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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I've used Signal and other messengers, including "IM's", to send things longer than a sentence. And, when I send email to people, if I have something more complicated than a paragraph or two to send, I make an actual document anyways. So what's your argument?

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Here is something that I have a need of pretty often, but don't know how to do in things outside email (Whatsapp, Signal, etc): a point by point interleaving of the original message and the reply; for instance in a technical argument.

I could do this in Slack, but unlike email this is not even close to being universally supported.

For such technical discussions, I prefer an issue tracker, wiki, or forum. It should be a centralized searchable archive and not hidden in personal mailboxes.

Sure, you can use email as an interface to an issue tracker. Debian is probably the most prominent example. That is worse than anything web-based in my opinion.

That answer isn't workable for those of us in shorter term projects which lack that sort of infrastructure. The need remains for a flexible messaging system to take over for those kinds of messages that need some permanence. It sounds like what people familiar with email workflow want is the email a document interface so we have something tho point to after the fact. I don't think anything else does that though Wire may at some point.

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