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Comment by rhizome | Hacker News Reader

A textbook instance of begging the question. Who is saying that email is dead?

Mark Zuckerberg, most famously, thought that Facebook would kill email (2010): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1329979/Faceb... http://www.channel4.com/news/has-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-j...

That's not even close to saying that email is dead.

Plus, consider the source.

How about the BBC?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15856116#TWEET33746

It's not an explicit "email is dead" but he was definitely suggesting email would lose in favor of messaging systems on social platforms (like Facebook).

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg echoed this in this talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm8NdNy4wOM

Again, in none of these examples is anybody saying that email is dead. It's writers interpreting Zuck words to mean that, but the BBC is doing the exact same thing as the people they're writing about, a commentary Ouroboros that is based on nothing. To be sure, Carr is even more of a hack than any of these people, but again: consider the source.

The journalist Paul Carr is referencing an earlier article where he talks about his misconception that email is dead. http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/17/yesterday-i-thought-email-w...

Even pg this week mentioned that email might not be the optimal tool and there might be a better tool to solve some of the problems (http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html), and there is no shortage of email is dead posts and comments here on HN.

So, an ex-Techcrunch writer uses himself as a source for that assertion? This is why I call him a writer instead of a journalist.

There is no possible way to infer that Mr. Graham was saying anything close to email being dead, simply that it's sometimes used for things that might be better handled other ways.

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