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Comment by lightcatcher | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure about email not being used to communicate with friends.

I'm currently a senior in college. If asked during high school, I would have said exactly what your daughter said, except with Facebook messages replacing SMS.

At my college, all organization of student groups happens over email. I very quickly went from receiving <1 email/day during high school to receiving ~20 emails/day in college. Exposure to this mailing list culture at college (and also at during internships in industry) has made me an email person. I typically don't send short emails (~2 sentence) for social messages (I use Facebook for that), but if I need to send a paragraph to someone I do it over email. My group of friends splits our planning of events 50/50 between email and Facebook messages.

I'm not sure if this is just at the college I attend or if its a more general phenomena.

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College is where I learned of the necessity to get good at e-mail management.

But honestly, since I left most events/groups I'm a part of work through Facebook now. Event management with Facebook really is its killer feature as a social network.

And yet, event management in Facebook sucks. It's just where all the events are posted.

Facebook isn't good at events because of event management. It's just because they aggregate all events.

I consistently get invited to events in: New York, Montreal, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, London, and Berlin. This is by choice: If I visit one of those cities, I want to know what to do. But why can't I filter my events view so that I only see events nearby? Why do I have to have a clogged events feedback, because I want to know what's happening if I travel and don't want to hide invites certain event producers?

(Also, event sharing features suck, if you're promoting an event. You have to use Javascript hacks to share, and only then you can share with everyone in one of your top two or three cities.)

They are not good at event discovery, maybe, but for setting things up between friends I've had no major issues (especially now that I can follow the wall of an event without RSVPing).

I think your use case is very different from how most people use FB events. Though it would be nice to have good event discovery (and they probably have the data to do it).

My experience was that organized groups will use email, but only really the leadership. I would also use email to communicate with professors in college, and now with clients (but not coworkers). Basically, email is now only for communications that need to be archived. You don't use it to send a long emotional rant to a friend because once the situation is over neither of you will need it ever again, so messaging apps to the rescue! Scheduling a meeting with a teacher, however, should be done by email, so that you can go back and prove them wrong when they claim they made no such commitment.

I'm probably dating myself a little, but this was true for me as well. Pre-college, everyone used AIM. During college, most social communication happened on email lists, with some 1:1 communication happening through the first version of google chat ('gchat'). As in, the one with the desktop client.

I had exactly the same experience, except with the e-mail influx happening in high school because I went to a boarding school, and with the same end condition (50/50 e-mail vs Facebook).

EDIT: And of course after I submit the comment I realize I know you irl. Sup.

It's like that at MIT too. I also see people do one sentence emails like "Meeting at X location EOM." I never used it in high school but now it's the main form of communication for more than one on one chats.

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