It feels somewhat hacked together (because, largely, it is); and there are significantly more bots than people using it (which is somewhat self-fulfilling).
But when I read the leaked/disclosed emails from founders during tech's boom in the late 00-s and early 10-s, I'm left feeling like: this is kinda nice.
You don't need to write long prose, email chains are reasonably self-contained, can include practically anyone and since nobody seems to have a total dominance on mail clients; they pretty much stick to the lowest common denominator. (though, HTML seems to be very much accepted behaviour for email clients, even though it was NOT when I grew up).
So, in the end, it's the safest medium to reach the most people, and incidentally it's also the most "comfy" in that I can optimise my own experience of email if I want to. Nobody cares if you use outlook/gmail/thunderbird/mutt or whatever. It's just email.
This is a pretty strong contrast to the modern web which pretty much requires Chrome or modern messengers which require/enforce their own first-party clients. Even if they happen to support federation (like Teams) which isn't a given.
Sadly my company decided the Gmail web interface was the only approved way to access email and blocked my email client (and all others). I probably check email once a month now to see if my invoice has been accepted, and ignore the hundreds of unread emails.
I've considered doing this a few times, but have to admit I've never actually got round to sending people appreciative emails, maybe this blog post is the prompt I need.
There's a lot of makers on HN, has anyone here ever received emails about things they made?
I used to be fairly active on r/generative, someone once DM'd me to show me a pen-plot they'd made based off of something I'd made, and it made my whole week.
Email, as a medium, prompts us to think (at least for a few seconds), not "generate human tokens". Sure, we may feel being "communicative" or "productive" while chatting or Slack, but (in my experience) it is not always the case.
I was basically working independently on a teaching task. But there was one coworker who had been there for a long time and was working more in outreach. She told me to install four(!) different instant messaging apps -- which I didn't do because while her job involved a lot of communicating with third parties, mine didn't. Besides, she was not my boss (formally - although I think she thought she kinda was. In any event, she did have a lot of influence on my actual supervisor.)
She insisted that that's mandatory for me to which I countered that the whole professional world works on email just fine, as far as non-internal communication is concerned. She started screaming at me in my own office how I had betrayed her by agreeing to install the apps but then didn't do it. I didn't think I agreed because I found the idea ridiculous from the get go. Anyway - I stayed calm and said we should talk again when she was calmer, too.
I later found out that she then schemed behind my back to have me laid off. Which obviously worked.
I must have really rubbed her the wrong way. But in retrospect, I'm really happy to have moved on to better places since.
It's amazing how big a reach a well crafted and intelligent email has.
Most replies are very nice. People really feel seen and appreciated when I compliment them on their cool project and nice write up.
Even if no one replies, I would still send the occasional email, because I want independent websites/blogs to thrive and stay.
didacusc•2h ago