Re: Old directions in social media.

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 1/5/21 7:05 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> I think the same could be said about decisions that are made on obscure mailing lists -- many developers refuse to subscribe to them now because of their awful usability problems.

Not sure what you mean by  "obscure", but I believe that IETF may have 
too many mailing lists, with a bad habit of (whether deliberately or 
not) squelching difficult discussions by spinning up more and more lists 
that people have to then subscribe to and follow.

Also not sure which "awful usability problems" you're referring to, 
because some people seem to think that even using email at all (and 
sifting through the spam and the scams and the automatically generated 
messages from other tools, and perhaps also just reading traffic from 
other contributors) are impositions.   But I will certainly agree that 
having to subscribe to lots of new mailing lists makes for a poor user 
interface.

Keith

p.s. 20+ ago I decided to subscribe to each IETF list using a unique 
email address so that I could route each list's traffic to its own 
subfolder.   But after IETF lists started to "moderate" messages from 
non-subscribers, I had to either change my From address for each list 
(which I didn't want to do because I wanted that address to be used only 
for list traffic and not private replies), or subscribe twice to each 
list, once using the unique address and another time (with email turned 
off) from my usual email address.

I now think that it might have been a mistake to put each list in a 
separate folder, because it seems to be more difficult to keep up with 
multiple lists that way.   This might be because the number of folders 
is more than will fit in the height of a full-screen window, and I 
haven't found a mail user agent that lets me effectively keep track of 
not only which folders have new messages, but which folders haven't been 
read in awhile.   (MUA user interfaces seem to have stagnated in the 
late 1990s, with many products actually getting worse since then.)

I've tried using the IMAP interface to read multiple lists without 
having to subscribe to them, but after investing multiple hours on 
multiple occasions, never got it to work well.

Vaguely speaking I get the impression that we're often drowning in 
"solutions" (not just in IETF), and what we need might not be /more/ 
solutions so much as /simpler/ ones.