[zapzupnz]

It may be sufficient, but sufficient isn't the same as ideal. What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email.

Yes, it can be done, but it's not going to be how people, _ordinary_ people, expect. The world has had 10 years to get used to the Facebook and Twitter workflow, they're not going back just because we think email is sufficient.

[astrobe_]

Also people have been been trained to misuse email. My coworkers, who are all in IT, can't quote correctly. I am bewildered by the level of ignorance of what email has to offered shown by some comments here. How to stop receiving messages? Well, just make a filter if you don't want to hurt the sender's feelings.

I blame it on the webmail wave that offered to the newbie Internet users of the nineties poor interfaces to email. People used it and said: "email sucks". No, that's just webmail that sucked. And stills sucks compared to native clients (except for Outlook that equally sucks in a different way).

When you take a good look at email it is the ideal medium for social micro-networks:

- no registration, no opt-in. All you need to start a conversation is an email address. - no vendor lock-in: thousands of email clients exist, on all platforms. - with a decent client, you manage your messages the way you want, not the way some company wants.

Let's put it differently: how to create a social micro-network in three easy steps: 1. Get the email addresses of the people you want to talk with 2. Send them an email when you want to say something 3. (optional) write a blog post about how to use group email well and put it in your signature.

Also, although I dislike it for it is often misused and abused, HTML-mail covers 99% of fancy formatting needs.

> What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email.

Agreed. Email is for communication. Social media are for fun, distraction and procrastination. Social media are MMORPGs.

[zapzupnz]

> Social media are for fun, distraction and procrastination. Social media are MMORPGs

To be fair, you get out of social media whatever you want. If you want to use it for fun, distraction, and procrastination, you can. If you want to use email for those things, you can. I have friends who do.

Personally, I'm fine with social media being websites/apps and mail being mail. Nobody emails me cookie recipes, 'interesting' GIFs and links to funny videos, discounts on snake-oil medication, surveys to find out what Disney Princess I am, inflammatory political posts, or megabytes upon megabytes worth of photos that I don't really want to delete because I know I'll need to come back to them again at some point.

More importantly, everybody being away from email means I'm far less likely to be spammed. What I get in my inbox is what I want to see, nothing more, nothing less, and with no bloat. I'm happy with the status quo, much more than when people actually emailed me and I had to swift through messages to find out what to keep or delete — in the days before Gmail, might I add.

Email's my sanctuary, I'll not have that taken away. :-)

[kkarakk]

and they're not going to untrain themselves because you want them to. you're just going to get tagged as the email spammer

[astrobe_]

Well we are back to square one: people grow discontent with social media (addiction, privacy violations, fake news), some guy suggests that the old tech from the 20th century can cover their actual needs pretty well.

I personally believe people should transition out from social-media-everything because social media are to society what pollution is to climate.