are mailing lists dead?

[snugglekitty]

I moderate a mailing list. I belong to several. I know that's true of lots of other people here.

Over the past few years, I have seen a drastic decline in traffic on ALL of the mailing lists I belong to.

And I'm starting to wonder. Are mailing lists dead? Has lj replaced them to some extent? IMO, lj cannot take the place of topical mailing lists exactly, not even lj communities, but I begin to suspect that for many people, the time and energy they used to spend on mailing lists is now going into lj.

Are your mailing lists dead? When's the last time you posted to one? When's the last time you posted here?

Comments

[deravyn.livejournal.com]

I've observed much the same phenomenon on all the lists I belong to/run with the exception of some very niche lists. I think that there has been a general move away from email and more towards blogs (lj included) and message boards (which are a lot more user friendly these days).

I think that blogs offer a lot to people who may not have large email accounts or want to give out their email to people in that you can have a blog account and access a vast number of posts in whatever theme strikes your interest whereas mailing lists have a greater degree of commitment/investment involved with signing up for them.

I also think that in this day of spam and more spam, people like communities that don't flood their inbox with more messages that they have to sift through.

My thoughts. I almost never post to email groups anymore and use LJ and message boards.

-D

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

Message boards/forums have largely replaced the ones I used to belong to.

[beowabbit]

Certainly LJ has taken up a big chunk of my time and brainspace that used to go to email (both personal email and mailing-list email).

There are some weird implications for that. For instance, I keep copies of all my email (unless it’s really trivial), but I don’t have copies of my comments in other people’s posts and the ensuing threads. Also, all email addresses are more or less equal (although that’s a bit less true these days, given the drastic measures sites and people sometimes go to to avoid spam), but I’m only likely to get in blog conversations with people on LJ (not, say, blogspot or plastic or whatever). Also, the psychological bar to commenting in somebody’s journal is a lot lower than the bar to sending somebody email. And the bar to reading their journal is a lot lower.

In general, I really like the way LJ conversations work, but it’s definitely a different medium from email, and that has some interesting social implications.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

Another implication I have noticed - you can't just read the part of the conversation that interests you based on subject tags. Not that that ever worked perfectly, but still.

[ramsay57.livejournal.com]

There's a mailing list for the boarding school i attended. It started up mid-July and just had its 6000th - yup, 3 zeros! - post. Around the election there were easily 100 posts a day. There are just over 100 members, most of the posts are from fewer than 10 people.