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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand why people become so anti-email. I'm a deeply introverted person, so it's not like I don't understand wanting to be left alone, but if I don't want to be interrupted... I close my email viewer. The asynchronous nature of email makes it great for introverted people. I used to get a TON of email at one of my prior jobs, and, like, it was fine. Just wait till it's convenient to open it. If it's actually urgent they'll call or send an IM.

I'm not accusing Knuth of this, but I think some people just use email as a way of humble-bragging. "I'm so important it's overwhelming!" Yeah wow. We're all so impressed.

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> I'm a deeply introverted person

That there might be why you haven't learnt to hate Email (or other forms of asynchronous communication). If you want to learn to hate, try running a few mildly successful Open Source projects. Or try participating in other lame company flame email thread.

The fundamental problem with email (and other forms of asynchronous electronic comms including Github pull requests and Facebook messages) is there's little burden on the sender. The entire burden is carried by the recipient. It's too easy for the sender to turn impulse into wasting someone else's time. Snail mail at least costs a stamp and a trip to the letter box.

TLDR: Right now email doesn't scale

Synchronous communication costs just as little, and it's vastly more disruptive. I've done all the things you mention, I guess the fact that I can easily turn off email makes me not care. Sure someone can callously waste my time with an email.. And I can callously delete it. Plus, if I think an email is a waste of time, I can just not respond.

It really isn't that much of a burden to ignore an email.

Email has been scaling just fine for years. And I've run some reasonably successful open source projects (including SpamAssassin at the height of its success). I really don't see the problem.

The fact that an email is easy to send without knowing the recipient is a huge benefit of email. No other electronic communication system offers this benefit (and unfortunately it enables spam, but that's an entirely different discussion).

The whole point is that it enables spam, broadly interpreted to include unsolicited mail of all kinds.

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