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Comment by cydonian_monk | Hacker News Reader

I wish we still had email, but an increasing number of folks in my circles are refusing to use it too. And you can forget trying to call anybody - nobody answers because every phone call is a robocall or a scam.

The balkanization of communications is real. I've become some sort of middleman/organizer in one of my hobby circles because I'm the only one who uses all of these disparate services; many of which I only use to connect to two or three folks.

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Who are you in contact with? Tech workers with enough autonomy to fall off the map without consequence? I can't think of anyone I know who doesn't get critical emails that require a reply. You'd fail college without checking emails. You won't get hired if you don't check your emails. You'd get fired from my job without checking emails. You'd fall out of touch with collaborators in the field without checking emails. Who are these people who refuse to check emails, and what do they possibly do that gives them this privilege of avoiding the most basic and fundamental electronic communication? It seems just absurd to me.

I had a roommate like that. The man missed out on a number of important opportunities because he just plain never checked his email. These people exist and it bothers me

Why would you expect investing a few seconds of your time to push your words unsolicited at someone to create a sense of obligation in the recipient?

The problem with email is it’s too easy to send, and I get 100+ non-spam per day between work and personal. I do not have time to read, let alone respond to 100+ emails per day.

So I triage them as best I can, and a lot get binned based on sender or subject alone.

The walled gardens improve on email and XMPP because they’re walled.

Oh sure, I was never arguing for that. I'm just saying that you need to at least attempt to triage your emails. You can at least make the conscious decision of "I'm not going to deal with this email." However, I will say that walled gardens do not necessarily improve on this problem. If everyone is within the same walls then it's the same situation all over again.

You can't control those walls though. With email, you can craft the most convoluted rules and sure it's not always clear how to get a rule to do what you want, but you have total power in building up your own walled garden to your personal preferences, not whatever preferences are studied to get the most ad revenue and waste the most amount of your time without wasting so much that you get frustrated and leave the platform.

Many people get an overwhelming amount of email.

Also once you move from college into the working world you have a work email separate from home email typically. I check my work email daily of course since it’s critical to my job, but I can go days without checking personal emails.

Most of the content of my personal email is hardly time sensitive and a lot of it is advertising or news I haven’t opted out of (although I have gmail filters and tabs). It’s not like IM where I would use to check and respond immediately because I only ever got messages from friends.

I will admit I have a burner gmail for account signups with like 18k unread messages, but I've resigned that email to the advertising spam dogs a decade ago.

Many of my "no email" contacts are hobby-related and not tech workers. Some of them are retired, previously used work-provided email, and have no interest in setting up their own accounts (I honestly have no idea how they survive). At least one of the tech folks who doesn't "use" email simply doesn't check their private email with any regularity, and doesn't use their work email for non-business contacts (neither do I for that matter).

I don't look inside my personal e-mail inbox unless I'm expecting to receive a message at a particular time: "click on the verification link we sent you" and variations on the theme. If other mail appears on the screen at the same time, I may take a look at it assuming I'm not in a hurry to do something else. Otherwise I never look there. No one e-mails me anyway. Everyone who's anyone has my wife's phone number; that's an exceedingly short list of people.

Slack and GitHub together are adequate for day-to-day work things. Everything else just isn't sufficiently important to justify a channel into my brain.

I also have a burner gmail for account sign ups, but it's not hard to regain control of your inbox and direct people to use a email you regularly check. I bet you have an email listed on your resume, after all. A good rule is to look for "unsubscribe" in the body of the email, and throw those emails into a containment folder. If you ever wanted to scroll through those and unsubscribe one by one, it will be easier to do so, or you can just ignore those emails since they will now be isolated from your inbox.

The young adults I know (18-24) mostly eschew email. They will check it if they're expecting something, but otherwise, you might wait weeks for a response.

Are they in college? You need it for college, your school email is the only official way for academic communication. Professors aren't going to contact you seriously on any other platform beyond office hours, because they literally aren't allowed.

>And you can forget trying to call anybody - nobody answers because every phone call is a robocall or a scam.

Same for email, as soon as every site required signup, then felt the need to send a daily marketing email people just gave up on email. Now it's just for getting signup links and password resets and anything unexpected is just drowned out in the mess of advertising.

Set up a rule to find "unsubscribe" in the body and push the email out of your inbox and into a folder or your junk/spam. Advertisers hate this one weird trick!

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