I'm the opposite - I love forums, hate mailing lists. Mailing lists clutter my inbox, while I can browse forums to my heart's content without it intruding on my personal mail.
I find that mailing lists are such a poor medium for discussion that I participate in zero of them today.
Every time a community switches from a mailing list to a forum (like Elm lang recently), they seem to agree with me.
This statement is often met with nerd rage on HN (“why wouldn’t you want to deal with mailing lists?!”) but it’s something you’ll just have to understand or take for granted if you are going to understand what people want from a Github competitor, for example.
Mailing lists are about organization, not content. If I'm on a 20 person team, there will be threads I'm interested in, and threads I'm not interested in. A mailing list doesn't make it easy to ignore the stuff I don't care about.
It's a mailing list.. you want it to be a forum, but that's not the point or what it is meant to be.
Some of us prefer mailing lists and interacting over email in our preferred client over having to go to various websites and deal with their varying user interfaces.
He had a different idea than yours. There is no need for a mailing list for the community to hang out. It sounds like something that doesn't work as well as Hacker News.
Most of these ideas for external groups didn't really go anywhere. The Friendfeed one did have a fair amount of activity, but they changed the name eventually.
I would rather be able to visit some central resource rather than mix email and discussion forums. Mixing those things together just feels wrong. Mailing lists tend to be extremely visually jarring. But there’s no difference between a mailing list and any other form of community. The packaging doesn’t matter. So I’m confused why you seem to think the packaging will help in some way. What matters is the moderation, the incentive scheme for users and other stuff like that. Also, traditional mailing lists lack a mechanism for maintaining solvency. The ultimate failure of all that has come before is the fact that it completely depends on altruism. Forums Create amazing value in the lives of people who use them and they will be good when they begin to sustain themselves based on that value.
> unlike forums, people really enjoy mailing lists. I don't think I've ever met anyone, ever, who said they liked forums.
I think it entirely depends on what the purpose of communication channel is serving.
Mailing lists are transient passive participation. I can sign up to a list and never have to do another thing because I use email all the time. Occasionally a back and forth discussion might pop up, but I can easily choose to ignore it by simply glancing at the subject line.
Forums are persistent active participation. I have to specifically access the forum, possibly logging in in the process, to see what activity has happened. Many do enable some kind of email notification with a set frequency. Digest emails lose the benefit of the quick glance decision to attend or not, while all activity would be similar to the mailing list model. As forums can encourage more silo-ed conversations or short disposable responses, getting all activity is generally not ideal, however.
To me a mailing list serve a purpose. Its a middle ground between IRC and not having any discussion medium at all.
IRC is suitable for chat but discussions happen on mailing lists (or here on Hackernews).
In mailing lists conversations are threaded and there's nothing wrong with carefully considering your response before the question flies off the screen as on an IRC chat. Stackoverflow is great for one-off questions, but they are not a support forum for your project.
IMO new or young projects don't yet have a need for real discussion around the project, the project is to small, the Dev team is too small and or is located geographically close together, or the project just doesn't warrant in depth discussion yet.
Edit: my biggest gripe about mailing lists is that many do not meet the one - click - unsubscribe standard, most that I've seen require two clicks. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but it does matter to me.
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