On 01/27/15 09:41 PM, David Brodbeck wrote:
The forum vs. email split seems to break down along the lines of polling
vs. push. People who have used email for a long time and know how to
I think it breaks down mostly between "people that know how to use mail
client", valuing their privacy and people who just "click" on someone's
proprietary services, depending on someone else for use of even basic
services on internet.
I also do not feel any "push" when using Newsgroups or mailing lists.
Messages are simply there in their folders, waiting for me to read them,
when I like. With one on the plus side, that I can take them with me and
not depend on some centralized web server to serve them to me, online.
It makes me able to control data flow from internet to me, something
that seems many people forget to do in their lives.
Your observation between "push" and "polling" is interesting and sounds
nice, althrough not much accurate. Forums also push messages, only users
do not OWN anything on Forums. There are no private places in the cloud
and services for individual, nor right to freely comunicate without
restrictions. (like, someone deleting your account and all your messages
on forum, even if you followed all good mannered rules)
manage large amounts of it prefer the push model; people who are less
familiar with it, and think in terms of online "communities," tend to
prefer forums. I like email lists, and find visiting multiple websites to
poll forums cumbersome, but this seems to be a really unfamiliar and
uncomfortable model for anyone under 30 -- much like how many people my
age are not familiar with newsgroups and have no idea how to use them.
Newsgroups are what Forums are made to emulate, although very badly and
with no purpose other then local one-man controlled exchange of
comments. Main difference in my opinion is that Newsgroups are
decentralized and standardized at protocol level, much like E-mail, and
Forums are just.. wild, crazy and mostly useless.
Using Newsgroups needs just ordinary mail client with Newsgroup support
and "subscribing" to groups.
Difference is that you don't need to make filters to use it like for
mailing lists and that people using one server exchange messages with
people using other servers.
On forums companies and sites own content. Or at least do with them what
they like including deleting it.
On newsgroups and mailing lists, content tends to be multiplied, copied,
archived and preserved for future use of wisdom (if any :) )
I will say that as long as forums stick around (a major caveat) they seem
to be more searchable; search engines seem well-tuned to access them,
compared to email archives; email list archives also often have broken
threading and are increasingly being made private due to spam concerns.
My mailing list archives in my Mail client are most searchable of all
ways of exchanging messages. (both when I am online and offline!)
I just download mailing list archives, concatenate them all to one large
file and give it to mail client under folder, to chew it. I always get
beautifully threaded messages and topics. (Except when someone was
top-posting).
That is exactly much better then, in contrast to, Forums where one is
forced to click through eternity over flat messages displaying one under
another with no information who answers to who.
Besides, searching mailing list archives is very easy, just narrow web
search engine to specific path where message archives are stored.
I like it much better then needing to browse through some simulation of
newsgroups and mailing lists on web sites, that forums are.
If Web representation of Newsgroups and mailing lists is distributed and
follow same exchange principles, then that kind of Web representation,
called Forum could be nice.
That would be actually making Mail/News client in form of Web
presentation, that Gmail, Yahoo and others truly are. (And that blurred
server/client nature of internet to younger generations).
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