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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

The rest of your list is irrealistic but I had to react at least to this one :

> The vast majority of email.

Not even close, less than a third in reality

I agree that google should be cut down, but if done then other tech giant should be too, otherwise we're just trading one master for another

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Even less than a third is absolutely massive on the scale of a protocol like E-mail.

Oh I am not saying they're not a gigantic provider, I'm saying less than a third is very far from "the vast majority" and exageration and misinformation help no one's case, be they on purpose or due to lack of knowledge.

I would shy away from calling them a majority myself, but it’s a fair point.

Remember that email involves at least two parties. It doesn’t matter if I use a non-Google provider, I still have to follow all of Google’s email rules, or email will be useless to me because I wouldn’t be able to send mail to Gmail or Google Workspace users.

In a practical sense, Google have very direct control over almost all email.

They're probably the biggest provider in existence.

I myself would bet on microsoft

I was being a bit generous. I did the research. Google has 1.8 billion active users. They're the biggest.

In the math department, we had a Moodle the students in the first year of my university in Argentina.

When we started like 15 years ago, the emails of the students and TA were evenly split in 30% Gmail, 30% Yahoo!, 30% Hotmail and 10% others (very aproxímate numbers).

Now the students have like 80% Gmail, 10% Live/Outlook/Hotmail and 10% others/Yahoo. Some of the TA are much older, so perhaps "only" 50% use Gmail.

The difference is huge. I blame the mandatory gmail account for the cell phone.

Anyway, we had weird problems with Live/Outlook/Hotmail and Yahoo because they classified some of our emails as spam. Gmail usually works better.

Anyway^2, everyone is using WhatsApp, so it doesn't matter.

In what way would you consider WhatsApp a replacement for email? Instant messaging is a completely different use case.

Not for everyone.

Anyway, I got asked to provide a "real" email address by support at my mobile provider.

I gave them a yahoo email.

Here, for a lot of profesional (from medical doctors to plumbers) the only contact is a WhatsApp numbers, no email, no real phone.

At work, 70% of the messages are by WhatsApp. We have like 10 buildings distributed in a 3 million person city, like 3 miles away from each other. So there is a lot of global coordination (mostly by WA). Also inside each building each subgroup of TA (like Algebra+Monday-Thursday+Morning) has one WA group, and the students have an unofficial WA per course.

We even have a WA group for the "HOA" of my home. (It's an apartment.) People can't maintain a mailing list or use CC correctly, but can use WA.

And there is another WA for the parents in each course of my children in primary school. Everything is discussed there, in particular invitations to birthday parties. Also, the school has like 3 official methods to send info (that is very confusing), but someone kindly repost all the info in the WA group.

Also, WA has a few aventajes: [1]

* If someone sends a message, they get angry if you don't reply in less than 5 minutes.

* If you realize something a Saturday at 11:30 pm, you can't send a WA about that, because the other person will think you expect them to get out of bed/party to reply.

* You can't mark a message as unread to reply it later or in a few days.

* It's even more centralized than email

[1] /s

How much is "the vast majority"? I would say that one third of something global with potentially infinite number of providers, when the second player is probably a fraction of that, is already a pretty big majority.

I don't know exactly where to draw the line on "the vast majority," but surely it must be higher than the bar for a simple majority, which is "more than half." If you want to describe something in the lead but under the 50% mark, the word you're looking for is "plurality."

In French it's not the case, you can have relative or absolute majority, which might explain my confusion.

According to this definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/majority : "c : the greater quantity or share" that also seems to be a possible meaning in English

Yes indeed, both meanings are possible in most contexts.

In US English, when speaking with the mathematical precision, majority means absolute majority (more than half) and plurality means relative majority (more than anyone else). British English does also have the term relative majority like in French, though I don’t know if this is used in mathematics.

But like most other dictionaries in both English and French (with some exceptions like l’Académie Française’s dictionary), Merriam-Webster tries to describe how language is actually used in the real world and not some theoretical idea of how it should be used.

Therefore, since “majority” is often used to mean either absolute or relative majority when speaking in a less precise context than mathematics, a general-purpose dictionary like this one lists both meanings. A mathematical dictionary from the US (again I don’t know about the British equivalent) would list just the absolute meaning.

As an Australian English and Indian English speaker and a mathematician, I have never heard the word plurality outside of discussions of the US political system.

I have seen nitpicking on whether the word majority is the right word for a relative majority, but only seen plurality offered as an alternative by American English speakers who are also students of the American political system.

I would almost never expect anyone to say "the plurality of cars sold are Toyotas", for example.

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