Are Social Networking Sites Reducing Activity on This List?

[Matt Graham]

> Keith Smith wrote:
>> AZPHP list has gone almost completely dark.  It has been that way for
>> maybe 3 years?? I'm wondering if the social networking websites might
>> be drawing down membership and activity.

mailing lists r like so last decade ppl r tweeting & bookfacing now #retro
#facepalm

(Er... Ha ha, only serious?)

From: Stephen
> Well there are elements that I like about a forum vs email.
> I can target what I am reading about at a given time. I can skip threads
> I am not as interested in. It's easier to go back and look something up.

All these things are at least partially doable on mail as well.  Subject:
lines are supposed to ~= forum topics, so it's easy to filter things like "OT:
16th-century Peruvian fishmongers" out by eyeball.  Most mail clients have
reasonable analogues to grep[0], so finding things is easy provided you've
kept the old mail around.  This is not always possible thanks to tiny mailbox
sizes on some clients.  I know I delete PLUG messages that I'm not interested
in.  (This can cause *annoyances* when I have some sort of terrible technical
problem involving 16th-century Peruvian fishmongers, though.)

> But there is something about an email list that is different that I would
> miss if it went away.

The lack of pretty pictures, moderation, user ratings, and features means
people have to make compelling/useful/funny statements using nothing but text.
 This has some benefits.

I felt the same way about Usenet.  A standardized format for the individual
posts, threading, worldwide distribution, and the ability to use any client
you liked made it possible for giant useful/insane communities to grow.  And
then web forums and ISPs not wanting to support Usenet servers basically
killed off comp.os.linux.* , which was sort of annoying.

[0] Mail.app on OS X 10.8.3 is an exception.  Seriously, if I have multiple
messages with "name generator" in their message bodies, and search for "name
generator", nothing shows up.  I get better results by exporting to mbox files
and grepping.  I'm glad I only have to use that thing at work.  It worked a
lot better in previous versions.  Way to fail at regression testing,
Apple....

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see