[joe_the_user]

With FB, a person has opted in to being your friend. With a mass email list, whoever knows your email can send it.

With FB, you go to the site to get basically this stream of opt-in announcements. With email, they are mixed with things that might require urgent action and direct personal messages and spam and what-not. Of course, I don't have FB on my phone and if I did it would be more intrusive.

[bscphil]

>With FB, a person has opted in to being your friend.

And if for some reason you feel obligated to be someone's "friend" on Facebook, you can still opt out of seeing their updates. Not so with email, unless you write a filter that sends it straight to the trash.

[sturgill]

Which I have in place for any email from my mom with a forward in the subject line. It helps maintain our relationship...

[throwaway287391]

> Not so with email, unless you write a filter that sends it straight to the trash.

Right, so how is that not the same thing as opting out on FB? Because it’s 3 or 4 clicks (in Gmail) instead of 2?

[zapzupnz]

It doesn't matter how many clicks it is. Email is one of the few sanctuaries away from mass social media. People are not expected to know how to do mailbox rules, nor should that ever be forced upon them. That is not the reason why they use email, it is not what they signed up for.

When you force people to learn things like that, you know what you're called? A spammer.

[bigbugbag]

Are you aware that email is actually one of the early online mass social media ? and one of the few that actually deserves to be called social while other such as facebook and derivative are antisocial due to be based on exclusion for their closed nature.

[icebraining]

I think the point is that they're trying to force communication patterns from FB into email. Just because they're both social media doesn't mean people wish to communicate the same way on both - different affordances lead to different behaviors.

[zapzupnz]

Yep, and I'd say the masses, who only really came to the internet with the advent of web 2.0, only know how to do social media the new way, not the classic way.

Even technical users seem to want to move away from email for more than office communication and password resets. A lot of projects move off mailing lists and on to forums, issue trackers, etc. because the affordances just match modern expectations.