If I'm summarizing your argument correctly, you are saying that mailing
list discussions should ALWAYS be public, no matter what. That it is the
mailing list that I'm conversing with, and not the individuals who
participate in the mailing list thread.
It is an interesting notion. One I totally and utterly disagree with.
When I reply to your email I am replying to YOUR email. It is not the
"mailing list", an abstract being with no intelligence, that I am
conversing with. It is Oleg Goldshmidt. If you will please read your own
email, it is not addressing my email in the third person. It addresses
it in the second person. Even your email is written to Shachar Shemesh,
while keeping in mind that the entire list reads it. It is not written
to the list, hoping that Shachar will read it. When you write:
This has been the semantics of group communication since before
email (surely you remember Usenet that never tolerated requests for
private responses).
You do not seriously think that the list has been around when Usenet was
common, nor even that the majority of this list's subscribers were. You
think that I, Shachar, have been.
To me, this pretty much pulls the rug from under your reasoning. If I
need to answer you in private (say, because what I have to say is based
on my personal knowledge of you, and is too personal for the entire list
to know), then that very same use of the second person in the email will
make the "forward" button a non-intuitive option for me. If what I have
to say is personal, but not based on prior knowledge (for example, I
know you offended another list member by bringing up a sensitive
subject, and I don't want to offend her myself), I might not even have
your email address in my address book.
Either way, the "forward" button is not a replacement to the "reply"
button. The second is simply a matter of hitting "reply" and writing
your email, the first requires putting in an email address, which has to
be figured out.
And, like I said in my previous email, if I get it wrong, the failure is
catastrophic. It means a personal detail has been exposed on a public
list, or I ended up insulting someone's sensitivities twice. These are
actions that cannot be undone by any technical means that I know of.
So, no, I don't think you adequately (at least, not to my satisfaction)
answered my counter points.
Shachar
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