Hacker News Reader

Yes, traditional social media requires me to create an account on its website and jump through various hoops before I can contact the person. Social media is also geared towards broadcasting and will discourage you from DMing people. Mastodon is closer to email, but hardly anyone uses it.

View on HN

Email also requires either an account at a service (with various levels of hoops) or setting up your own email (with even more levels of hoops), so judging by "hoop count", they're more or less the same?

Social media has terms of use that apply to everyone. This makes the social media operator an intermediatary who decides who you can and cannot talk to and what you may or may not talk about.

With email you get to choose your provider (or be your own provider) and in general providers are prety hands off. SPAM filters are a thing but you won't have your email account banned because of a single conversation. That makes email providers act more as facilitators than intermediaries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com