Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

No, I fully understand the problem. If Google Mail vanished tomorrow, a pretty large number of people would probably stop emailing altogether. The number of people for whom that's true increases every year.

If you find that unthinkable, consider the bubble you might be living in. I appreciate that there are people that require a decentralized service for messaging and understand where they're coming from. I don't deny their existence. I simply think their numbers are much smaller than they appear on nerd message boards.

View on HN

> No, I fully understand the problem. If Google Mail vanished tomorrow, a pretty large number of people would probably stop emailing altogether. The number of people for whom that's true increases every year.

I highly doubt that's true. Email is pretty essential to the functionality of the internet, from signing up accounts to getting notifications, to just plain discussions with professionals. It's pretty much the only thing that does what it does.

To use non-nerd examples people in my life have done recently via email: contacting the school registrar's office, updating insurance information, discussing minor problems with a recent surgery with their doctor. Especially for people with anxiety issues who have problems on the phone, email is a life saver.

I lived off email when buying a house through a builder last year. Everyone went through email and nothing else was even offered in many cases. The builder, bankers, lawyers, electricians, everything was email.

Wechat is what's doing this is China, and it's working fairly well for them. It's obviously impossible to do the same in the West (companies won't be trusted by people in Europe, nation-level apps won't be trusted in US) but it's not impossible to replace email. Note: mobile is gigantic compared to desktop in China, so this might also be a reason.

I still believe email will outlast all the current solutions though, but the crushing presence of a few big providers is not doing any good for the protocol.

While WeChat is somewhat more advanced then its rivals, the reason it works is because Chinese businesses are less 'sophisticated' than western ones and much more human based. WeChat is to a large extent a phone call replacement, which is especially useful in a country of multiple languages and dialects but a common written one. Western messaging services are mainly replacing things like text messages and other instant messengers not e-mail. (e-mail is probably still the de facto most insecure protocol on the internet and should be replaced).

Electronic conversations didn't even replace paper mail.

Replace? That's a strong word but it has more or less deprecated paper mail. Everything from insurance cards to my recent W2s are delivered electronically via e-mail now. I recently bought a car and all the paperwork was completed online. The bank uses electronic signatures for everything. The amount of first class mail delivered by USPS has halved over the last decade. Is paper mail dead? No. Is it on it's deathbed? Probably.

Out of curiosity, I plotted first class mail delivery vs. population:

https://i.imgur.com/Fp2LLCg.png

Annual per-capita mail delivery is down 50% in the US since Y2K.

So 20 years of internet, the rise of mobile and hi-speed connectivity, the multiplication of communications means including emails, chats, text and social network and the paper mail is still here.

I still receive all my most important communications through the mail box, including anything related to administration, voting, my landlord, invitations to major life events, bank details, etc.

Now if you hope to kill email, you gonna have to remember that.

Well, I think some of this can attributed to personal preference. Each of the use cases you described can be accomplished via e-mail or other electronic communications. Other than a wedding invite or two every year, I receive no other personal mail. This didn't require any special technical skills, many organizations actually encourage you to setup paperless accounting when you sign up for a new account.

Three responses:

* Email remains important for middle-class Americans because it's used for business. But that is a small subset of the whole population, including very large numbers of Americans.

* For almost all those users, email might as well be a Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft product.

* Every year, the number of people and businesses that rely on email gets smaller --- in the last 5 years or so, by something like 15%.

There's no trend we're looking at that suggests that email is becoming more relevant.

We should be happy about this, not freaking out. Even if you think the future is decentralized messaging protocols (I like decentralized too; I just think we should figure the nuts and bolts out before we decentralize), email is a boat anchor holding us back.

> * Every year, the number of people and businesses that rely on email gets smaller --- in the last 5 years or so, by something like 15%.

If that's true then where's that stat from and how are these businesses getting contacted online?

There's no decent replacement for email in that department at all to my knowledge.

Can't answer the source of the stat, but where they're getting contacted - FB messenger or Twitter, for starters.

I've done most of my non-B2B communication with businesses over the last year or so via FB messenger, Twitter or phone.

>I just think we should figure the nuts and bolts out before we decentralize

Bolting on decentralization works about as well as bolting on security.

Can you qualify that third point?

What's considered reliance? What's the name of some place that stopped using email? I can see a drop in businesses that are running their own email, and that outsourcing maybe represents a big shift in terms of how they see it as "not critical and must be kept in house" but I don't know that they rely upon it much less.

How are these businesses messaging and communicating?

There's a big dilemma with using centralized systems for sensitive communication.

* You have to use one that is not economically or legally dependent on a jurisdiction hostile to you.

* There can never be many different centralized messaging systems that are economically viable because that requires network effects.

As a result, there will always be a large number of people who will not be able to find a centralized system that protects them reliably.

> * Email remains important for middle-class Americans because it's used for business. But that is a small subset of the whole population, including very large numbers of Americans.

Middle class Westerners (not only Americans by any mean) that are doing business are also pretty much the only ones that are willing to spend money on written communication. E-mail might not be on the rise, but I'd guess it grosses way more money than all IM platforms together.

re @tptacek

> Every year, the number of people and businesses that rely on email gets smaller --- in the last 5 years or so, by something like 15%.

Are you sure that's not just the spam decreasing?

Yes.

A bold statement like that without a source just screams bullshit.

I think tptacek thinks in a way where he's giving you charity in an uneven discussion, so he's not obligated to go further; perhaps harsh, but his reputation warrants a little pause before simply saying "bullshit".

His reputation is specifically why I asked for a source. While I don't doubt he's an intelligent individual, I've noticed that he also likes to "shoot from the hip" without providing evidence of many claims he makes on both here and Twitter.

No, his reputation doesn't "warrant" anything. Internet discussions don't work this way.

If he claims something, he should be able to back it up with something else than his so-called "authority".

Do you really understand the problem as you claim? The amount of people who require a decentralized system is irrelevant to the issue. The issue is in what users will do when their trusted system goes down, be it centralized or decentralized.

Say Gmail goes down (forever), will people use another of their emails? Or register for a new one somewhere else? Or start using another medium of communication alltogether? I assume all of the above will occur to some extent, but if that system was centralized, only the third option would be available. And if that centralized system was so good that it had killed all competition, then suddenly no one would be able to communicate.

It's not about the amount of people who scream for decentralized solutions. It's about the alternatives available in case something does go down, and how easy those alternatives are for users to adopt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com