In the beginning there was the fire. People sat around the fire to cook and chat. Times were
good. Some time later alcohol was discovered and alcoholic drinks devised. Some time later
cam the public house. From this point on all forums of discussion have gone downhill.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that more modern discussion forums don't have their
advantages. It is undeniable that email allows discussion with more people than the pub and
that instant messaging allows discussion when people are otherwise supposed to be working.
However all the more modern forums lack at least one thing that the pub provides.
It may be useful to split this discussion into two parts: realtime and non-realtime. This
distinction is important because it divides the people who may discuss into those who have
little better to do or are discussing alongside some other task and those who are giving
their full attention to the discussion. Of course this is a generalization, but a useful
one. Also note that we will only be covering methods of holding a discussion, not
conversations. Discussions are between more than two people.
The realtime discussion methods include: party telephone lines, IRC, party-line IM, radio.
These can basically be divided into text only and voice only. Text only realtime discussions
often have the problem that since people type much slower than they speak. It has also
become the norm to supply text conversations as whole lines or sentences instead of letting
recipients read as the sender types. This is done to make it less painful to read so you
don't have to watch every typo being made. Old talk systems used to work this way though.
Voice communications don't have this packet problem, but it does make it difficult to split
the discussion off into subdiscussions become there is often only a single channel. Realtime
voice communication has the additional benefits over realtime text communication of
inflection. I'm sure everybody has experienced that offhand remark which was intended to be
sarcastic and was taken as a personal attack.
Non-realtime systems have a bit more variety. One thing you don't see much of is non-realtime
non-text communication. I believe that this is mostly because it is a pain to do and doesn't
provide sufficient gain. It may also not occur simply because people haven't thought of it
yet (Maybe it is time for the Web 2.0 Video forum?). This leaves mostly text based methods.
Of these the most common are: usenet, email, web forums, BBS's, blogs, social networking
sites and article comments. Now some of these have mostly fallen out of fashion in the past
decade, such as usenet and BBS's, but they are all still in active use. Mostly these systems
are divided into two major categories: messages come to you and you go to the message. Many
of the former are the older systems, usenet and email for example. These are differentiated
in that each user uses some software to connect to a server which contains all the messages
waiting for them to read. These messages themselves originate on many systems from many
people. The latter type of systems, where you go to the messages, are mostly the newer style
systems. These include web forums, blogs, social networking sites and comments.
The major advantage of the systems where the messages come to you is that it takes less time
to collect the messages and there is more flexibility in viewing them. If I can't stand
reading a flatly threaded discussion with dozens of participants then I can use a threading
client. However there are also those who can't stand threading. Using our own software gives
us both the ability to view messages as we desire. It is difficult to explain the rise of
the other form of mechanisms, where you need to go to the messages, except in the context of
the increasing view that the entirety of the Internet is nothing more than the Web.
Now how do these modern methods compare? Well the current voice methods are expensive and
time consuming, though broadcast only forms are starting to gain prominence. Specifically
amateur podcasts and video blogs can be quite successful when they keep a tight focus. Blogs
and comments tend to go together, but it may be argued that this is more the foil and the
discussion. The major problem with comments is that they are too dispersed and activity in
them dies out quickly. Social networking sites are a bit better in this regard, but they are
not conducive to indepth discussions mostly due to cumbersome interfaces and in some cases
length limits.
In many ways I find it difficult to top the capability of the old timers of the Internet:
usenet, email and IRC. They have really covered the bases as far as I can see. IRC handles
most of the realtime discussion needs. IM tries to be as effective in discussions, but tend
to end up muddled and difficult to coordinate. Though it has fallen from the public eye I
truly believe that no forum of discussion with random strangers has topped usenet. There are
places to talk about any topic on usenet and the capabilities of modern readers far exceeds
those of any web forum. There is also the fact that the discussions can be global in nature.
Sometimes it's nice to discuss only with your friends, but you'll often hit limits as you
discover that your friends either all agree on a topic or just don't care about some topic.
Finally we have email. People complain about email all the time. They don't like the SPAM,
it isn't fast enough, it isn't pretty enough, etc. Yet for all this there has been no true
competitor which has gained traction. There are no systems which are able to handle the
volume while still providing quite good reliability (sure the message isn't guarranteed to
arrive, but 99% of the time it does and email handled server outages pretty well). No other
system does this while also allowing large and varying lists of reciptients and allow true
offline capability with attachment. In fact, perhaps the greatest complaints about email
come about because of terrible email readers (Webmail and Outlook are not good tools by any
means) and the lack of authentication.
Authentication of email is an interesting problem. On the one hand a large part of the
robustness and flexibility of email comes from its store-and-forward nature and yet a large
part of its utility is the ability to send from nearly any server and email claiming to be
from nearly any domain. That is, it is not only possible, but common for a business to
handle moderate volumes of email without them hosting and maintaining their own mailserver.
Furthermore, what mailserver they use is often inaccessible (for sending outgoing email)
from their workstation. Instead they go through the office ISP's mailserver to send their
mail. A system which didn't work this way could certainly be made to work, but at an
increased cost and complexity.
One consequence of this is that there is no association of an email address and the sending
computer. This results in a sizeable chunk of the SPAM. It is important to note that SPAM
happens even when there is little doubt that the actual sender of the message is the
authenticated owner of the account. Now there are solutions to this problem, but not many
people use them. The best solution which I am aware of is PGP/GPG.
These allow messages to be signed to have some guarantee that they have been sent by who
claims to have sent them.
I believe that the only reason these have not really taken of is two fold. First the need is
not so acute in most situations that it is worth any effort to rectify. This is becoming
less the case as more and more is being done online, but is a reason nonetheless. The second
reason, in my opinion, is that the proponents of these systems have been too zealous in
achieving perfection right off the bat. Any tutorial you read will give you complicated
rules of thumb with scary warnings in an attempt to have you construct a perfect and
watertight web of trust such that this web of trust can be used to conduct the most
confidential and important of business communications. This is really the wrong tactic to
take. Instead they should simply promote the most basic use as a toehold. Instead of
admonishing users to use a strong pass phrase and protect their private keys like they were
priceless jewels they should recommend that, unless you have a need for further security,
they use no passphrase and make sure that every computer account they send email from has a
copy. These programs could help this along while still maintaining security if they tagged
such private keys which have no passphrase in some special way. That way those who desire
security will know not to put any trust in those unprotected keys.
In fact, if the big webmail providers automatically created a key and automatically signed
every message it would increase the security of email in general by more than all the
promotion of encryption software to date. Would this provide perfect security? Of course
not, but some security is much better than no security.
Now back to discussions. There exist realtime discussions on IRC, though those have issues
with long, in depth discussions because people are usually not focused solely on the
discussion as they would in the pub. There exist email mailing lists, but they don't have
the level of privacy that a pub provides. There also exist a small number of optionally
encrypted mailing lists. There are perhaps the best fit for good discussions when you are
unable to take it to the pub. Sure secure email doesn't have beer and doesn't have emotion,
but it does have the participants focus.
Thus, in my search for valuable conversation I have created a mailing list. This list is a
private mailing list, but notify me if you want to be added. This mailing list also supports
encryption. This means that anything may be discussed there, safe from prying eyes.
Hopefully is gets comes valuable discussion on any interesting topics.
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