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Comment by xefer | Hacker News Reader

I'd say it's closer to the Hindenburg moment.

These services are great as long as it's part of a small, insular community of like-minded people. Once the criminal element sees it for the opportunity it is, it's over.

There's an obvious analogy here to email and spammers.

I suppose it could still work if the vetting process is better, but there will always be those who mask their identity and "sneak in". The cost of this to a criminal is probably minimal while the potential rewards are great. Perhaps the key is to create smaller "circles" of trust within the wider community.

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So ... email was destroyed by spammers? I didn't know about that; could you email me the details?

I wouldn't argue that email was 'destroyed' by spammers, but it definitely helped reduce its relevancy from my perspective considering that I assume 75%+ of all emails I receive on my non-work address to not be worth looking at.

Spam is a solved problem. If you're seeing that much spam you should re-evaluate what filters you have working.

Not to get offtopce, but spam is not "solved". Solving spam would be something that does not require a user to implement filters and other mechanisms to auto-sort things into a junk box.

A solution would be one which prevents the sending of the spam in the first place, or an auto-rejection mechanism that was 100% passive and 100% accurate.

Spam is merely a problem that is manageable with some ultimately clunky tools.

I disagree. All sorts of things use filters to solve problems. From my point of view (an end user), I don't have to configure or manage my spam filters, I just end up not getting spam. I used to, it sucked. But now I don't and it's the same email address. I consider the problem solved.

Right. Just like the internal combustion engine is a kludge because you need to change the air filters in your car. A real solution would be an engine that didn't need filters, anything else is just a clunky hack.

An IC engine would run just fine for quite a long while with no air or oil filters. The filters are there to prolong its lifespan, but are not strictly necessary for basic operation.

How long would your email be usable if you turned off your spam filters?

Engine aire filters are also preventing the INGRESS of foreign contaminants. Most spam filters are much closer to the receiver than the sender. So the spam email volume still moves through many servers, routers and networks before it is finally filtered out and stopped.

I don't think your analogy holds up at all.

There are two sides to the spam problem.

One is managing _your_ inbox. Yes, the tools are there, and if you're using any largish email service provider, you've probably got pretty effective filtering going on.

Try getting on the other side of it, though, and start _sending_ email from a new domain. The same mechanisms which "solve" the inbound problem create a _huge_ issue for outbound. Especially if, say, your business is somehow reliant on being able to reach out and communicate a message to people (I'm not even talking about marketing -- think of status notifications, account mailings, etc., etc.).

I'm a huge believer in email, don't get me wrong. I dislike most of the tools that have come along to "replace" it to some degree or another (how fast would SMS disappear in a mushroom cloud if spammers were to hit it like mail?). But it's gotten really, really creaky.

> 75%+ of all emails I receive on my non-work address to not be worth looking at.

If you use any of the major mail providers (gmail, hotmail, yahoo), you should not see 75% spam in your inbox. It's worth noting that email that's "not worth looking at" is not necessarily the same as spam. The group you mentioned includes both real spam (phishing, pills, etc) and gray mail (newsletter, notifications, etc). If most of your inbox is gray mail that you're not interested in maybe it's worth setting up some filter rules or consider unsubscribing to those mailing lists.

Gray mail is generally a difficult problem for spam filters to solve since a critical email to one person might be junk to another. There are evolving ways to improve this filter but it usually requires action on the user, such as clicking the junk button or deleting them without reading.

Spam is a problem with a technical solution. Determining the 'goodness' of a person seems a lot harder.

Sounds like a research problem to me. What about an equivalent of Klout score? (just kidding).

Or better yet, Erdős number.

Email is certainly not dead, but a major value-add of services like Facebook et al is that you can only get messages from people you know. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_eats_away_at_e...

Maybe I'd buy this if you used Google+ as an example instead. As far as I'm concerned I get many times more spam on Facebook than through email - only once every few months does a message from a Nigerian prince slip through gmail's spam filter, but multiple times a week I get a FB message that someone I vaguely knew 3 years ago lost their phone and needs numbers, is having a party thousands of miles away, etc.

That's your own damn fault for telling Facebook you trust that person. Manage your friend list and the problem disappears entirely.

Yes because trust is an all or nothing thing in the real world.

Facebook encourages its users to add lots and lots of friends to your main friend pool, and always has. It's spent most of its existence trying to get lots of users and build a huge social graph. Having hundreds upon hundreds of "friends" is the norm, not the exception - there's no emphasis on keeping your set of facebook friends small and tight-nit.

Email is not a reliable way of communication anymore, because of the spammers. I have given up on checking my spam folder, which means there is a probability of ham getting lost.

Spam is just one of many things that slightly reduces the reliability of email, and Bayesian filtering has reduced it to a minor nuisance. The implication that email was ever completely reliable is false, there has always been a risk of mail servers going down, for example, but it was also reduced to a minor nuisance by modern redundancy techniques (for example).

The implication that there even exists an actually reliable way of communication I don't think is true either, that's why email is still so widely used.

I think it's a trade off of having a decentralized system vs. a centralized system. Just imagine if we could only use Gmail or Facebook for email--now that would be just plain scary.

Email's taken a considerable hit. The challenge of running your own email server (even as a business) is considerably higher now than it was, say, in 2001. Hell, a lot of major ISPs won't even talk to you unless you jump through a lot of hoops (SPF, DKIM, and more).

Spam doesn't break into my house, pour yellow-brown crud all over the background, smash the walls, and take all my stuff.

It's shown me a few things that can't be unseen, though console-mode clients have distinct advantages sometimes.

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