Re: “Get rid of digests”

[J.B. Nicholson]

Lori Nagel via libreplanet-discuss wrote:
> I used to read digests cause I got too many emails and was on tons and 
> tons of email lists about various topics of interest.
You could have chosen to use the filtering capability found in any modern 
email client to sort emails into folders. That approach would automatically 
keep threads organized, let you quickly identify what's active, where to 
focus your attention, and let you do things like mark threads as read when 
that thread became uninteresting (or simply ignore the thread). Then mark 
everything in the folder read to 'catch up' on all of those messages. 
Server-side filtering would let you do this organization into folders as 
well; server-side filtering is particularly handy if you read your email 
account from multiple MUAs. With this approach the number of emails becomes 
a non-issue; you stop reading when you want to knowing the rest of what you 
didn't read is still there in a well-organized and easily accessible 
fashion. The point being that I've not seen such support in MUAs or 
server-side filtering for digests and you can make choices that won't cause 
you to think that it's a burden to handle "tons and tons" of emails.

> Now, for a lot of that stuff I just read message forums and don't bother
> with email.
Which means you're allowing each forum owner to change what people write at 
any time (even well after their post was made), block messages from being 
seen by you, and generally give forum owners a much greater amount of time 
to exert censorious control over what you're allowed to read and when. I 
don't prefer that tradeoff.

> There is just no way I could keep up with the amount of conversation 
> that goes on in those communities, and that is why they have forums 
> rather than lists.
I can think of reasons some prefer web forums over mailing lists, none of 
which have anything to do with the amount of conversation: some people 
don't really want the administration of hosting any service so they 
outsource that job to a web forum by hosting their discussion to Reddit, 
Facebook, or some other system they don't administer. One thread (perhaps 
it was on this mailing list) encouraged the FSF to adopt a Discuss-driven 
web forum on the basis that it was more liked by (the inchoately described) 
young people. No evidence was given to back up that claim but the claim had 
nothing to do with the amount of conversation.

> Lists are really only good for a small group of people that are
> frequently writing to each other.
My experiences with mailing lists involving hundreds of people tells me 
otherwise.