JubilantJaguar

Somewhat true if you have anyone left who wants to talk to you by email.

First people stopped using it for socializing, and now it's slowly on the way out for work communication too IME. Not secure enough. Better to use a secure messenger which requires login. And personally I quite like this, assuming the messenger is on the web and requires no software install.

The reality is that the main surviving use case for email is as a notification engine.

By downvoting my comment you're saying you don't care what I have to say. So that's the end of this debate. Good night.

From an Atlantic article yesterday:

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

want to reschedule something on the fly

Yeah it certainly got easier to be late and generally not keep commitments, that's for sure.

I do agree that communication when out and about is a genuine killer feature. It's was the original use case after all. But doomscrolling social media, or banking, or shopping, or playing dumb games, or most of the other things I watch people doing in public - personally I am never going to buy the argument that this is about "convenience". To me it's pretty obvious that it's just addiction and irrational social contagion.

Almost all of these things can be done from a computer, siting in comfort at home. And some of them, i.e. communication, are even more pleasant that way. The supposed convenience of the mobile form factor is mainly a function of habit. I speak from experience, having mostly kicked that habit.

The "emergency" argument is particularly tiring BS IMO. Somehow we managed for all of history until basically yesterday without this functionality and got by just fine.

The fact that technology exists is not in itself a reason to adopt it. If only we would learn this lesson at last. Rant over.

I would prefer that "wrong" people without "proper education" be countered with arguments rather than jeering.

After all, without arguments, who is to say that the person who's wrong is not the one jeering?

To me it reads more as someone who is jaded, cynical, perhaps a bit wounded by other people's attacks on them and projecting their insecurity and frustration about that.

IMO very few people are assholes by nature. If we can create an atmosphere, and tools, that encourage civility, then we will get civility.

at least person gets the idea that opinion is in fact unpopular

And why is that important?

Interesting. Of course, "obnoxious" and "in love with their own voice" are highly personal judgements that are pretty vulnerable to motivated reasoning. In other words: if they were making a point that you happened to agree with, perhaps you wouldn't think those things.

Downvoting is intolerance made cheap. It's a button to say: "You're wrong, I don't care what you have to say, LA LA LA LA SHUT UP". If you did the equivalent of downvoting in an in-person discussion, you would be an asshole.

But what really annoys me personally (someone else mentions it) is that downvoting reduces the visibility of the downvoted opinion. It's literally soft censorship.

I regularly leave discussions after receiving cheap downvotes in return for my carefully considered contribution. It's a statistical certainty that I'm not the only one.

Downvoters should consider the opportunity cost of their actions for the quality of the discussion they are taking part in.

THIS is the reason.

Downvoting is literally a form of censorship. It's the virtual equivalent of shouting someone down.

It was never popular even in France, for a simple reason: the week became 10 days but the weekly rest day was still only 1.