Ask HN: Could we add social features (e.g. likes) to the email standard?

1 point·sawwit··6 comments

I think, it would also be great to have groups, "thank you" messages, votes, tools for meeting coordination, location/time meta data, hash tags, inline videos, strong crypto. So many possibilities…

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The last thing I want is someone being able to "like" my emails. Email is supposed to be a conversation between the sender and recipient. "likes" would be far from appropriate.

The nice thing about the e-mail standard is that it's a standard - the basic features work in the expected way no matter what e-mail client you're using. If you add all these features on top of it, people won't be able to use them unless they use a client that supports these features. When I send an e-mail, I don't want to have to think about whether the recipient will have the ability to read it.

Why is HTML constantly being extended while email is more or less the same as 35 years ago.

Because advertisers (read spammers) want to sell you things and that is easier with a flashy image-laden email than with plain text.

Email groups (distribution/mailing lists) already exist

Meeting coordination already exists via caldav

Video embedding is mostly just a case of clients accepting <video> html5 tags

Strong crypto is available now via either S/MIME or GPG/PGP

The other features - "likes" etc are not applicable. Email is not a social network.

Wouldn't that all be transmitted in the clear? I see a lot of risk of privacy leakage.

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