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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

What happened to good ol' emails? Serious question... Can't you organize amongst friends with emails? I hate to suggest Slack as well... But there are alternatives is the point...

What about Meetup.com for bigger groups?

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Any UX expert can tell you that every little bit of friction counts. I see that mentioned or assumed every day here on HN, but somehow in discussions about using vs. abandoning Facebook it gets thrown out the window. I might be comfortable with email, you might be comfortable with Slack, but my uncle or my high-school friend who's a massage therapist might not be. Also, they and a couple of dozen other older, younger, or less tech-savvy friends are already on Facebook and comfortable doing things there. Getting them to switch to a different platform is a hard sell even if it's more convenient, and if it's even marginally less convenient then forget it. Ease of use and network effects are both real things.

How old are you? I am asking because I remember full well the pre-facebook days when people would send around 'funny videos' to groups of friends, with no chance of opting out, getting your email address shared with people you don't know, filling your inbox with crap, etc... Something like FB is hundreds times more convenient

Gosh, I miss Uncle Dan's chain emails about how terrible Bill Clinton is. . .

Lol.. good point. I like to think I was one of the first million people on Facebook when I got it in college... Maybe users who were initiated to Facebook earlier have it more ingrained in their lives.

wat

It's insanely easier to filter those things out with email.

It's been years since I've used FB, but I don't recall any very good filters for those types of things, and in fact they are incentivized to show you more of them.

No it isn't - not if the same person sends you a mixture of useless and usefule emails. And it doesn't solve the problem of your email adress being made public.

With FB, you simply go on it when you feel like / have the time.

Yeah, actually, I do that all the time. Regex's are awesome, and so is spamassasin. There are plenty of other "rule-based" type tools out there too.

What is the problem with an email being public? I don't think I understand what you mean.

Yes, of course, we all have the time for endless fiddling with regular expressions... please

I never said you had to. I provided a list of tools. You have yet to bring anything worthwhile to the discussion except to complain about tools you don't understand.

I only go on facebook to talk to other car enthusiasts for a particular brand. Some of them are on some online forums, but most aren't. They are also not my friends - so I don't really want to share emails. The group is also non-English speaking - so services like Meetup or Slack are out of the question. It's a tough one. I think reverting back to standard post-based online forums is the best, but they have more friction and they are hard to discover for some.

Email addresses come and go all the time, get changed, deactivated, or people start using different emails and never check the old ones. But FB messages are always seen. Email is just not a reliable long-term "address" for someone.

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