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Comment by webwanderings | Hacker News Reader

Sounded all good until I read this: "email them to friends and family."

You have a weak link there. In today's day and age, most people expect not to send or receive emails. Be that family photos or birthday wishes. The expectations is to share in a pool of social media, for everyone to see (or not see).

I am not a naysayer of your method (I prefer email), but it is practically too much work to select and send emails (takes a lot of thinking and decision making). This is why one-click sharing on social media, has been able to evolve to a point where it has set such an expectations across common denominator crowd.

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> In today's day and age, most people expect not to send or receive emails

People who don't care about your shit expect not to send or receive emails, just easy to digest posts in an infinite timeline while they're on the toilet.

But people who care about what you have to send them (e.g. your grandma when you send her pictures of you and your boyfriend on vacation, your dad when you send him pictures of his grandchildren, a close friend when you tell her about your new job) are very happy to receive what you have to send to them and reply to it, no matter the medium.

Yes, if you want to address 99% of your social network email is probably not as good as Facebook, but if you only care about the 10% that's closest to you, the technology doesn't matter. One of my best friends from high school still sends me paper letters, and I am ecstatic to receive them when I do.

I agree with you. I clarified similar position in a followup[0]. However, let's not just confine ourselves to grandma and personal pictures. The issue is all encompassing content; some of lesser value, and some greater. You may think all of your shared content is of value, but the receiver may not feel the same. You have to judge (think) before you direct your message. It is of course an easy choice to send baby's pictures to the grandma, but when you have to target different pictures, you have to think about the target audience. Going one level deep, you may have a story to share instead of a picture. You are now hard pressed to email because you know others may have already seen it, or something else.

Ultimately, the evolution of the web to the social media has happened due to human's lazy nature. We are not capable of directing messages of mass nature to one-on-one. We can direct messages of personal nature to one-on-one, but that's about it. For this reason, social media - versus email - has been able to make inroads into people's lives. Certainly, we feel that one-to-many is not the right approach, hence we form this or that group, to confine ourselves into self-created boundaries (groups have its own pros and cons).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345534

If the choice is between data security and a few family members being unwilling to click an email link, I'd choose data security.

Let's face it: the kind of people who only look at your photos when they're very convenient to look at aren't interested to begin with. Nothing of value is being lost.

That's exactly my thinking. The people I email generally open the link, look through the photos, and sometimes even write an email in response! It's the damnedest thing.

I put effort into arranging everything, and everyone else puts effort into looking at it. It's a pretty fair trade.

Somehow my mother-in-law still finds it worth her time to open my emails and text me saying "thanks"

Yes, of course. That's very true. But there's a reason I used the words "common denominator" to explain the situation. I'd also appreciate and thank receiving the email. The social media sharing makes one feel less-valued. I'd rather people individually contact, to show that they care. Social media sharing is a detached sharing. It is a lazy man's ideal situation.

Social media is giving up quality for quantity. I decided it was unhealthy a while ago, and continue to feel pretty good about that :-)

Apparently, there is more money (business?) in quantity, then there is in quality.

Not to mention the 25mb limit. Maybe he just emails the direct links?

Yes, I just email a URL to a page.

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