Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then 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.
    - ruslan 5y ago
      Besides, text messages compress very well. 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.
  - kjs3 5y ago
    Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. 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?
- ptman 5y ago
  Matrix is mostly used to chat. But really it is just a distributed graph database. Some of the founders of the project have very nice memories of NNTP and something like NNTP (but modern) can certainly be built on top of matrix.
tucnak 5y ago
Drew DeVault managed to make a mailing list renaissance of sorts. https://lists.sr.ht/ https://lists.sr.ht/ 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 https://lists.sr.ht/~badt/leet
inetknght 5y ago
> Too bad Google Wave didn't pick up. With Google's abuses coming to light I'm actually glad it didn't pick up.
- cube00 5y ago
  The recent wave of hiding old Usenet groups from their DejaNews archives because the algorithm now says no is a perfect example.
Popegaf 5y ago
Please not mailinglists. They are unbrowsable and who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion? 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).
- aloisdg 5y ago
  Beside you cant edit a post after sending a mail, right?
  - ballenf 5y ago
    Some call that a feature not a bug: - incentivizes thoughtful consideration before sending - increases reliability of the list as an archive
    - aloisdg 5y ago
      As a non english speaker, I love being able to edit a typo later on.
- db48x 5y ago
  > 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 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.
hrbf 5y ago
I really, really support that. It’s threaded by default, requires only a simple signup and in the end is just text email. You can use a mailing list with any email client you choose. Web-based forums are notoriously unsafe and each one has its own eccentricities, not least regarding text formatting. I don’t want to put up with that. 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.
syntheticnature 5y ago
The problem with mailing lists is that anti-spam efforts, both on technical and policy fronts, have provided many blockages to their successful use. Not to mention that a lot of hosting providers are totally clueless as to the existence of discussion mailing lists. Source: I help run some discussion mailing lists.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > The problem with mailing lists is that anti-spam efforts, both on technical and policy fronts, have provided many blockages to their successful use. The real problem with mailing lists are businesses who have a vested interest in permitting spam to be delivered to users' inboxes.
  - syntheticnature 5y ago
    Are you saying that voluntarily joined e-lists that reflect posts from each member to all members, as a means of discussion, are spam?
chakkepolja 5y ago
Old simple PHP based forums or even reddit / Google groups was better than current state-of-art using discord or JS-heavy discourse forum.
- logicalmonster 5y ago
  Some of the best chats I've ever had have been on niche Internet Message Boards using some of the worst technology run by people who didn't understand how to run a website. But the communities were so tight-knit and dedicated to their conversation topic and produced brilliant and entertaining ideas. 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.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Indeed. I think the technology is somewhat orthogonal to the community, but it's the community that's important. A lot of technical people equate the two. (Though there are definitely technical and systemic benefits to more open standards than Discord, even if that doesn't necessarily help the community.)
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    conversations (in the past) were so much easier to join, find, and review. I wish my company had a bbedit forum instead of slack :)
- hef19898 5y ago
  I find the fact that reddit forces me to use the app on mobile, and not the browser, highly irritating. End of story, I don't go there.
  - chakkepolja 5y ago
    The third party apps are very good though, some even open source.
baxuz 5y ago
No please. Trying to read up on FFmpeg issues or join a conversation is a nightmare.
mch82 5y ago
I’ve looked at mailing lists for major, successful open source projects and you may be right. I like using Wikitech-L for Mediawiki. Some communities miss out on the potential of mailing lists because they implement the distribution list aspect without taking the additional step of implementing the browsable archival website. The archive is important because it lets late joiners find and participate in discussions. 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.
- Miraste 5y ago
  > 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.
  - mch82 5y ago
    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. [1]: http://vger.kernel.org/ http://vger.kernel.org/ [2]: https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mailing_lists https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mailing_lists
matheusmoreira 5y ago
How do I use mailing lists properly? Last time I tried, I embarrassed myself by replying to someone directly. Couldn't figure out how to add the email to the thread.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Usually by doing "Reply all" instead of replying to just one recipient. One of the addresses will be associated to the mailing list, and forward you message to everyone when you send it. Basically, mailing lists are just a "special" email account everyone can send/receive emails to/from.
  - price 5y ago
    "Reply all" is the best single answer, but it also varies between lists -- on some lists, the norm is that you reply only to the list and don't CC the sender. 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.
- dqv 5y ago
  On Thunderbird I get a button that says “reply list” that lets me do that. Failing that I guess you can just do a normal reply and then change the To: field to the list address.
- Bjartr 5y ago
  The fact that you're getting downvoted is precisely the attitude that drives people away from mailing lists.
- layer8 5y ago
  Traditionally, many mailing lists set the Reply-to header field to the mailing list address, so that replies would go back to the mailing list by default. For various reasons, that has fallen out of favor. Nowadays the message headers of mailing list messages usually indicate the list address in a separate header field, and mailing-list aware email clients provide a “reply to list” action. Unfortunately, too few email clients are mailing-list aware in that way. “Reply all” is the fallback, but make sure to remove the non-mailing list address, or else the original sender will receive two copies of your reply (one through the mailing list and one directly), which can be annoying.
travisgriggs 5y ago
I don’t so much mind (yet) slack replacing IRC. I use slack at work already. So more slack channels is an easy extension of that communication space. Collaborating with Kotlin or Elixir folks in their excellent slack channels feels like a modernized variant of the IRC communications I used to have with Python and Smalltalk. 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.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I think there are a bunch of issues with using mailing lists this way, but they are fixable: 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.
InitialLastName 5y ago
Not sure about the mailing list thing. I just started watching sci.electronics.design out of curiosity, and >80% of the posts are just two guys (one of them with an IEEE email address!) who appear to have been waging a years-long politics flame-war. The few posts about, er, electronics design are completely drowned out by self-righteous screaming about Trump, Biden, vaccines, elections and covid. 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.
- extralobe 5y ago
  Oh man. 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).
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Sometimes slow is a feature. For once it's a quality filter. Chats are 1% signal, 99% noise. 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.
- unholythree 5y ago
  > 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. 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.
- spidersouris 5y ago
  > Zulip is a better than most chat for that, because you commit to a topic, which adds order and caring. I've never used Zulip, but realistically, how does it differ from Slack's thread system?
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Slack's thread UI is simply atrocious. Zulip's UI makes it harder to not be part of an existing thread. In slack, anyone can just wander into room and start typing things that should be in a thread, outside of any thread, even (especially) if the thread they want is right there. That's not impossible with Zulip, just harder enough to do that it's not an issue in the same way.
    - philsnow 5y ago
      If I understand Zulip's threading correctly (I can't log in right now to check), it imposes a strict two-level threading system. Quill (https://quill.chat https://quill.chat) has nested channels but unlike Zulip, clicking on the "outer" channels doesn't show you all the content of all the "innner" channels.
gizdan 5y ago
> 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. 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.
tablespoon 5y ago
> 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. 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).
- moonchrome 5y ago
  >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. 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.
  - bavila 5y ago
    > 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.
mschuster91 5y ago
> I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists. 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.
- nine_k 5y ago
  In other words, mailing lists are a poor replacement for private instant messaging. Indeed! 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.
zh3 5y ago
I love Slack. I love waking up in the morning to be told I need to upgrade to use exactly the same product as I'm forced to use every day, and which behaves exactly the same (except a bit slower) after I've updated my OS to install the latest browser to access Slack. 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.
- asdff 5y ago
  Switch to ripcord to help alleviate some suffering
  - julianlam 5y ago
    Ripcord is nice and fast, but good GOD the UX is atrocious.
- strokirk 5y ago
  What product has better search in your experience? I personally find Slack's search experience to be one of the better I've ever used.
aqsalose 5y ago
Mailing lists are nice to use, but quite difficult to set up.
pjmlp 5y ago
I have to put up with Slack due to work, and to dismay of other people, I just use it exactly like email, by turning notifications off and only looking into it during "compiling" moments. And for finding stuff, you are absolute right, anything deemed relevant gets archived to my Notes instead.
rmidthun 5y ago
Slack decided that my phone is no longer good enough. So I have lost access to the main method of communication when I am away from the computer. I really don't want to get a new phone just for this...
- jobigoud 5y ago
  They expect you to check slack when you are away from the computer? So you're on 24/7?
fragmede 5y ago
Google Wave may not have picked up, but Google Docs certainly did. In the broader topic of online discussion, I feel like we'd be remiss if shared Google Docs didn't get a mention. (I assume MS O365 has a similar set of features, but I haven't used it extensively, so I'm avoiding using a generic term here, at the risk of sounding like a commercial.) 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.
FalconSensei 5y ago
I loved forums and mailing lists, so I don't have to be on 24/7 to join a conversation. 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
stavros 5y ago
What's a good mailing list service for a company? I'd like something I could restrict access to, at least, and with an easy/simple UI.
maccard 5y ago
The problem with a mailing list is that the interfaces for interacting with mailing lists are all terrible. I've yet to see one that comes _close_ to the UX that discord/slack (and tbh even IRC) provide.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Just for clarification it's "moving to Discord" not "moving to the Discord"
blagocube 5y ago
I work for Automattic (Wordpress) and internally we use https://wordpress.com/p2/ https://wordpress.com/p2/ as well as slack. P2 is basically every team having an internal Wordpress blog. This serves the same purpose as mailing lists but with rich content and other nice features I think it works really well for long form discussion.

by xlii 5y ago

twic 5y ago

Mailing lists? Bring back usenet! 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.

superkuh 5y ago
Just be the change you want to see. I've been posting on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk sporadically again for a couple years now. https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ is a great group that provides free text group access and posting.
- walterbell 5y ago
  > Just be the change you want to see. Timeless advice. Still applicable in tech thanks to open-source software, even as people lose agency in other areas.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
It was because of people, not the medium. Usenet was a great place for discussions, especially (but not only) on technical topics, by and for relatively competent people - at the beginning most people using it were from the academia. At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely broke that paradigm. 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.
- Multicomp 5y ago
  > At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely broke that paradigm. That event was called Eternal September, and netiquette has never been the same, or so I am told.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Kids these days have no respect for saving bandwidth with their inane top posting.
- sp332 5y ago
  Yeah, when AOL allowed Usenet access.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  I think it's a bit of both. Most people under 30 have only known the type of email emitted by Microsoft products, Gmail, spammers and retailers etc. To these people, bottom-quoting is the only option that exists (mail readers like Gmail will hide your message from them if you attempt to do top or inline/correct/sane quoting)). HTML mail is normal and expected. Proprietary attachments with "invitations" and the like is normal and expected. It's just a completely different thing to what those users were using back then. 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.
shuntress 5y ago
My problem with using email for communicating with strangers is that my email address feels like it must be a closely guarded secret known to only a select few or given out only when there is no other option. 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.
- pvarangot 5y ago
  I envy you if you can guard your email address. I have a six digit name and initial of last name Gmail address and I get email for more Pedros with a last name starting with a V that I wanted to know existed. It's so broken... Last week I had to create a new email to sign up for Playstation Whatever because they won't let me "recover" the account someone on Brazil created with my email even though they can't have ever possible validated the email.
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    This happened to me with someone’s bank account and they didn’t have confirmation so I kept getting emails with pii after that, including the recovery phone number, address, etc. (I alerted the bank to their issue)
    - metalliqaz 5y ago
      I have a first initial last name email from the early days of gmail. The amount of PII and private conversations I've received is incredible. Someone on the other side of the country tried to email himself his business loan application... twice.
    - josephg 5y ago
      Hah that happened to me a few years ago too. HSBC emailed me all the login details for someone’s internet banking account. I emailed back saying they had the wrong email address for their customer. They said if I wanted to change the email address on the account I’d need to go into a branch to do it. It took several attempts back and forth before they finally just disabled internet banking again for that account. 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.
lostlogin 5y ago
> usenet It hasn’t gone away. It’s usage has changed though.
caymanjim 5y ago
I used Usenet quite a bit in the 80s/90s, and ran a Usenet/NNTP server for a small ISP for a while. I miss a lot about it, but it wouldn't work well today. Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. And it was unregulated and unmoderated, which is a laughable idea now. There are just too many bad actors to even consider it. 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.
- VLM 5y ago
  NNTP does not equal Usenet. Some of the most interesting applications of NNTP would never connect to the legacy usenet network, which as you mention is/was a mess.
- wott 5y ago
  > Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then 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.
  - ruslan 5y ago
    Besides, text messages compress very well. 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.
- kjs3 5y ago
  Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. 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?
ptman 5y ago
Matrix is mostly used to chat. But really it is just a distributed graph database. Some of the founders of the project have very nice memories of NNTP and something like NNTP (but modern) can certainly be built on top of matrix.

tucnak 5y ago

Drew DeVault managed to make a mailing list renaissance of sorts. https://lists.sr.ht/ https://lists.sr.ht/ 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 https://lists.sr.ht/~badt/leet

inetknght 5y ago

> Too bad Google Wave didn't pick up. With Google's abuses coming to light I'm actually glad it didn't pick up.

cube00 5y ago
The recent wave of hiding old Usenet groups from their DejaNews archives because the algorithm now says no is a perfect example.

Popegaf 5y ago

Please not mailinglists. They are unbrowsable and who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion? 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).

aloisdg 5y ago
Beside you cant edit a post after sending a mail, right?
- ballenf 5y ago
  Some call that a feature not a bug: - incentivizes thoughtful consideration before sending - increases reliability of the list as an archive
  - aloisdg 5y ago
    As a non english speaker, I love being able to edit a typo later on.
db48x 5y ago
> 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 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.

hrbf 5y ago

I really, really support that. It’s threaded by default, requires only a simple signup and in the end is just text email. You can use a mailing list with any email client you choose. Web-based forums are notoriously unsafe and each one has its own eccentricities, not least regarding text formatting. I don’t want to put up with that. 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.

syntheticnature 5y ago

The problem with mailing lists is that anti-spam efforts, both on technical and policy fronts, have provided many blockages to their successful use. Not to mention that a lot of hosting providers are totally clueless as to the existence of discussion mailing lists. Source: I help run some discussion mailing lists.

inetknght 5y ago
> The problem with mailing lists is that anti-spam efforts, both on technical and policy fronts, have provided many blockages to their successful use. The real problem with mailing lists are businesses who have a vested interest in permitting spam to be delivered to users' inboxes.
- syntheticnature 5y ago
  Are you saying that voluntarily joined e-lists that reflect posts from each member to all members, as a means of discussion, are spam?

chakkepolja 5y ago

Old simple PHP based forums or even reddit / Google groups was better than current state-of-art using discord or JS-heavy discourse forum.

logicalmonster 5y ago
Some of the best chats I've ever had have been on niche Internet Message Boards using some of the worst technology run by people who didn't understand how to run a website. But the communities were so tight-knit and dedicated to their conversation topic and produced brilliant and entertaining ideas. 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.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Indeed. I think the technology is somewhat orthogonal to the community, but it's the community that's important. A lot of technical people equate the two. (Though there are definitely technical and systemic benefits to more open standards than Discord, even if that doesn't necessarily help the community.)
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  conversations (in the past) were so much easier to join, find, and review. I wish my company had a bbedit forum instead of slack :)
hef19898 5y ago
I find the fact that reddit forces me to use the app on mobile, and not the browser, highly irritating. End of story, I don't go there.
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  The third party apps are very good though, some even open source.

baxuz 5y ago

No please. Trying to read up on FFmpeg issues or join a conversation is a nightmare.

mch82 5y ago

I’ve looked at mailing lists for major, successful open source projects and you may be right. I like using Wikitech-L for Mediawiki. Some communities miss out on the potential of mailing lists because they implement the distribution list aspect without taking the additional step of implementing the browsable archival website. The archive is important because it lets late joiners find and participate in discussions. 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.

Miraste 5y ago
> 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.
- mch82 5y ago
  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. [1]: http://vger.kernel.org/ http://vger.kernel.org/ [2]: https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mailing_lists https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mailing_lists

matheusmoreira 5y ago

How do I use mailing lists properly? Last time I tried, I embarrassed myself by replying to someone directly. Couldn't figure out how to add the email to the thread.

capableweb 5y ago
Usually by doing "Reply all" instead of replying to just one recipient. One of the addresses will be associated to the mailing list, and forward you message to everyone when you send it. Basically, mailing lists are just a "special" email account everyone can send/receive emails to/from.
- price 5y ago
  "Reply all" is the best single answer, but it also varies between lists -- on some lists, the norm is that you reply only to the list and don't CC the sender. 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.
dqv 5y ago
On Thunderbird I get a button that says “reply list” that lets me do that. Failing that I guess you can just do a normal reply and then change the To: field to the list address.
Bjartr 5y ago
The fact that you're getting downvoted is precisely the attitude that drives people away from mailing lists.
layer8 5y ago
Traditionally, many mailing lists set the Reply-to header field to the mailing list address, so that replies would go back to the mailing list by default. For various reasons, that has fallen out of favor. Nowadays the message headers of mailing list messages usually indicate the list address in a separate header field, and mailing-list aware email clients provide a “reply to list” action. Unfortunately, too few email clients are mailing-list aware in that way. “Reply all” is the fallback, but make sure to remove the non-mailing list address, or else the original sender will receive two copies of your reply (one through the mailing list and one directly), which can be annoying.

travisgriggs 5y ago

I don’t so much mind (yet) slack replacing IRC. I use slack at work already. So more slack channels is an easy extension of that communication space. Collaborating with Kotlin or Elixir folks in their excellent slack channels feels like a modernized variant of the IRC communications I used to have with Python and Smalltalk. 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.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I think there are a bunch of issues with using mailing lists this way, but they are fixable: 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.

InitialLastName 5y ago

Not sure about the mailing list thing. I just started watching sci.electronics.design out of curiosity, and >80% of the posts are just two guys (one of them with an IEEE email address!) who appear to have been waging a years-long politics flame-war. The few posts about, er, electronics design are completely drowned out by self-righteous screaming about Trump, Biden, vaccines, elections and covid. 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.

extralobe 5y ago
Oh man. 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).

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Sometimes slow is a feature. For once it's a quality filter. Chats are 1% signal, 99% noise. 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.

unholythree 5y ago
> 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. 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.
spidersouris 5y ago
> Zulip is a better than most chat for that, because you commit to a topic, which adds order and caring. I've never used Zulip, but realistically, how does it differ from Slack's thread system?
- fragmede 5y ago
  Slack's thread UI is simply atrocious. Zulip's UI makes it harder to not be part of an existing thread. In slack, anyone can just wander into room and start typing things that should be in a thread, outside of any thread, even (especially) if the thread they want is right there. That's not impossible with Zulip, just harder enough to do that it's not an issue in the same way.
  - philsnow 5y ago
    If I understand Zulip's threading correctly (I can't log in right now to check), it imposes a strict two-level threading system. Quill (https://quill.chat https://quill.chat) has nested channels but unlike Zulip, clicking on the "outer" channels doesn't show you all the content of all the "innner" channels.

gizdan 5y ago

> 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. 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.

tablespoon 5y ago

> 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. 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).

moonchrome 5y ago
>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. 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.
- bavila 5y ago
  > 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.

mschuster91 5y ago

> I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists. 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.

nine_k 5y ago
In other words, mailing lists are a poor replacement for private instant messaging. Indeed! 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.

zh3 5y ago

I love Slack. I love waking up in the morning to be told I need to upgrade to use exactly the same product as I'm forced to use every day, and which behaves exactly the same (except a bit slower) after I've updated my OS to install the latest browser to access Slack. 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.

asdff 5y ago
Switch to ripcord to help alleviate some suffering
- julianlam 5y ago
  Ripcord is nice and fast, but good GOD the UX is atrocious.
strokirk 5y ago
What product has better search in your experience? I personally find Slack's search experience to be one of the better I've ever used.

aqsalose 5y ago

Mailing lists are nice to use, but quite difficult to set up.

pjmlp 5y ago

I have to put up with Slack due to work, and to dismay of other people, I just use it exactly like email, by turning notifications off and only looking into it during "compiling" moments. And for finding stuff, you are absolute right, anything deemed relevant gets archived to my Notes instead.

rmidthun 5y ago

Slack decided that my phone is no longer good enough. So I have lost access to the main method of communication when I am away from the computer. I really don't want to get a new phone just for this...

jobigoud 5y ago
They expect you to check slack when you are away from the computer? So you're on 24/7?

fragmede 5y ago

Google Wave may not have picked up, but Google Docs certainly did. In the broader topic of online discussion, I feel like we'd be remiss if shared Google Docs didn't get a mention. (I assume MS O365 has a similar set of features, but I haven't used it extensively, so I'm avoiding using a generic term here, at the risk of sounding like a commercial.) 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.

FalconSensei 5y ago

I loved forums and mailing lists, so I don't have to be on 24/7 to join a conversation. 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

stavros 5y ago

What's a good mailing list service for a company? I'd like something I could restrict access to, at least, and with an easy/simple UI.

maccard 5y ago

The problem with a mailing list is that the interfaces for interacting with mailing lists are all terrible. I've yet to see one that comes _close_ to the UX that discord/slack (and tbh even IRC) provide.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Just for clarification it's "moving to Discord" not "moving to the Discord"

blagocube 5y ago

I work for Automattic (Wordpress) and internally we use https://wordpress.com/p2/ https://wordpress.com/p2/ as well as slack. P2 is basically every team having an internal Wordpress blog. This serves the same purpose as mailing lists but with rich content and other nice features I think it works really well for long form discussion.