[GTALUG] OT: Shots fired - heads up

[Evan Leibovitch]

I scanned through the groups in groups.io. Many are more than 20 years old.
There is no smartphone app.
It costs money to start a group of more than 100 people, and the more
successful it is the more you need to pay. I understand the business model
but from the point of view of a group creator this is crazy next to the
free-of-cost alternatives.

When creating a group, don't you want to be where the users are, rather
than force them to create an account on yet another platform?
WhatsApp has two billion users
Reddit has 430 million
Discord has about 20 million
Groups.io and Google Groups do not publish user statistics.

I don't use groups.io but I do use Google Groups. I have been in and
created groups in it, in all the platforms mentioned above, as well as
Signal and Telegram which have group functionality.

All of these platforms can handle small groups, like the Discord server for
GTALUG. I have a personal Discord area with fewer than 12 members.
They are all pretty straightforward to set up, especially if you're
familiar with them.
But how well can they scale?
The largest group in groups.io has 15,000 members.
The popular groups in Reddit have tens of millions of members.
The larger Discord servers have a few million members each, though one --
for users of the Midjourney AI system -- has about 20 million members.

I see nothing in email (whether in Google Groups, groups.io or a
conventional list like GTALUG's) that isn't functionally done better on
Reddit (which allows people to "upvote" the most useful contributions) or
Discord (which includes streaming and virtual ad-hoc meetings) or WhatsApp
(which is super simple and most people have it anyway). All three of these
are free of cost to join or start a group of as many people as you can
gather. Discord also supports  Markdown formatting which is easier to do
than the HTML in most emails.

You're right, it is about the audience.
As I said, this is a generational issue.
Email works great for people over 40, because it's comfortable and they
grew up with it.
For younger people who grew up with smartphones and apps it's a very
different story.

- Evan


On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 11:44 AM Karen Lewellen <klewellen at shellworld.net>
wrote:

> As a counter to this idea I offer up groups.io.
> www.groups.io
> A location where email not only allows for exchange interaction and
> communication, but   often a great deal of community building as well.
> especially for folks who wisely wish to avoid the minefield that is
> Facebook and so forth.
> Perhaps?  it is less about how email may be declining generally,  and more
> about how, in your personal experience, email is less important?
> I could have listed google groups, and freelists in the place of
> groups.io, with comparative results.
> Perhaps its more about the audience?
> Cheers,
> Karen
>
>
>
> On Tue, 10 Sep 2024, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 4:56 AM ac via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> I read in a thread here recently that email is dead,
> >
> >
> > That would be me. Or something close to what I said.
> >
> > I never said email was dead, but rather it's evolved in a way that makes
> it
> > ever less useful ... just like postal mail.
> >
> > Email, like postal mail, is mainly these days for
> > - Flyers and advertising
> > - government, business and legal communications
> >
> > None of these uses is really interactive, at most they're occasionally
> > transactional (ie, providing stimulus for me to do something that often
> > itself does not require mail in response).
> >
> > The one benefit of postal mail that is not shared by its electronic
> > counterpart is the ability to send and receive parcels; the consequences
> of
> > my doing e-commerce in a way that has zero to do with mail of any kind.
> And
> > the one unique benefit of email is that its addresses provide a unique
> > identifier that can be used to create (and optionally authenticate)
> > unrelated online accounts.
> >
> > I have been hearing that same thing for 30? years now and always for
> >> different reasons. But volumes of actual transactional email has seen
> >> exponential growth, year on year, with not even a hint of any decline in
> >> the growth itself.
> >
> >
> > For most email these days, "transactional" is an aspiration. Most have
> > response rates of single digits at best.
> >
> > Sure, my spam filter is busier than ever ... but the signal-to-noise
> ratio
> > has plummeted. Same with postal mail. If it wasn't for flyer mail Canada
> > Post would be in even more of a financial hole than it now is. Email
> > marketing does not suffer quite the same financial fate as postal mail
> > because costs are shared between sender and receiver.
> >
> > In a previous life I was on the other side of this. I was involved in
> > choosing a bulk-mailing vendor and launching numerous bulk email
> campaigns,
> > for newsletters and announcements. (FWIW, the vendor we ended up using
> was
> > Moosend, based in London and India -- email doesn't care about domestic
> > versus international rates.) It was cheap, but we never expected more
> than
> > low-single-digit percentage of recipients even opening what we sent, let
> > alone responding by (say) going to the org's website. Providing strategy
> to
> > circumvent RBLs and spam filters has become a cottage industry of its
> own.
> >
> > What interactive functions of email still exist -- mainly the social
> ones,
> > like personal mail and forums such as this -- are mostly the artifacts of
> > the generation that grew up on it. Just like I still receive birthday
> cards
> > in the post, but only from relatives older than me.
> >
> > These services may very well never die. But both email and non-parcel
> post
> > are destined to continue their ever-further descent into pure nuisance.
> >
> > - Evan
> >



-- 
Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56
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