Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.
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@anonymous234 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
why is it still the primary communication tool in big companies now that there's a bajillion other ones?
I would say that it's still the primary one because there are a bajillion other ones. Every time the company follows the fad of the day and switches from one IM system to another, from one bug tracker to another, from one internal forum to another, something is lost (sometimes it's whole conversations that are not archived, sometimes it's just links, pictures or whatever, and at the very least it's the familiarity and knowledge of the tool that everyone had developed).
Meanwhile, email is still there, still working in the same way, and can be used in place of most other tools.
It Just Works
.I'd sooner set up a Discourse instance.
My
is probably showing, but I had to install Discord recently for interacting with a community that used that. That meant one more stuff to download and install, one more login to create, one more UI to explore and guess what tiny icons mean and what jargon they'd invented for everything. And ultimately, I used it to have an audio-conf + sharing some slides + chat. Not something I could have used email for, granted, but something that I had been doing for years with Webex, Zoom, Lync, GoToMeeting and tons of other systems. So how long before your Discourse instance will go the same way as all others and you will have to learn yet another system that does the same thing?Also, this highlights another reason why email is still there because of the innumerable competition. If I want to interact with someone outside of my team (or company), it's likely that they will be using a different IM/forum/whatever system than mine. Which means at best that I will have both systems running in parallel, at worst that I will simply be unable to communicate with them. Meanwhile, again, email is still there, and will work with anyone anywhere, no matter what system they are using on their end.
It Just Works
.
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@anonymous234 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I get that in the 90s email was the best you had, but why is it still the primary communication tool in big companies now that there's a bajillion other ones? I'd sooner set up a Discourse instance.
You need to learn about Usenet. That was waaaay better than Discourse or any Web-based forum I've ever seen.
But when you need to talk to an ad-hoc group of 3 coworkers and one client, you don't want to (1) open a new topic on your favorite forum and (2) find a way to restrict access to exactly that group of persons.
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Seems we are now only missing some Rosie-bait:
@error_bot xkcd 1810
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@Planar said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
You need to learn about Usenet. That was waaaay better than Discourse or any Web-based forum I've ever seen.
I still miss it, it was indeed vastly superior to all these web-based discussion forums.
But as always, useless fancy features were preferred over actual usability.
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@nerd4sale I'm a bit torn. There were some great features, but OTOH some of the missing "fancy" features (such as handling pictures directly) were, in hindsight, probably not just "fancy" but mandatory.
Also, and somewhat related to the original discussion here, it was missing any easy sort of moderation (the way moderation was implemented was by asking server admins to only accept posts with some sort of approval (such as a header), and to have all posts directed to a moderation email box, but that was slow, brittle and added as an afterthought). I think given the way online discussions go nowadays, that wouldn't be acceptable (i.e. it was far too easy for a few determined users to kill any newsgroup -- and I did witness that more than a few times!).
Also also, some of the "actual usability" turned out to not really work at scale. xpost/fu2 was great, but in practice and when used by real humans (not just a small subset of geeks who cared about underlying details), it wasn't used at all, or very badly. The decentralised nature of it, which made its strength, also doesn't matter that much nowadays (where what passes for a "poor" connectivity nowadays is something we would only have dreamt of in the days of Usenet!) and could even be a drawback (I ultimately stopped using it the day the server I was connecting to stopped working...).
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
where what passes for a "poor" connectivity nowadays is something we would only have dreamt of in the days of Usenet!
It's perfectly possible to use usenet at home while only having internet at work, by carrying the posts with you on a floppy.
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@PleegWat Also, you can almost always find a news server that's located in your local phone call area! No need to call long-distance!
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
some of the missing "fancy" features (such as handling pictures directly) were, in hindsight, probably not just "fancy" but mandatory.
Not to mention the fun of not being able to decode the picture because part 31 of 37 never arrived. Or the fact that many servers refused to carry binary newsgroups at all.
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@anonymous234 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
To discuss a topic you want a "forum" style discussion where everyone sends messages to a single place and those messages are stored for everyone in the group to see. Sure you can replicate that with mailing lists and resending all messages to everyone in it, but that's a ridiculous amount of repetition.
Um … you’ve got that backwards: web forums are the re-invention of mailing lists and Usenet (before that became primarily a warez distribution network).
Good mailing list software keeps a log of all messages sent, and will mail that to anyone who requests it, so you can always read back conversations if you want. Yes, this is more cumbersome than web forums where you can just view the “log” by scrolling back up. However, as I see it, web forums didn’t become popular because they were more convenient than mailing lists or Usenet, but because the unwashed masses who began using the Internet from the late 90s onward, couldn’t conceive of using anything else than a web browser.
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@anonymous234 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
why is it still the primary communication tool in big companies now that there's a bajillion other ones?
I would say that it's still the primary one because there are a bajillion other ones.
I’ve long felt there are two eras of the Internet:
- that ended around the time the 21st century started, during which people developed protocols for specific needs and everybody who wanted to, implemented those in their programs, resulting in high interoperability and stability because everyone is basically on the same plan — with the result that users pick and choose whatever software suits their needs, but they can all still talk to each other; and
- that began around then, during which people build mainly proprietary platforms for specific needs, putting lots of people on different plans — with the result that users take up and abandon them with abandon.
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@PleegWat Also, you can almost always find a news server that's located in your local phone call area! No need to call long-distance!
Heh, and at this point there's almost no such thing as long distance calling (in the US), aside from international calls.
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@Gurth That's because you can't monetize interoperable protocols and people want everyone to be on the same chat server so they can be easily found.
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@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@PleegWat Also, you can almost always find a news server that's located in your local phone call area! No need to call long-distance!
Heh, and at this point there's almost no such thing as long distance calling (in the US), aside from international calls.
You mean due to everyone moving to cell phones, or is there some other dumbfuckery going on that I'm not aware of?
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@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@PleegWat Also, you can almost always find a news server that's located in your local phone call area! No need to call long-distance!
Heh, and at this point there's almost no such thing as long distance calling (in the US), aside from international calls.
You mean due to everyone moving to cell phones, or is there some other dumbfuckery going on that I'm not aware of?
I don't know how related it is to cell phones but it's just not a thing any more.
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@boomzilla is it impossible to make landline phone call from Wisconsin to Georgia? Or is it just not called long-distance anymore? Serious question.
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@Gąska it's probably called long distance but you also wouldn't pay more for it today than you would to call your next door neighbor.
There used to be "local" toll calls that the local phone company would charge you extra. And you had a separate long distance phone company in addition to the local phone company that would carry your long distance calls and for which you paid.
Of course that was after AT&T was broken up in the 80s, through at least the early 2000s.
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@Gąska It's not charged at a different rate from local calls anymore, so there's no need to differentiate between local and long-distance.
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@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Gąska it's probably called long distance but you also wouldn't pay more for it today than you would to call your next door neighbor.
There used to be "local" toll calls that the local phone company would charge you extra. And you had a separate long distance phone company in addition to the local phone company that would carry your long distance calls and for which you paid.
Of course that was after AT&T was broken up in the 80s, through at least the early 2000s.
The way I heard it, there were only so many "long-distance" phone lines. And since multiplexing was not so good then (or even possible), you basically had to have a reserved (or nearly reserved) line from one point to the origin. And the longer that was, the more expensive (because rare and congested) it became.
Now, with basically all voice going over IP outside of the very local loop (and maybe even then), it just plain doesn't matter.
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@boomzilla @Unperverted-Vixen I see. My first thought was that nobody provides landline phone service anymore, and that's why you can't have long-distance calls, or something.
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@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@boomzilla @Unperverted-Vixen I see. My first thought was that nobody provides landline phone service anymore, and that's why you can't have long-distance calls, or something.
There's an increasing amount of that, too. It isn't yet at the level of "nobody provides", but when I switched from ADSL/2+ to into-my-appartement fibre(1) at the end of 2016, the provider deactivated the POTS landline. I don't think they pulled the wires out, but they aren't connected to any service.
(1) Put like that to show clearly where it is on the spectrum from FTTC to FTTP to FTTH. (Cabinet, Premises which might be no further than the entry to a block of flats, and Home which is inside your dwelling.) I have no separate ONT - the fibre comes out of the wall and directly into the back of my routerbox. (Yes, I know, the ONT is embedded inside the routerbox. That's why I said "separate ONT".)
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@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@PleegWat Also, you can almost always find a news server that's located in your local phone call area! No need to call long-distance!
Heh, and at this point there's almost no such thing as long distance calling (in the US), aside from international calls.
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@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Shoreline said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I think there's an analogy here for global general culture and education as well, but I'm too lazy to figure it out.
Facebook and Twitter make it incredibly hard (or even downright impossible IIRC) to filter your feed in any meaningful way. Not sure what it means, but seems related.
I see what you mean. I guess their idea of "filtering" is to "predict" what you probably want to see.
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@Shoreline and over time, what you want to see evolves to match their filters.
/r/im14andthisisdeep
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Shoreline said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
IMO this is a great example of culture and education. You have a culture where people just "reply all", but few are educated enough to know how to filter to another folder, or think to do it.
I'm not really sure it's a matter of culture and/or education. Many pieces of software have some sort of filter or another, but IME users almost never use them. I get the feeling that while it's a neat idea, somehow it either never works perfectly (e.g. there is one item that's not filtered and you get annoyed more than helped by the filter), or it doesn't work like people think (maybe it's too "computish" and not enough "human"?). Or something else. But it's definitely not just email filters, and it's not just "uneducated" users.
That's true for my personal email. Recruiters should all be getting archived and labelled in case I want to go looking for them, but there's always new recruitment companies...
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@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Shoreline and over time, what you want to see evolves to match their filters.
/r/im14andthisisdeep
yourheadasplode
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@magnusmaster said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Gurth That's because you can't monetize interoperable protocols and people want everyone to be on the same chat server so they can be easily found.
Yes, I realise that today, it’s about making money in people’s minds, rather than solving problems they themselves happen to have (which, for example, is how IRC came into being).
But the proprietary platforms inhibit the second part what you say: sure, everyone is on WhatsApp — except those who use a different app. IMHO freely available protocols are far better for these kinds of things from a user’s perspective, but few users (other than the “free as in speech” crowd, primarily) actually think about it like that.
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
some of the missing "fancy" features (such as handling pictures directly)
Send a MIME message holding HTML (or markdown or whatever) with attachment or referring to a resource online, rather like you do with email. The basic problems were solved, but too many people who cared moved on to other platforms. Newsgroups continue (really!) but binaries groups are dead because almost nobody wishes to carry them. Just too much trouble from illicit content. (Also, killing them makes bandwidth a trivial matter.)
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@dkf said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
some of the missing "fancy" features (such as handling pictures directly)
Send a MIME message holding HTML (or markdown or whatever) with attachment or referring to a resource online,
But that relies on a third-party hosting system working in parallel to the newsgroups. Which inherently has both usability and stability issues. Unless you use the same servers to host both...
rather like you do with email.
But email works because those binaries are not duplicated on each intermediate servers that host the message (which is a key feature, by design, of Usenet). Although I guess, with modern networks, that news servers could have evolved to just handle some sort of linking back to an authoritative one (e.g. the one that posted the stuff in the first place). Maybe.
The basic problems were solved, but too many people who cared moved on to other platforms.
Some of them were, but not in a way that was easily and widely adoptable by the general public.
I remember endless discussions about the tiniest of changes to newsgroups -- heck, even UTF took ages to be adopted, and even that wasn't ever fully working by the time I stopped using news (and you still sometimes got mojibake). And I was using a lot of French-speaking groups, where you cannot write the language properly without some extension of ASCII (yes, yes, ISO-8859-15... provided it was properly set in your client. And in the server. And in all intermediate servers. And in the client of the recipient. And not messed up somewhere in the middle, or by quoting, or wherever...).
Newsgroups continue (really!) but binaries groups are dead because almost nobody wishes to carry them. Just too much trouble from illicit content. (Also, killing them makes bandwidth a trivial matter.)
Which is one of the things I mentioned earlier, that Usenet totally failed to do properly and that is now an essential feature. There was no effective way of policing stuff, either to prevent illicit content or to limit bandwidth.
As much as I loved Usenet, I have no qualms in admitting that it was a 20th century technology, designed for the needs of a small community of somewhat-technical users on poor connections. It wasn't fit for wide-spread usage on high-speed networks, even if we thought otherwise at the time.
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@dkf said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Just too much trouble from illicit content.
That's basically all I use Usenet for these days. Downloading TV episodes, movies etc.
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@nerd4sale I'm a bit torn. There were some great features, but OTOH some of the missing "fancy" features (such as handling pictures directly) were, in hindsight, probably not just "fancy" but mandatory.
Also, and somewhat related to the original discussion here, it was missing any easy sort of moderation (the way moderation was implemented was by asking server admins to only accept posts with some sort of approval (such as a header), and to have all posts directed to a moderation email box, but that was slow, brittle and added as an afterthought). I think given the way online discussions go nowadays, that wouldn't be acceptable (i.e. it was far too easy for a few determined users to kill any newsgroup -- and I did witness that more than a few times!).
Also also, some of the "actual usability" turned out to not really work at scale. xpost/fu2 was great, but in practice and when used by real humans (not just a small subset of geeks who cared about underlying details), it wasn't used at all, or very badly. The decentralised nature of it, which made its strength, also doesn't matter that much nowadays (where what passes for a "poor" connectivity nowadays is something we would only have dreamt of in the days of Usenet!) and could even be a drawback (I ultimately stopped using it the day the server I was connecting to stopped working...).
This. As so often turns out to be true in similar circumstances Nostalgia Filter Usenet is a far superior system to Reality Usenet, which kinda sucked but we didn't really realize that because there weren't better alternatives available yet.
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@Mason_Wheeler Don't you fondly remember downloading multi-part archives only to find part 7 of 9 missing or corrupted?
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@Mingan said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Mason_Wheeler Don't you fondly remember downloading multi-part archives only to find part 7 of 9 missing or corrupted?
I remember when Easynews (the provider I've used longer than I can remember) added a Par viewer into their web interface so you could check the archives were all complete before downloading.
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@loopback0 Checking Usenet on a web interface?
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@Mingan said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@loopback0 Checking Usenet on a web interface?
When using it solely for downloading files, it's vastly superior. For using Usenet the way it's intended then yeah, a proper Usenet client still wins.
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@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@boomzilla @Unperverted-Vixen I see. My first thought was that nobody provides landline phone service anymore, and that's why you can't have long-distance calls, or something.
I still have a land line.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Nostalgia Filter Usenet is a far superior system to Reality Usenet, which kinda sucked but we didn't really realize that because there weren't better alternatives available yet.
That turns philosophical very quickly: if it sucks in retrospect, but at the time, there was nothing better available, did it really suck back then?
I mean, writing a novel on a typewriter sucks if you’re used to a computer word processor. It will be heaven if the alternative is a dip pen, however.
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@Gurth not really, no. The question isn’t if it was the best we had back then, but if what we replaced it with is actually better or not. Typing on a computer (the modern replacement) is much better than typing on a typewriter. Using Facebook messenger or some other lock-in proprietary crap is worse than open protocol messengers of the past.
As far as Usenet goes, there’s probably pros and cons.
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
But email works because those binaries are not duplicated on each intermediate servers that host the message (which is a key feature, by design, of Usenet). Although I guess, with modern networks, that news servers could have evolved to just handle some sort of linking back to an authoritative one (e.g. the one that posted the stuff in the first place). Maybe.
Email is totally a mechanism that stores the messages for a while during the process of sending, including on intermediate servers. And nobody but the seriously most hardcore of hackers reads email archives directly or sends messages without a client. I've done it a few times… but usually just to prove I can rather than for any good reason.
I remember endless discussions about the tiniest of changes to newsgroups -- heck, even UTF took ages to be adopted, and even that wasn't ever fully working by the time I stopped using news (and you still sometimes got mojibake). And I was using a lot of French-speaking groups, where you cannot write the language properly without some extension of ASCII (yes, yes, ISO-8859-15... provided it was properly set in your client. And in the server. And in all intermediate servers. And in the client of the recipient. And not messed up somewhere in the middle, or by quoting, or wherever...).
Fortunately, all the really crappy EBCDIC servers seem to have been retired. Or is it that the really crufty sysadmins who ran them have been retired?
All the world is Unicode-based now (either UTF-8 or UTF-16 or whatever) and clients are a lot better at describing what on earth they're putting in the message. The message handling solutions for email are pretty much the exact same ones for newsgroups; the message formats themselves are nearly identical (both in good and bad ways).The actual big issue with newsgroups back in the day was bandwidth. But this was back when a very high speed connection was 10 Mbps, and it was common for people to use a sub-56k modem. Everyone has so much more now.
Which is one of the things I mentioned earlier, that Usenet totally failed to do properly and that is now an essential feature. There was no effective way of policing stuff, either to prevent illicit content or to limit bandwidth.
Policing was always on a local basis. How else do you think a system distributed across large numbers of jurisdictions is going to work? There isn't a central authority.
As much as I loved Usenet, I have no qualms in admitting that it was a 20th century technology, designed for the needs of a small community of somewhat-technical users on poor connections. It wasn't fit for wide-spread usage on high-speed networks, even if we thought otherwise at the time.
The only real problem it has now is that so many people have gone elsewhere. But that also means that it is a more civilised place.
Filed under: who remembers BITNET?
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@Mingan said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Mason_Wheeler Don't you fondly remember downloading multi-part archives only to find part 7 of 9 missing or corrupted?
Usually it was more like part 39 of 142.
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@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@boomzilla @Unperverted-Vixen I see. My first thought was that nobody provides landline phone service anymore, and that's why you can't have long-distance calls, or something.
I still have a land line.
My land line was converted to IP a few years ago. So now I have the joy of losing my telephone when the router decides to reboot.
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@dkf said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
sub-56k modem
I had a 56K. But the landline maxed at about 26k.
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My ISP provides me with 2 (or 3?) VoIP landline numbers, but I don’t have a phone plugged into the router. Or even know my phone number.
(I probably have a phone, somewhere, in a box with old cables and stuff.)
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@dcon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I had a 56K. But the landline maxed at about 26k.
I remember being able to sometimes get up to 48k. When the weather was right.
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@dkf said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@dcon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I had a 56K. But the landline maxed at about 26k.
I remember being able to sometimes get up to 48k. When the weather was right.
My problem was being a long ways from the switch. I forget how far, but far enough that when DSL first came out, I couldn't use it.
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@dcon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@boomzilla @Unperverted-Vixen I see. My first thought was that nobody provides landline phone service anymore, and that's why you can't have long-distance calls, or something.
I still have a land line.
My land line was converted to IP a few years ago. So now I have the joy of losing my telephone when the router decides to reboot.
I have FiOS, so I have a single cable of fiber that serves me TV, Internet and phone. I have no idea (nor do I care) how that's all implemented. After it hits the Verizon box on my back wall (and the one on the inside) those three seem to be independent
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@topspin said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Using Facebook messenger or some other lock-in proprietary crap is worse than open protocol messengers of the past.
What open-protocol messengers were those, then? IRC was (is), but that’s a multi-user chat service, not so much an instant messenger for one-on-one use, though you could of course use it like that. When the masses got online, they instead turned to propriety software like ICQ, AIM, MSN, etc. — and usually had to change every couple of years when a new one became the currently fashionable one, for no reason I could see.
@dkf said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Filed under: who remembers BITNET?
I do. I never actually consciously used it, but my first exposure to the Internet was joining a mailing list that advertised both a BITNET and an Internet e-mail address.
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@dkf said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
But this was back when a very high speed connection was 10 Mbps, and it was common for people to use a sub-56k modem.
10 Mbps? Heck, I remember when the backbone was 56k and the rest of us were getting by on 9600 or whatever was the best you could get on normal POTS at the time.
