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Comment by tcmart14 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it is rooted in similar things though. Right, like with email. People don't really read or check emails because spam became a serious problem. Then with social media, looking at facebook, there is definitely a big different in ad space in facebook between the time I used to use it to now. Where ads have effectively become the "spam" equivalent for social media. Ultimately, did success of these technologies also lead to its demise. Email was so good, so it made sense for a market of spammers. Facebook became a prime place for ads, and as ads become more and more of the platform, people started to consciously or subconsciously step away to other platforms.

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>People don't really read or check emails because spam became a serious problem.

With the tabs in Gmail, very little leaks through to my primary inbox that isn't relatively immediately relevant (and not a lot of mail total). Often don't look at Promotions at all and maybe glance at Updates once a day or so.

Email is useful for me though, yes, a lot of my interaction with my circle of friends is over texts.

The problem for me is not so much real spam, this gets filtered. The problem is the massive amount of work required to unsubscribe or clean up automated emails from apps and websites, both transactional and non-transactional.

I know way too many techy and non-techy people who have thousands of unread email messages from those apps.

A lot of people I know don't really answer to real email anymore, unless they know something is coming. It became just something you use to make accounts with.

Even corporate email is dying. 99% of my inbox is transactional emails from SaaS apps and spam from apps I forgot to delete. And 90% of the rest is spam from recruiters or people trying to sell me some product. Only 0.1% is legitimate.

Statistically, email is not for people anymore, period.

Experiences differ. I did go on unsubscribe jags from time to time at my last employer because I ended up on email lists from a lot of events.

But really, I get 5-10 emails a day now in my primary inbox and I don't really have many filters. I DO get a lot in Promotions and Updates, but most of the stuff in Promos I can safely ignore and I mostly keep my eye on Updates if I'm expecting something I might want to deal with there.

Email is still my primary channel for the most part.

Spam filters can be trained. Just mark anything you don't want and didn't explicitly sign up to as spam, "legitimate" sender or not. Problem solved.

If everyone in a city wants to go crap in some place, I'm not gonna be the one cleaning their shit. I'm just gonna stop coming there.

Email is just a public toilet. I'm not gonna work hard so I can pretend it's a five star restaurant.

I'm already doing my part by not making it worse.

There is still a lot of "spam" if you don't spend the effort creating filters or unsubscribing to the new notification list that companies like to make every few months. Hell, my inbox is covered in invoices, receipts, disclosures, required actions, ToS changes, etc., even though I've spent some time setting up filters for some of the common receipts.

Sounds like lots of transactional mail for services you signed up to with that mail. Sign up to less crap or use a different mail from the one you use to communicate with real people.

I used to use a separate email when I ordered things etc. Once Gmail tabs came in, I pretty much stopped doing so because it was too much trouble to monitor a second email address because I actually care about receipts, order tracking, etc. a lot of the time.

I think you've hit the nail on the head of the problem.

A lot of comments online claim that people don't care about spam, or think that advertisements are a good thing for a free service, or at the very least won't change their habits if given an alternative. If that's the case then what's a better explanation for your observations?

I argue that people do care, even if it's perhaps not expressed in words.

A lot of legitimate email (password resets and stuff) gets eaten up by spam filters

We have a family email domain for my extended family, administered by a few retired but very tech-savvy relatives (both had long IT careers) and it’s roughly 50:50 whether a message sent to everyone@ lastname.com will actually show up in people’s inboxes or not. It’s probably 75:25 that a reply all to that list will show up, but modern email is a dumpster fire.

I uses the business version of Office 365 for e-mail. It works well. I never have a problem with e-mails not being delivered or going into a SPAM folder. I am not saying your family did anything wrong. What I am saying is e-mail works well for some people.

Yeah, unfortunately that seems to be the best way to handle this kind of thing but unfortunately that costs $6/person/month so our ~50 person casual email list for organizing fantasy football and family reunions would cost almost $4k/year.

Is this using some cloud-based email host where you don't have any control over the spam filter? Otherwise, whitelisting (verified) senders from your own dowmain should be very much possible.

E-Mail isn't some magic that randomly drops mails. Mail servers are even resilient against network problems and will retry dilevery MANY times. What you are describing is NOT normal and would make using it for business basically impossible, which is not the case since email is still the primary b2b communication method for many companies.

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