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Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
Don't blame email, if you can't create a few simple inbox filters to manage the cruft for you. It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox. We've largely addressed the spam thing. The non-spam stuff is going to be dumped on you, whether it's in email or phone calls or text messages or instant messages or facebook messages or instagram messages or whatever the fuck it is teenagers are doing these days that makes email "irrelevant".
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.
What about this as a potential solution - in order to send an email to someone, you have to pay something.
Here's how it could work:
1) You sign up for a service that autoresponds to all incoming email stating that in order to send this receiver an email, they require at least X BTC.
2) The receivers inbox only shows email where the sender attached the minimum X BTC. In fact the inbox is sorted by the amount of BTC attached to each email.
3) The receiver keeps half the attached BTC and the email service keeps the other half. This is the part I'm least sure about.
Thoughts?
"Email is broken. People are using it a lot."
No thank you.
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…
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.
One thing stood out to me in the article "make something free and easy and people will do a lot of it". What about this as a potential solution - in order to send an email to someone, you have to pay something. Here's how it could work: 1) You sign up for a service that autoresponds to all incoming email stating that in order to send this receiver an email, they require at least X BTC. 2) The receivers inbox only sho…
Coincidentally, hashcash's proof of work is the foundation of bitcoin.
But don't let this discourage you from trying your idea. I think it's still a fantastic idea. Making email cost something to send (either btc or CPU time like hashcash) would kill spam, and slow down the flow of over-communication.
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…
This part is not true, it's incredibly hard to write an email client.