gosh so many comments to choose from. Evan, what I personally prefer, is choice. Indeed when many Yahoo groups moved to groups.io, I created a password there. However, I have never needed to read posts there, or at google groups, or even freelist. Instead, i can subscribe from my inbox, no ads, hackers, passwords, or leading to my next point, lack of innovation required. Reddit recently shut down access by all third party applications. Meaning the command line Linux tools that allowed say a person using a voice browser, or braille display, or who just wanted to cut the ads have no access to the service anymore. In fact, if a reddit post shows up in google searches or duckduckgo..the contents cannot be read. Discord is a fine example of a platform created for other profoundly graphical purposes getting expanded, It is a gamer platform first and foremost. Still, again you must use discord as they define the term..no innovative lower graphics doors allowed. Do I want to be where the people are? sure, but not at the cost of privacy, inclusion, and reading in a way that maximizes real communication..or choice. why is the only door to this table their app and nothing else? I personally like giving a single post my undivided attention, But that is me. what I personally love is a place that lets you choose how you reach the conversation, with the technology you like, the body you have, and the method you prefer. I really miss reading reddit posts, but I never had to join to reach those. Turns out that is a very good thing, because I could not reach my account now, only certain kinds of technology gets there. What value is a place that welcomes millions, if some who do not look like those millions are shut out? Where is the value if creativity, open source program tools have no place there? And as another person said quite brilliantly, little beats a genuine back and forth conversation. Again, I am speaking personally. But I have folders of posts from my many email groups rich with technical ideas, discussions of Charles dickens, and kind notes shared between humans united by a shared interest when one in the list family has lost a loved one. ..and I prefer my phones as dumb as possible thank you very much, smiles. cheers, Karen On Tue, 10 Sep 2024, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
I scanned through the groups in groups.io. Many are more than 20 years old. There is no smartphone app. It costs money to start a group of more than 100 people, and the more successful it is the more you need to pay. I understand the business model but from the point of view of a group creator this is crazy next to the free-of-cost alternatives.
When creating a group, don't you want to be where the users are, rather than force them to create an account on yet another platform? WhatsApp has two billion users Reddit has 430 million Discord has about 20 million Groups.io and Google Groups do not publish user statistics.
I don't use groups.io but I do use Google Groups. I have been in and created groups in it, in all the platforms mentioned above, as well as Signal and Telegram which have group functionality.
All of these platforms can handle small groups, like the Discord server for GTALUG. I have a personal Discord area with fewer than 12 members. They are all pretty straightforward to set up, especially if you're familiar with them. But how well can they scale? The largest group in groups.io has 15,000 members. The popular groups in Reddit have tens of millions of members. The larger Discord servers have a few million members each, though one -- for users of the Midjourney AI system -- has about 20 million members.
I see nothing in email (whether in Google Groups, groups.io or a conventional list like GTALUG's) that isn't functionally done better on Reddit (which allows people to "upvote" the most useful contributions) or Discord (which includes streaming and virtual ad-hoc meetings) or WhatsApp (which is super simple and most people have it anyway). All three of these are free of cost to join or start a group of as many people as you can gather. Discord also supports Markdown formatting which is easier to do than the HTML in most emails.
You're right, it is about the audience. As I said, this is a generational issue. Email works great for people over 40, because it's comfortable and they grew up with it. For younger people who grew up with smartphones and apps it's a very different story.
- Evan
On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 11:44 AM Karen Lewellen <klewellen@shellworld.net> wrote:
As a counter to this idea I offer up groups.io. www.groups.io A location where email not only allows for exchange interaction and communication, but often a great deal of community building as well. especially for folks who wisely wish to avoid the minefield that is Facebook and so forth. Perhaps? it is less about how email may be declining generally, and more about how, in your personal experience, email is less important? I could have listed google groups, and freelists in the place of groups.io, with comparative results. Perhaps its more about the audience? Cheers, Karen
On Tue, 10 Sep 2024, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 4:56 AM ac via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I read in a thread here recently that email is dead,
That would be me. Or something close to what I said.
I never said email was dead, but rather it's evolved in a way that makes it ever less useful ... just like postal mail.
Email, like postal mail, is mainly these days for - Flyers and advertising - government, business and legal communications
None of these uses is really interactive, at most they're occasionally transactional (ie, providing stimulus for me to do something that often itself does not require mail in response).
The one benefit of postal mail that is not shared by its electronic counterpart is the ability to send and receive parcels; the consequences of my doing e-commerce in a way that has zero to do with mail of any kind. And the one unique benefit of email is that its addresses provide a unique identifier that can be used to create (and optionally authenticate) unrelated online accounts.
I have been hearing that same thing for 30? years now and always for
different reasons. But volumes of actual transactional email has seen exponential growth, year on year, with not even a hint of any decline in the growth itself.
For most email these days, "transactional" is an aspiration. Most have response rates of single digits at best.
Sure, my spam filter is busier than ever ... but the signal-to-noise ratio has plummeted. Same with postal mail. If it wasn't for flyer mail Canada Post would be in even more of a financial hole than it now is. Email marketing does not suffer quite the same financial fate as postal mail because costs are shared between sender and receiver.
In a previous life I was on the other side of this. I was involved in choosing a bulk-mailing vendor and launching numerous bulk email campaigns, for newsletters and announcements. (FWIW, the vendor we ended up using was Moosend, based in London and India -- email doesn't care about domestic versus international rates.) It was cheap, but we never expected more than low-single-digit percentage of recipients even opening what we sent, let alone responding by (say) going to the org's website. Providing strategy to circumvent RBLs and spam filters has become a cottage industry of its own.
What interactive functions of email still exist -- mainly the social ones, like personal mail and forums such as this -- are mostly the artifacts of the generation that grew up on it. Just like I still receive birthday cards in the post, but only from relatives older than me.
These services may very well never die. But both email and non-parcel post are destined to continue their ever-further descent into pure nuisance.
- Evan
-- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56