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Comment by nickm12 | Hacker News Reader

Agree these are advantages: Mailing lists are simple - Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly - Mailing lists interoperate - They're asynchronous - They're portable - They can be freely interconverted - They can be written to media and read from it

Disagree these are advantages: Mailing lists require no special software - They impose minimal security risk - They impose minimal privacy risk - They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up - They scale beautifully - they're relatively free of abuse vectors - They handle threading well

I still use mailing lists, both at work and personally, but they are 1970s technology and it feels like it. We could build mailing lists for this century that keep these advantages and fix what's broken, but there's no business model in it.

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What makes them “feel like 1970s technology” to you, and—more importantly—why do you say that like it’s a bad thing?

Most of the opposition I’ve seen to using mailing lists for technical discussion has basically come down to “young people think email is old and gross” and my position is that people reacting that way have some self-reflection to do and to get over themselves.

What makes them feel like 1970s technology: everyone has to manually manage their own archive and pay storage costs for media files, there is no way to share history (if you want), there is no integrated search, differences in clients mean that people have different experiences of the same message, there are no affordances like reactions that allow people to easily interact with a message without sending an entire separate message.

But maybe I should have said late 80s, early 90s tech. In the 70s, if you were communicating with others on a computer, you were almost certainly using the exact same software on the exact same time-shared system, where at least there was a symmetry of experiences (but no multimedia). The explosion of email clients happened in the 90s, mostly.

Oh no, people have to consider how they engage with others’ writing! They can’t just push a “like” or “thumbs down” button! There will be social pressure against it if they try to just send around picture or video memes instead of writing something thoughtful! And worst, everyone gets to be in control of their “experience of the same message,” by using the mail client that works best for them!

All of the reasons you say mailing lists are, let’s say, “dated” are actually benefits of using them, especially when using them for engineering purposes.

I agree that the available features can steer the online community culture and behaviors, but it's not determinative. I don't see why online communities should give up useful features just because other communities use them in a way you don't like.

I've been using mailing lists for about 30 years now. In the days before social networks, there was tons of forwarded crap and email chains, such that debunking them was a cottage industry. This behavior eventually moved to Facebook and Twitter which is perhaps why email lists seem more civilized these days, but I don't believe its the features that are driving it.

> but there's no business model in it.

I mean this is precisly why email is best. Being an open standard, it's not a business. Nobody owns it, nobody can. Those are fundamental to its strenght.

Sorry, I disagree. The lack of a business model means a lack of competition and a weak market. For years I've been looking to find an email list hosting solution that works for a small family, sports team, friends group, etc. There is next to nothing in this space besides Google Groups. There are a few hosted mailing list solutions, but they have enterprise features and pricing.

groups.io is decent if you're looking for hosted solutions. Most of the mailing lists I'm on that used to be on yahoo groups moved to groups.io

$240/yr is a lot to just have a couple of family mailing lists. Even for creating mailing lists for youth sports teams, local civic orgs, and things like that it's really high.

groups.io lists are free for lists with under 100 participants, the $20/mo would be for a premium plan which doesn't sound like you'd need that.

https://groups.io/static/compare

google mailing lists are also free. I still host one there, although mostly try to not use google. But it's another free choice.

Minimal privacy risk is such a BS "advantage". You put your email out there for everybody to read it. So privacy with mailing lists does not exist

If I want to remain anonymous, I need to register another email address, which is a massive pain in the ass to register AND then to read or reply to the mailing list.

With a forum I register, chose an anonymous nickname and can participate and get updates into my normal inbox anonymously.

Also, SMTP straight up leaks your IP address when sending e-mails (the "Received" header.)

Possibly the most common open source mailing list software, mailman, has had configuration options to address both email address and header exposure for at least 15 years

At least with email, you're in control of what shows up in your inbox as well as message routing with filters of your choice

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