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Comment by schizoidboy | Hacker News Reader

What do people think about using email as an alternative to social networks - i.e. creating lists of email addresses (groups), and sending out photos, jokes, opinions, etc. to those groups (e.g. an "All" group to send life updates, a "Cool" group that can take any joke, etc.)?

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This is by and large how I operate. I don't do Facebook. I use Slack at work, because I have to, but I hate RTC in general.

I personally love email. It fits how I do things. I can take the time to compose carefully, it supports more than a sentence or two but is also fine for "me too!" comments, it is a fine quick-n-dirty file transfer tool (so long as you're not mailing a kernel source tarball or pile of RAW images), and, I think most importantly, sets expectations properly.

Same here. I have avoided Slack at work so far, but since colleagues are using Google Hangouts and Skype as well I end up using those. Usually the former, as I always have a Gmail window open and often forget to open Skype.

I can't tell if this is clever baiting or not. This was email with friends before MySpace.

Not sure what you mean by clever baiting, but yeah, I guess I mean going back to the olden email days, at least for close friends

Curious how old the OP is because I got a good chuckle out of his comment.

31 :-)

I miss the pen-pal days of emails between friends.

Email, IMO, really isn't suitable for that mode of communication. Newsgroups, OTOH, were made for that type of communication.

Email really should just be used for 1-on-1 communication that's not meant to be read by anyone else other than the sender and recipient.

What if it is still 1-on-1 communication; so, imagine this: I use an app to write the email, select a group or set of contacts, and the system sends out a 1-on-1 style email to each one of those contacts?

Your original premise, as I understood it, was to send a message to a group of people and possibly have people comment on it. With your new proposal, the recipients would not be able to see each other's responses.

It also will shift the burden solely to you to answer any questions or provide clarification. If recipients were able to see other recipient responses, they could do some of the work for you.

But, for all the use cases I can think of with regards to sending messages to multiple recipients, I cannot really think of a good reason to prevent recipients from seeing other recipient responses barring some communication of a personal nature.

I think it'd be interesting to have an option for either type. I find a lot of commentary is suppressed because people don't want other people to see their thoughts, whereas with email, they can just reply directly with thoughts. However, I think you're right, that sometimes it's useful to have a group discussion. I'm thinking that would be a link at the bottom of the email that goes to a webapp that allows a more FB-like experience that people can opt-into.

Sounds awful. It's a push model on someone else's terms.

Think of it this way -- would you want someone else deciding how often you'd look at their web page?

I was thinking primarily for close friends, but for broader contacts, I agree with you, so I was thinking of a system that would allow them to unsubscribe from certain topics (e.g. politics)

How do you unsubscribe from certain topics? Would you have to email your friend and ask him or her to not tell you about politics? There's a whole lot of social pressure that means people are reluctant to do that.

The idea would be that when you send an email, you give it a category, like politics. Then at the bottom of each person's email, there are two links: 1) Unsubscribe from person X's emails about category Y, and 2) Unsubscribe from all of person X's emails from this system

So if that person clicked link #1, the token in the link is verified that it was created for that email address, and then it's noted in a database. In the future, if person X sends another email for that category, it won't go to that person. I'm thinking the sender wouldn't even know that the person unsubscribed

I would tell you to use Google plus instead. I dislike any group email because it is too cheap. Blast fifty people a message that is going to take longer for them to read than it took you to write it?

And joke emails? Seriously I'd anybody wants a joke, they can Google that. No good reason to interrupt others.

This is how a lot of people, myself included, use SnapChat. The social network dynamic is totally different when the default is to include no one and you manually curate the list for each post.

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