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It is time to ban email

shkspr.mobi

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Re: It is time to ban email

#31

Post by im3w1l »

edent wrote: post #22
TZubiri wrote: post #18

And replace it with.... Email is a neutral protocol, in a natural monopoly, very hard to replace unless you want to choose a state sanctioned monopoly like you would to Facebook's Whatsapp or Apple's messenger. This sounds like fatalistic throwing the baby with the bath water, I know that there's a fine line between operator's error and bad system design, but when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, a…

> when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, and there is a fuck up, you can't reaally blame it on the tech. After 40 years of the same fuck up - what should you blame?

Maybe deciding who should have access to what information is just an intrinsic difficulty of the problem space? In this day and age, maybe you could have an LLM read the email and ask for confirmation for CC.

Re: It is time to ban email

#32

Post by Spivak »

TZubiri wrote: post #18

And replace it with.... Email is a neutral protocol, in a natural monopoly, very hard to replace unless you want to choose a state sanctioned monopoly like you would to Facebook's Whatsapp or Apple's messenger. This sounds like fatalistic throwing the baby with the bath water, I know that there's a fine line between operator's error and bad system design, but when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, a…

You replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem.

You don't even have to replace the email system behind the curtain, just make it work like group chats. People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually."

Why we even still bother with the letters and mailboxes metaphor is beyond me. It implies a level of ceremony that just isn't needed anymore. Just send the file, what does "attaching" mean in the digital age?

Re: It is time to ban email

#33

Post by jjkaczor »

rpmisms wrote: post #4

> Will the youth of today see sending an email as ridiculously old-fashioned as a paper telegram or a landline? They already do.

Not just youth - I work with teams of all ages (skewing towards older GenX - and even younger boomers), and getting them to commit to sending an actual email versus an instant message is incredibly difficult.

But - I was "raised" with email and have personal archives going back 30+ years now. It was also my "CMS", and it "just worked" with everything and everyone across every platform.

Re: It is time to ban email

#35

Post by n4r9 »

edent wrote: post #24
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #13

Email is one of the best communication protocols humanity has ever invented. Do you want to give Meta the keys to all your communications? Or Slack, who sends them off to AI training models?

Google and Microsoft probably already have the keys to 90%+ of all email comms. They probably already use them to train AI. It is well known that the Enron emails were used to train early AIs * https://qz.com/work/1546565/the-emails-that-brought-down-enr... * https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/ But, if it is one of the best comms protocols, why then do people flock to WhatsApp, Slack, and other non-email products?

> why then do people flock to WhatsApp, Slack, and other non-email products?

One reason is that corporations are extremely good at hijacking attention and stimulating addictive areas of the brain. There are various definitions of "best" here, ranging from "efficient" to "what people will flock to".

Re: It is time to ban email

#37

Post by ndegruchy »

jjkaczor wrote: post #28
krunck wrote: post #16

Sure let's dump email in favor of a new non-proprietary, open standards, decentralized and non-commercial protocol. Name one If you like.

ActivityPub? (Runs for the hills, couldn't resist - /jk - I prefer email) There are several relevant xkcd comics about multiple competing "standard" protocols IIRC...

You mean, "email with extra steps?". AP is a mess.

Re: It is time to ban email

#38

Post by edent »

imiric wrote: post #29

> When was the last time you used carbon paper to make a copy? Have you ever dictated to your secretary who a memorandum should be blind-copied to? When was the last time you filed a document in a physical folder? Or used a physical clipboard? Have you ever found a physical bug in your computer? These are all concepts that were once common in the real world, adopted to make computing more familiar and approachable. W…

Most new students don't understand filesystems. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

A directory structure is a skeuomorph which doesn't fit in with their search-first workflow.

I've not seen any articles about the clipboard - but I have watched people of all ages copy-type rather than copy 'n' paste.

The technologies you rely on don't match the mental model of most new computer users.

Re: It is time to ban email

#39

Post by PaulKeeble »

A lot of businesses view human errors that a system has as something to complain at the users about and put policy around to stop it from happening, this does not work. Equally banning an essential technology doesn't solve the problem because people still need a mechanism for sending messages asynchronously to each other.

The issue is about the user interface of the clients. The problem with email is that no one really makes any money out of it. Its a mature and stagnant technology and it gets little investment. People want to pay as little as possible for something that you can get from Google for "free". But the issues are all to do with the user interface and defending people from relatively rare errors because people misclicked and misunderstood the impact.There are very common features of email that should be nice and quick and there are features rarely used that cause a lot of problems and the happy path should be slowed and made more difficult to do accidentally and without knowledge of the potential impact.

But the issue is the maturity and lack of investment because otherwise these problem features like CC would be handled better and there are numerous ways it could be made safer and errors a lot less likely.

Re: It is time to ban email

#40

Post by rpmisms »

jjkaczor wrote: post #33
rpmisms wrote: post #4

> Will the youth of today see sending an email as ridiculously old-fashioned as a paper telegram or a landline? They already do.

Not just youth - I work with teams of all ages (skewing towards older GenX - and even younger boomers), and getting them to commit to sending an actual email versus an instant message is incredibly difficult. But - I was "raised" with email and have personal archives going back 30+ years now. It was also my "CMS", and it "just worked" with everything and everyone across every platform.

I'm firmly Gen Z and love email. Messaging is great, but emails have a formality that is infuriating for casual conversation, but works really well for anything important or weighty.
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