4 ms·

It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online. The only people I can contact directly are authors of pape

It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online. The only people I can contact directly are authors of papers whose emails are still published in the papers. For everyone else, you would have to go through an intermediary (social media).

diggan 2y ago
You consider email to be without intermediary while social media is with one? Both have some sort of intermediary usually, but in the case of Mastodon (or ActivityPub in general) it at least uses a protocol, just like email.
- bubblethink 2y ago
  Yes, traditional social media requires me to create an account on its website and jump through various hoops before I can contact the person. Social media is also geared towards broadcasting and will discourage you from DMing people. Mastodon is closer to email, but hardly anyone uses it.
  - diggan 2y ago
    Email also requires either an account at a service (with various levels of hoops) or setting up your own email (with even more levels of hoops), so judging by "hoop count", they're more or less the same?
    - account42 2y ago
      Social media has terms of use that apply to everyone. This makes the social media operator an intermediatary who decides who you can and cannot talk to and what you may or may not talk about. With email you get to choose your provider (or be your own provider) and in general providers are prety hands off. SPAM filters are a thing but you won't have your email account banned because of a single conversation. That makes email providers act more as facilitators than intermediaries.
jasode 2y ago
>It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online. It's easier to understand this if we re-state it from the perspective of the receivers instead of the senders: We've given up on publicly displaying our non-intermediary contact info such as our email addresses or phone numbers to avoid abuse and spam from random people / stalkers / bots / robocallers / etc trying to directly contact us. E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.) Had an email address from 1995 for 20 years that I let go because it became useless with spam and phishing scams. Back then, I was naive about the internet and gave that email out freely. Lesson learned from that is my new email address is never given out freely or displayed on my web pages. Yes that means that random people can't contact me directly very easily. Communication friction is the inevitable consequence of society at large abusing the system.
- diggan 2y ago
  > E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.) For what it's worth, I've always had my email on my HN profile, and my email is also public + I'm pretty sure my phone number is public too after 2 decades of using it carelessly and also having it in my email signature. I don't think I receive more spam emails/calls than anyone else. After entering a "no-spam" block list for my phone in Spain (Lista Robinson) I receive literally no spam calls anymore, and I get about ~30 spam emails per day it seems.
- pyrale 2y ago
  One useful perk of owning a domain is that I can now give a different email address to everyone. When they misuse, I can remove them from my inbox very easily.
  - brokenmachine 2y ago
    On gmail when I have to give my email to a company, I give it out as myemail+theircompanyname@gmail.com, which is an alias for myemail@gmail.com. In theory I could later use it to know which company gave out my email, but I also realize how easy it would be for the spammers to just remove the "+theircompanyname" part. Sometimes sites must be using a crappy regex that won't allow the + though, even though it should be a valid character in email addresses.

diggan 2y ago

You consider email to be without intermediary while social media is with one? Both have some sort of intermediary usually, but in the case of Mastodon (or ActivityPub in general) it at least uses a protocol, just like email.

bubblethink 2y ago
Yes, traditional social media requires me to create an account on its website and jump through various hoops before I can contact the person. Social media is also geared towards broadcasting and will discourage you from DMing people. Mastodon is closer to email, but hardly anyone uses it.
- diggan 2y ago
  Email also requires either an account at a service (with various levels of hoops) or setting up your own email (with even more levels of hoops), so judging by "hoop count", they're more or less the same?
  - account42 2y ago
    Social media has terms of use that apply to everyone. This makes the social media operator an intermediatary who decides who you can and cannot talk to and what you may or may not talk about. With email you get to choose your provider (or be your own provider) and in general providers are prety hands off. SPAM filters are a thing but you won't have your email account banned because of a single conversation. That makes email providers act more as facilitators than intermediaries.

jasode 2y ago

>It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online. It's easier to understand this if we re-state it from the perspective of the receivers instead of the senders: We've given up on publicly displaying our non-intermediary contact info such as our email addresses or phone numbers to avoid abuse and spam from random people / stalkers / bots / robocallers / etc trying to directly contact us. E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.) Had an email address from 1995 for 20 years that I let go because it became useless with spam and phishing scams. Back then, I was naive about the internet and gave that email out freely. Lesson learned from that is my new email address is never given out freely or displayed on my web pages. Yes that means that random people can't contact me directly very easily. Communication friction is the inevitable consequence of society at large abusing the system.

diggan 2y ago
> E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.) For what it's worth, I've always had my email on my HN profile, and my email is also public + I'm pretty sure my phone number is public too after 2 decades of using it carelessly and also having it in my email signature. I don't think I receive more spam emails/calls than anyone else. After entering a "no-spam" block list for my phone in Spain (Lista Robinson) I receive literally no spam calls anymore, and I get about ~30 spam emails per day it seems.
pyrale 2y ago
One useful perk of owning a domain is that I can now give a different email address to everyone. When they misuse, I can remove them from my inbox very easily.
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  On gmail when I have to give my email to a company, I give it out as myemail+theircompanyname@gmail.com, which is an alias for myemail@gmail.com. In theory I could later use it to know which company gave out my email, but I also realize how easy it would be for the spammers to just remove the "+theircompanyname" part. Sometimes sites must be using a crappy regex that won't allow the + though, even though it should be a valid character in email addresses.