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This title reminds me of the line, "Nobody goes to that bar. It's too crowded."[0]. I'm not sure why people love to insist that "email is broken" Email does it
by chimeracoder 13y ago
This title reminds me of the line, "Nobody goes to that bar. It's too crowded."[0].
I'm not sure why people love to insist that "email is broken" Email does its job remarkably well. In 2014, it's one of the only communication forms that's truly open, 100% cross-platform, and free-as-in-both-beer-and-freedom. If there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that handles your email according to whatever logic you set up.
The main complaint that I hear about email is that "we get too much of it". But that has little to do with email itself, and more to do with how much we do these days. The pace of business in 2014 is faster than the pace of business in 1964, and I'd wager that if you compared the volume of email today with the volume of paper mail then, the increased velocity of transactions would account for almost all of the difference.
Rather than trying to "fix" email by replacing it or extending the protocols in incompatible ways, let's work on creating clients that do what we want them to do.
[0] Currently the title is "Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013", though I suspect that this may be reverted soon, given the HN policy.
- theophrastus 13y agoIn the set of options to choose when one hasn't a truly innovative notion to review then the one that tends to top the list is: "If there's a separable technology which hasn't shown significant public change in ten years then you may declare it as _dead_, or otherwise broken or moribund" Selecting this option has the advantage that the majority of readers might see a point and no further research into this issue need be done by the commentator. Furthermore, the following technologies are thus "dead": (1) the desktop (2) email (3) Apple (4) linux (5) the-internet (6) the classroom (7) physical books (8) sharks ... you get the idea.
- Touche 13y ago> If there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that handles your email according to whatever logic you set up. This part is not true, it's incredibly hard to write an email client.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoI think he meant handling the client's logic and configuration (how it processes messages), rather than writing one from scratch. Which is not that difficult, what with things like Sieve scripting.
- ddebernardy 13y ago> I'd wager that if you compared the volume of email today with the volume of paper mail then, the increased velocity of transactions would account for almost all of the difference. Doubtful, and methinks the article nails precisely why it's not the case. Back then, workers didn't cc their every move to their boss and colleagues, whereas nowadays doing so often is the norm. Be it FYI or CYA, the cc is used and abused. Reporting and RFC channels from the past have been replaced by live -- and overwhelming -- data streams of information.
- raldi 13y agoIn your analogy, does going to a bar correspond to sending or receiving email? Because, "Nobody reads email anymore; they receive too much of it" doesn't have any paradoxical self-contradictions.
- greenyoda 13y agoFor paradoxical effect, try: "Nobody sends e-mail anymore. There's just too much of it." By the way, the original quote was from Yogi Berra: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
- VLM 13y ago"the increased velocity of transactions would account for almost all of the difference." Don't forget the reduced cost of CYA. One reason I have 2208 emails in my deleted folder right now is a server I don't care about in a state I don't work in which provides a service I don't care about is down, so hundreds, perhaps thousands are being spammed. But we can't limit that because "what if you needed that info" or "one time someone didn't get an important notice and ..." I get around an email per minute and its my fault if I don't read an important one. Almost all, of course, are unimportant.