More than a decade later, how original YouTube stars feel about the site - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/06/youtube-changed-my-life-a-pair-of-original-videostars-ponder-a-life-lived-online/ <comment><USER3> Currently have over 4 million subscribers and 600 million views across multiple channels on YouTube (all organic, no paid traffic).

Usually what you see is about $1 per 1000 views (CPM) for US creators. This number can be much lower depending on which country you are from - US is the highest.

Since "adpocalypse" (advertisers pulling out of YT ads) and some other relevant events, CPM has gone down significantly for everybody. While we were making about $1 CPM a couple years ago, we are now doing about $0.50 CPM.

With that said, most business-savvy YouTube creators have known from the beginning that YT ads are a drop in the bucket compared to the potential of revenue that you can make using other monetization methods. Patreon is one way, but merch, live shows, and digital products are examples of other ways that a creator can make way more money from their following.

For example, one of our channels with nearly 1 million subsribers only made about $4000 per month on YT ads at its peak. During that same time, it made over $15,000 per month just selling t-shirts (3x+ more than ads).

Another one of our channels that had over 2.5 million subscribers was making about $10k per month on average at its peak. By selling our own digital products, we were able to make over $200k per month (20x YT ad revenue).

I know this was kind of a long answer but basically - for the YouTube creators who saw their channel as a business, not much has changed. YouTube ads continue to be a very small percentage of their overall revenue.

On the other hand, YouTube creators who were dependent on ad revenue are now feeling the pain. However, I actually see this as a blessing in disguise because it forces these creators to look at other ways of monetization and to view their channel/brand as a business rather than just a content creation machine.

<comment><USER4> > _However, I actually see this as a blessing in disguise because it forces > these creators to look at other ways of monetization and to view their > channel /brand as a business rather than just a content creation machine._

Why would that be a blessing?

I'm just being curious. Are you talking from a business perspective or do you suggest that diverting work force to selling t-shirts instead of mere content creation is somehow more beneficial to humanity?

<comment><USER5> On some level it's a boon to not tie one's livelihood so closely to a fickle and shady advertising industry. I agree that t-shirt selling doesn't sound like an amazing alternative, though.

<comment><USER6> Recording artists have had a fairly similar set up for quite some time; the label takes almost all the money from album sales, so the artists tend to make their money off live shows and merch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always wondered how much on average a Youtuber makes, per 100K or 1 Million video views. Any original Youtuber care to throw some light on this?

Articles like this paint a very rosy picture....

> Nowadays many young YouTubers can become flush with cash much more quickly > and set up their own companies just to deal with the income from ad sales, > marketing tie-ins, and personal appearances at live events.

But I'm having a hard time getting convinced. I launched a tech videos channel like what TechCrunch is doing now with CrunchReport, back in 2011. For video views of 10,000 or so, I was barely getting 10 / 15$ in ad revenue. A year later I shut it down as the cost of production was far outpacing the video ad revenues. I had a hard time getting sponsors also.

The article mention 1 of the MOST POPULAR Artist - "PewDiePie" -'s earnings of 8 Million, but this NYTimes story [ 2014 ] also features the same Olga Kay mentioned in OP, and also paints a much sober picture of how much money "Youtube Stars" really make from it, and all the efforts that go into it.

"Chasing Their Star, on YouTube" => [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/business/chasing-their- st...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/business/chasing-their-star-on- youtube.html)

> "We are underpaid," Ms. Kay says. "We are not only coming up with the > commercial concept and tapping into a loyal audience, we are also doing > marketing. We are doing all of these jobs for a relatively small fee."

<comment><USER8> From watching a few reasonably popular channels over the years, even those folks have a hard time making money given the time investment put into video production. I think the EEVblog guy posted a video when he went full-time youtube and he's looking at making somewhere between $30-40k a year and he has about half a million subscribers with most video getting somewhere between 40k-100k views and he puts out 1-2 videos per week. Considering the intense time commitment to producing content, this really doesn't seem like much. So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible.

Another guy I like to follow, Lord Karnage, has similar number of subscribers, but most of his videos get far fewer views, 6k-10k and he's got over 4,000 videos up. I've heard an interview with him about his business and tbh, it doesn't sound great. He'd make more money panhandling playing video games on a street corner.

On the other hand, Simon and Martina, 1.2 million subs, between 300k-400k views per video and 4 videos a month, seem to be living a decent middle class life in Seoul and then Tokyo. No idea how much money they make, but they've had employees in the past to help them with their video production. Some calculators seem to claim they're probably making something a bit north of $100k.

One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often, google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages. Eventually everybody will figure out what changed and things will settle down, but there's a few weeks seemingly every year, where my subscription feed will be full of people complaining or shutting down channels.

<comment><USER9> > So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or > three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly > pretty terrible

One thing that may be worth adding is that for Dave Jones in particular, he has other lines of income such as selling hardware (project kits, branded multimeters, T-shirts, etc) and ads on his popular webforum. The YouTube channel works as advertising for those businesses. So even if you don't make a good living off of the YouTube revenue, it may still make sense as a way of building a loyal customer base.

A lot of YouTubers also make a good chunk of their income on Patreon now as well.

<comment><USER10> Source on the Patreon claim? I watch a lot of frequent YouTube channels and my anecdote is that < 10% have Patreon.

<comment><USER9> I guess it depends more on the niche than I assumed. I follow a lot of electronics channels, and YouTubers like techmoan and bigclive make $2,000+/mo on Patreon.

<comment><USER11> On the more extreme end of the spectrum, CGPGrey is making ~$20000/video on Patreon [0]

[0] [https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey](https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey)

<comment><USER12> Beware, it's a power-law thing. I'm in the top 3.5% of all Patreon myself, and I'm barely making $650 a month from it. It's really dangerous to consider that as any more plausible than YouTube ad revenue: everything about it is set up as just another lottery ticket. I've been keeping track of the numbers for a year. The amount that constitutes the '1%' mark has been steadily declining even as the total population grows.

With Patreon, it's more properly considered as just another payment processor: the hope is that you'll build a functioning business and use it to handle people's credit card interactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> YouTuber here, it feels like the party is over. The viewership is there but it seems like the list of things we can't do or speak about is getting bigger and bigger. You literally cannot mention war; your video will be demonetized.

<comment><USER14> Are you there to speak freely or are you there for the ad revenue? They actually disallow very little.

But if ad revenue is what you want, be advertiser friendly. There's nothing unreasonable about that.

<comment><USER15> Au contraire, I think the effect that advertisers have on what can and can't be said via popular channels is something we should all care about.

It's easy to say, "Just stop advertising," but producing valuable content is expensive. Advertiser-funded outlets are at a _tremendous_ financial advantage, and that translates directly into higher viewership. Consequently, we get the vast majority of our news, information, and opinions from advertiser-funded institutions.

Furthermore, the majority of advertising dollars come from clients who share similar attributes with each other (rich, corporate, favoring the status quo, etc.), so their perspectives and agendas tend to align.

The result is that contradictory perspectives are pushed to the sidelines, no matter how correct, logical, popular, or morally superior they may be. The fact that people aren't allowed to discuss war on YouTube is something we should all be concerned about. It's de facto propaganda.

This applies to more traditional media, too, not just the internet. There are all sorts of topics that advertisers won't "allow" even the mainstream media to dwell on for too long.

<comment><USER16> On the other hand, it also does a good job of removing what I might call accidental propaganda. Most youtube videos are not even skin deep, running off of one article in the news they read, and some youtube person is going to have almost no real understanding when making a video about Syria for example. By removing the people who are only there to drive clicks and revenues, I can probably get better results when I search for a serious topic. Maybe some topics should be left to pure enthusiasts.

<comment><USER17> This is an oversimplification of the issue.

Some videos to illustrate:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn46t8NksX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn46t8NksX0) \- h3h3 "We're at an Important Crossroad"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw) \- 2veritasium "Why YouTube Used to Prefer Quality"

In particular, consider the thought experiment presented in the second video: If YouTube's algorithm solely promoted car videos, then car videos would be all that are uploaded to YouTube. The algorithm _is_ the content.

Even though it happens to align with what you like right now, the bias should be concerning.

<comment><USER18> >If YouTube's algorithm solely promoted car videos, then car videos would be all that are uploaded to YouTube.

That's assuming that people only upload videos on Youtube to monetize them. Given that uploading videos is basically free I'm sure there'd be no shortage of non-car videos. Actually if I recall correctly youtube didn't have any monetization for many years when it started?

What you'd probably lose is high production value original content, although I suspect that many of those content producers might still break even if they have other ways to monetize their content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Veritasium recently made a video [1] talking about how the site today seems to favor quantity over quality. Many of the people in the comments there think YouTube's recommendations are to blame saying they're often not relevant. What have been your experiences?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw)

<comment><USER20> Yeah, the recommendations on YouTube are horrible. Google is a very hard company to understand sometimes. They're attempting to make self-driving cars with AI, yet they can't recommend relevant videos.

<comment><USER21> A self driving car seems easier in some ways. Just make it not crash.

Recommendations for millions of people and millions of videos on the other hand. Liking a video is subjective, for some channels I don't like half their content yet I am a regular viewer of some of their series.

Personally I am quite happy with their recommendations, even if I don't watch half of it.

<comment><USER20> Maybe easier in some senses, but cars are life and death. If 1 out of 10 of your recommendations are bad, no big deal. If the car misclassifies obstacles in the road at even 1/100th that rate, not acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very little of YouTube feels genuine at all anymore. For as much as I can't stand the middle schoolers vlogs, at least I know that's an actual person with something to actually say. If you go to YouTube's home page with no account, literally all you see is promoted content, usually by a mix of record labels, TV stations, some "company" that makes comedy sketches or whatever, and one of those channels that does the "worlds blankiest blank" video lists.

There's very little regular people on there anymore, and IMHO, that is their biggest problem. It's just become a slightly different version of television, with all the big money, shallow personalities, derivative content and problems that comparison implies.

Edit: self correcting, there are plenty of regular people on there, they just never get seen organically.

<comment><USER23> Isn't that pretty much what happened to eBay? Used to be a community of people selling their old computer parts and Magic The Gathering cards, and now it's devolved into Yet Another Distribution Channel where faceless companies offer their lineup of products.

<comment><USER24> Add Etsy to that list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "you do the job of at least five people. You have to be creative; you have to be a writer, be a performer, an editor, a director, a marketer."

This is my problem. I keep building things, both hardware and software, and post them to Hackaday and Show HN, respectively. Cool things, like a magnetic audio connector or a big data project of 20,000 restaurant menus translated from Chinese.

But I can't do the marketing. I have no idea how to make money out of this. Finishing a project and posting it is exciting, but then I'm always let down by the fact that nobody cares.

<comment><USER26> I'm a senior marketer. The short answer is yes, you can market without spending. The slightly longer answer is that time is money and those forms of marketing often take lots of time, and take time away from building the product.

There's lots of free info out there, but it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise. Noise in this case often being gurus and blogs trying to get you to buy info products or make a purchase via affiliate link.

Start simple by making a site to sell your product and add a way to monetize it. Get engaged in communities that have problems your product solves. You can then reach out to people to get product feedback and maybe a sale.

But to be honest, at some point odds are you will need to spend money. If the issue is you simply cannot afford it, that's fine... bootstrap with non-paid channels.

If your issue is that you don't want to pay for anything on principle, you're going to have a rough time. There reality for most businesses is that it takes money to make money.

If you have any specific questions or want to chat, feel free to contact me via my profile. While I charge a consulting rate for hands-on work or analysis, I'm always happy to answer general marketing questions, point people in the right direction to reputable resources, etc. for free without any pressure to consult.

<comment><USER25> Thank you for your thoughtful reply! And thanks for not using an affiliate link, unlike some commenters below.

"add a way to monetise it" \- do you mean Google ads? Affiliate links? The same thing we just said is "noise"?

"don't want to pay on principle" is part of it. I have a maximum wage - <USER2> visa and work contract do not allow me to do other paid work. I'm not allowed to have any revenue, so I want to minimise my costs. My "portfolio" feels useless if I can't find anyone else to use it though, so I know I need to do marketing, I just don't know how.

<comment><USER26> That's an interesting challenge--I've never encountered it. Monetization can occur through a variety of ways. Ads and affiliate links tend to be fairly low margin. Personally, I'd focus on productizing your offering, and trying to find a way to sell it as a service for recurring revenue.

That said, I don't know how you can actually make a business if you're not allowed to have any revenue. Can you clarify on what your end goal is? I might be missing something with that.

<comment><USER25> My end goal is just to make my work useful to someone else.

I do these projects because I want to. I'm going to keep building stuff, because that's what I enjoy. I just feel useless when I think how much time I spend on it, and then nobody cares.

Existing Chinese textbooks don't have colours for tones, pinyin, and literal translations. So I decided to make my own software to do that. I can sit back and judge the textbook authors (saying their stuff sucks), but that doesn't help anyone. So I made my own better one! But the only person who is helped by my work is me. It's not going to change the world if I'm the only person who uses it. Do I have to be a business in order to give stuff away for free?

<comment><USER26> That helps me understand a bit better. I'm not clear on the legalities of your situation, but it seems like you might benefit from looking into educational institutions and other community resources to see if they could make use of your work.

If you are giving stuff away for free you don't need to be a business, but if what you are giving away has costs associated with that, you need some way of covering those. If not by yourself, then with the help and sponsorship of another org.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've always wondered, who (demographically) actively goes to YouTube and watches videos/subs to channels?

Among my friend group (mid-20s tech people in Seattle for the most part), YouTube is a non-entity. It never comes up in conversation. I personally never go to the front page of youtube to actually look at anything, I'm always searching for something specific. OTOH, we talk plenty about Netflix and podcasts.

<comment><USER28> I agree with you. I think the site caters mostly to children and young teenagers. Most popular videos, those shown on the home page, are of guys talking to a camera loudly and making silly jokes about videogames and current events, or very bad pop music.

And video thumbnails are the most cringy thing you can see on the Internet. [http://buyviewsreview.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/02/custom-...](http://buyviewsreview.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/02/custom-youtube-thumbnails-good-examples.png)

It's sad to admit it but I avoid youtube whenever I can.

<comment><USER29> If you log in and watch what you like, what shows up on your page really adapts. You can think of it sort of like reddit, many siloed communities. I wouldn't judge what you can get out of it by the default front page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I really wish they had got a hold of Ray William Johnson to ask him about the rise and fall off the equals three show. He was YouTube's number 1 for a long time. His timeline defined the drama around all aspects of YouTube. From being a trail Blazer to personal tolls on life to partnering with networks to make things "better" to the complete meltdown of a partnership. Would have made for an interesting perspective.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't how how it affects "original" stars but the "adpocalypse"[1] + the move to "punish" infrequent uploaders[2] are sure to have interesting long- term effects.

[1] [https://redd.it/6cyuva](https://redd.it/6cyuva)

[2] YouTube algorithms like channels that upload frequently and can generate a "community" around them

<comment><USER32> Hmm. I want to lash out because I feel like this is a total thread hijacking, but I am curious how some of these OG youtube stars are reacting to these new developments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm not a YouTuber but I do subscribe to a dozen of channels. It seems to me that the sustainable channels are making their money from donations either via PayPal or Patreon not so much from ads which was my long-standing belief.

</comment><comment><USER34> MKBHD seems to be this generation's Walter Mossberg: he's a trusted reviewer who goes into the appropriate level of detail, given his audience. I have no idea what he makes but he drives a Tesla and shoots in 4k and 8k on pretty high-end cameras. Seems to be doing well enough, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER35> Read about LBRY here: [https://lbry.io/](https://lbry.io/) They plan to tackle this problem in an innovative manner, whether it works out, we'll have to see...

<comment><USER36> LBRY needs a _text-based_ quick intro.

Not a video.

Probably not a FAQ.

"What is this, what problem does it solve."

Or as one of my more populare HN comments put it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_forward_to_marketing_how_to_present_your/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What's next? Vimeo? Vidme?

<comment><USER38> VidMe seems to be the one a lot of YouTubers are using as a backup. So I'm guessing it's the most likely YouTube replacement as things are now.

<comment><USER39> Well I'm mostly a user, and I've got to say that YouTube still wins on the technical front.

It remembers my position when I watch a video part way through, they have an app for just about every device you can get, they have a subscription service that removes all ads, it supports everything from 144p to 4k, it has livestreaming with multi-camera support, it supports 360 videos, has annotations, subtitles, speed changing, and more.

Compared to the next best thing, YouTube is still winning by a lot for me as a user.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the largest file size possible for a 100x100 PNG? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The PNG format allows arbitrary ancillary chunks, so it can be as big as you want it to be.</comment>


Famous Logos Designed Entirely in CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecsspert.com/

<comment><USER2> I hate to be "that dick" so let me first say that this is damn impressive stuff; kudos to the authors for some serious CSS wizardry!

It's also completely and totally useless. The person / people who did this are obviously talented and have a lot of expertise. I'd really rather see people with this level of ability contributing meaningful, useful tools / techniques to the community rather than seeing this type of post over and over again.

I can hear the arguments now, "but it shows off the power of CSS!"

No, it doesn't. It shows off what a clever person can achieve by tinkering with a system; but there's no practical value to most of the techniques demonstrated. CSS has a lot of power; but its best demonstrated by projects like the CSS Zen Garden that show off real-world CSS use.

<comment><USER3> _It's also completely and totally useless_

Not really.

A CSS logo would be useful for performance issues and overall page rendering speed. A CSS _animated_ logo, such as the Atari example, even moreso than a Flash / JS counterpart. CSS renders more quickly than images, and definitely more quickly than embedded Flash.

<comment><USER4> CSS is the wrong tool for the job. Your example would be better served (and easier to maintain) with SVG or Canvas.

<comment><USER5> or in some cases: data uris.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool but isn't this what SVG (ignoring browser incompatibilities) is for? CSS is for affecting the layout of the content. In most uses a logo is content, that content could still be affected by style, but I don't think it should be entirely defined by CSS.

<comment><USER7> Definitely.

SVG is available in any browser that supports all the selectors being use (i.e. it'll not work in IE6/7/8 with CVG, but these CSS versions probably won't either), and the code for them in SVG would be significantly smaller then that markup+styling I'd wager.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe a dumb question from someone who isn't proficient with CSS -- but if you can render these as vector images, can't you autogenerate the CSS for them?

And the reason I even ask is I feel like I could draw all of these logos pretty well with Illustrator, but couldn't just sit down in a text editor and make these logos with CSS.

<comment><USER9> In theory, yes, in practice I don't know if such converter exists.

But SVG should be a better option anyway (it doesn't work in <IE9, but on the other hand, this probably won't either).

<comment><USER10> Hmmmm. Maybe there could be a SVG to CSS converter!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm slightly blown away by this. Call my naive, but perhaps I knew this was possible but just wasn't expecting it to look as good as it does. I'm not sure what's more surprising, how good the logos look, or the fact that someone had to have spent a tremendous amount of time designing all these from scratch with CSS.

<comment><USER12> I think it is kind of an irony that code displayed underneath those excellent logos is so hard to read because of those same css effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm kind of bummed that most of these are thoroughly broken in Opera, and I wonder whether it's the CSS that's broken or whether Presto is rendering them wrong.

<comment><USER14> You can see that they included browser specific prefix for Firefox and Chrome/Safari, that is -moz-* and -webkit-* respectively and left out (although not everywhere) the Opera's one (-o-). So yeah, the CSS won't work wheter the Opera implements these preview features or not. And I'm sure it implements most (if not all) of them.

But to be fair, the CSS itself should work as soon as the specification is closed and browsers implement it under the regular names, without those prefixes.

edit: Here is the list of attributes supported by Opera <http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/presto26/css/o-vendor/> (you can see that transform, the one left out in the first example, is one of them)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hate to be pedantic but that should be "rendered entirely using CSS". The logos were designed by their respective designers using whatever tools.

<comment><USER16> Its confusing as well. Before clicking the link I thought they would be icons (newer ones, naturally) which were designed from scratch using CSS.

<comment><USER17> That's what I was thinking too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Adobe being first didn't impress me much, Twitter made me curious, and I was extremely impressed by Steve Jobs, Apple, BP and Nike.

<comment><USER19> Whats the advantage of doing this versus sprite splicing

<comment><USER20> Few advantages, mostly disadvantages. But unbelievably cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> These use _a lot_ of empty divs. It's no different in approach to the "twitter fail whale in css" experiment of last year.

<comment><USER21> I'll be impressed when someone can build a logo out of CSS... _semantically_.

<comment><USER22> "Semanticallity" (sic), wrt templates and css is not all it's cranked up to be.

It's just voodoo thinking on the part of web designers that were taught about it circa 2000.

And it basically comes from the misunderstanding that the html page _is_ the data, when it's really just a RENDERING of the data. The data is what's on the DB or storage system --and that, yes, has to be semantically stored and attributed.

The template is just a means to show them GRAPHICALLY, not semantically.

Except if our main purpose is to make screen scrapping easier.

<comment><USER21> The rendering of data _is data itself._

We structure databases semantically for backend developers. Why shouldn't we structure display markup semantically for frontend developers?

<comment><USER22> > The rendering of data is data itself.

Only if you have a poor system of sharing data, one that necessitates the rendering to be the data. Why put that inflexible requirement upon yourself? We have plenty of renderings that are not supposed to be data (i.e mechanically readable) by themselves, from graphical UIs to paper printouts.

> We structure databases semantically for backend developers. > Why shouldn't > we structure display markup semantically for frontend developers?

Because the target audience of the display markup is not "front-end developers", it's our website viewers. And they could care less how we structure our display markup.

A truly intelligent system of content/display separation wouldn't use "semantic markup" and such nonsense, but true separation, i.e multiple types of data output.

Take accessibility for example. What's good for a web browser is not equally good for a screen reader.

The optimal path would be not to share the same display markup, but to create a _specialized_ screen reading output that can leverage the same underlying data.

We only do a half baked work when we add media css, alt attributes and such to "semantic display markup". It's a leaky abstraction.

And then you go and implement an interface to the website as an Android or an iPhone app, and suddenly the "semantic display markup" is useless, you do it with custom queries and native controls. Or you go an implement a voice operated interface to the site, like voice xml, and the "semantic display markup" is of no use here too.

Heck, even when we output something as basic as an Atom/RSS feed, we don't get to reuse the "semantic display markup", we output a customized feed.

<comment><USER23> _Because the target audience of the display markup is not "front-end developers", it's our website viewers. And they could care less how we structure our display markup._

That's not really true, though. The viewer is the target audience of the display _output_ , not the markup. The target of your markup is either someone technically minded (who would do a 'view source') or some sort of crawler that is trying to derive semantic sense from your document.

In that context, semantic markup makes total sense. Part of me is still disappointed that using XML+XSL for web pages never took off- implementation nightmares aside, separating page data and page presentation is an awesome concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps this is a naive question, but are there any benchmarks comparing client-side load times for actual images vs. images rendered in CSS?

Server-side bandwidth savings is easier to calculate, and while I realize this kind of savings for sites like Twitter can create noticeable margins, I'm curious as to what the cost-benefit threshold is.

<comment><USER25> Can't give you any hard numbers but I'm quite sure that "CSS images" this size load faster in most cases. But, once you load an actual raster image you're done with it: you can cache it, reuse it as many times as you want, manipulate it's placement, etc. - all without significant performance issues. With "CSS images" that's not the case. Placing a few on one page and/or allowing user any interaction with them will create performance bottlenecks more often than not. For the 'real world usage' it's safer to stay with the raster images.

Matt Seeley, UI Engineer at Netflix, made a presentation in which he touches these issues. It's available here: [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5618867/mseeley-2011-09-27-html5devc...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5618867/mseeley-2011-09-27-html5devconf.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Excellent work. Can you imagine how amazing it would be if there were a tool that allowed us to convert/output all our images as CSS/SVG/etc instead of bitmaps? I, for one, look forward to the day when the only static assets we have to worry about are text-based assets such as CSS and JS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ringed a bell <http://www.imgtocss.com/>

<comment><USER27> I love that it actually converts the image to a table with bgcolor attributes. It doesn't rely on CSS at all.

<comment><USER28> That's not always true. Any image with an alpha channel will have an opacity style attribute. In the firefox logo[1], for example, you see things like this: <td bgcolor="#081b3c" style=opacity:0.17;filter:alpha(opacity=17) />.

[1] [http://www.imgtocss.com/convert?url=http://www.imgtocss.com/...](http://www.imgtocss.com/convert?url=http://www.imgtocss.com/assets/images/firefox.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This looks impressive, but I think an SVG image would be just enough and the right tool for single-color logos like those of Adobe, Twitter and Nike.

For Nike it will be just a background declaration, the curve with Bezier parameters and the foreground color. It will be much more compact and be able to scale.

And just as much cross-browser as CSS, which means not totally cross-browser. Your logos are broken in Opera and IE, for example.

I understand it takes much effort and expertize, but it's not the right tool for drawing images. You could do this by just exploring the UTF characters table and positioning differently colored characters near each other to make an image. But the fastest way to draw a vertored shape in a browser is still SVG.

</comment><comment><USER30> I love this. Challenging small but crazy ideas always strengthens our creativity. Remember your childhood. We created a lot of unique stuffs by using imperfect materials around us such as junk and bulk. These continuous challenge will be nutrition to help us become great creators.

</comment><comment><USER31> Could someone explain the Atari one? Don't quite understand how it's animating.

<comment><USER32> I believe the relevant lines are

        @-webkit-keyframes ball { 0%, 100% { left:30px; top:107px } 30%
        ...

and

        -webkit-animation: player2 4s linear 0 infinite normal;

which define the animation keyframes and parameters.

See the webkit blog for information on how it works:

<http://www.webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/>

<comment><USER31> Interesting. Thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Also see the many many insane examples of CSS art on jsdo.it

<http://jsdo.it/tsmallfield/counting_sheep2/fullscreen> \- double click for more animals

<http://jsdo.it/norahiko/m1WT/fullscreen>

<http://jsdo.it/tsmallfield/pigg/fullscreen> \- cute "avatar" like on <http://pigg.ameba.jp/> ameba pigg

</comment><comment><USER34> This is really impressive.

I've never seen something like this in pure CSS. If anyone knows of anything this impressive, please post a link to it.

<comment><USER35> Made something similar a while ago:

<http://sy0t0s.bplaced.net/demo/hero/> \- Apple logo

<http://sy0t0s.bplaced.net/demo/tubes/> \- Nixie tubes

<http://sy0t0s.bplaced.net/demo/opera/> \- Opera Browser in your browser

I have more, but don't want to spam links. If you want to see more you can crawl through the /demo/ folder on the page. Most of them are experiments with CSS3, javascript and html5.

<comment><USER34> Impressive, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> You have to weigh up the 'coolness' of such CSS trickery with the amount of extra HTML code there is, when you could have just used an image!

</comment><comment><USER37> Our logo on <https://entrydns.net/> is also made in CSS entirely

</comment><comment><USER38> It's interesting opening it up with an older browser and seeing how it fails.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is very clever. Is there supposed to be a practical application, or is it simply a "look at this neat thing I did with CSS" demo?

</comment><comment><USER40> The droplets on the Pepsi logo, and the pong animation on the Atari, are very cool. Inspiration to better my CSS skills.

</comment><comment><USER41> Logo are content, so they should be displayed with img, either as raster (png or gif) or as vector (svg).</comment>


Email will last forever - <AUTHOR> http://blog.frontapp.com/email-will-last-forever/ <comment><USER4> I find it interesting to contrast 'forever' with another technology that will last forever 'vinyl records'. I expect there will always be point to point, store and forward communication channels, but those channels have existed for millenia, from travelers who stacked rocks to tell those who came after where the trail was, to people who send compromising photos of themselves across cellular networks. So if we set aside the tautology for a moment, communication channels get morphed into a solution for a particular need, regardless of how well they service that need, and when there is a particularly wide disparity between need and implementation, there is an opportunity to create a better channel.

My current favorite example is Trello as a way of communicating activity status from many to many on many projects. Something email does poorly (but has been used for in the past) and Trello does brilliantly.

But lets look at the points one by one.

 _#1 everyone has an email address_ \-- sure today they do, and 25 years ago nobody did, and 25 years from now its possible everyone will have a "fooservice" address.

 _#2 email is flexible_ \-- see my point above, flexing is not the same as serving.

 _#3 other stuff is great for professional communication but we still use email._ \-- and before that inter-office memos.

I get that these guys (Front) are invested in email sticking around but I would note that putting an adapter layer in front of it is no more, nor less, efficient than putting an adapter layer in front of TCP/IP or smoke signals or a 45 year old text file transfer protocol, whether or not "email" in the form of SMTP will survive should be irrelevant to Front, the question should be will the need for their service survive.

<comment><USER5> My opinionated 2¢ on why e-mails will live while many an "e-mail killer" dies mourned by no one.

E-mail is just better way of doing snail-mail, a technology that we had since we first invented writing. One could say that our whole civilization is built on such communication, as one could not conduct business, make a war or govern a country without mail. E-mails is just the same, only faster, and it shares all the benefits with the snail-mail medium. Interestingly, many of those benefits are also shared by... phone.

Why snail-mail, e-mail and phone calls do better than others and will outlast random fads is visible if you look at the structure of the medium. The main features those three forms have that various "e-mail killers" don't are:

\- ubiquitous - you can reach anyone...

\- distributed and federated - ...anywhere, without caring about whether they subscribe to the same service as you.

The last thing is important. When I send you a snail-mail, I don't know or care how the post office works in your country. When I send you an e-mail, I likely don't know (and again, I don't care) if you pay for your mail server and to whom. When I call you, again, I don't know or care who provides you cellular service. I don't even know what kind of device you use to receive that call.

No single entity owns snail mail, e-mail or the phone network.

On the other hand, with Facebook Messenger you can talk only to Facebook users on Facebook platform. With Asana, I can only talk to other Asana users.

The reasons those services die quickly (when was the last time you ICQd someone? MSNd? or <insert your national IM equivalent that no one uses nowdays anyway>'d?), and the reasons I STRONGLY WISH THEM TO DIE A QUICK DEATH for are _greed_ and _hubris_. I go to Asana web-page (I don't mean to single them out, apply this to any other similar service) and I can see that idea, "we will replace e-mail, _everyone_ will use our service and we will rule over in- company communication!", floating in the air. No, this will not happen. There will always be people who won't use your service because they don't like your UI or like a competitor more. But what you're trying to do is to throw away freedom of collaboration and interoperability to earn a quick buck. This is damaging to communications, damaging to society, damaging to humanity, and fortunately will disappear quickly into oblivion, like countless other similar startups.

Want to create an "e-mail killer"? Apply some humility. Accept that you will not be The One Gateway to Human Communication; it would be bad for everyone (yourself included) to become one. Just aim for a federated protocol, awesome UI and play nice with others. Sure, success will not be yours only; many others will profit in the same space as you. But embrace that. Wanting to keep everything for yourself is just greed.

<comment><USER6> I agree with your reasons, but it's interesting to consider that realtime IM is one area that, while there exists a standard, simple, and scalable protocol that's been around for a _long_ time - IRC - it's nowhere near as popular as the proprietary alternatives that followed. IRC usage is declining, and of the people I know, the majority have never heard of it. Yet almost everyone knows about email, AIM, MSN Messenger, and now Skype. What lead to this huge difference? Is it just the triumph of marketing client software, or is there something else?

<comment><USER5> There's IM the one-to-one communication, and there's IM the multi-user chat. Those are two different concepts, they have their own mechanics of working and are treated differently by society.

But since you brought it up, let's talk about IRC. I'm betting its lack of widespread success is because of the general UX combined with some historical mishaps.

There are things you need to think about when IRCing, like:

      - <USER2>
      - channel discovery
      - NickServ, ChanServ
      - channel modes

that all boil down to a. thinking, b. learning, and c. typing magic incantation into a command prompt. It all gives off this complicated, "techie" vibe.

Remember that the general population can't use a computer [0]. That level of involvement is already too much for people to start using it without a strong reason to do so.

I remember when I started IRCing for the first time. There was another solution, that captured much more users - the web chats. Those ugly, scammy looking Java applets embedded on news portals. They solved all the above problems, i.e. you didn't care about "servers" or "connecting", all channels ("rooms", they were called) were listed on a website and there were no magic modes or something, just users, administrators and kicking (and you as an user had only to grok what "being kicked/banned" means).

And of course you could post rainbows and cat gifs and animated faces made by a crazy artist on drugs.

Chats ultimately mostly died, having gained the (deserved) reputation of scammy and ugly places. Or maybe because society still thinks that talking with random strangers on the Internet is something weird and/or dangerous, I don't know.

Anyway, back to the topic of technological obstacles. At my local Hackerspace, every now and then we invite people to our IRC channel, and sometimes those people are not exactly of computer-competent type. A good way to do this is to point a person to a IRC web frame, that is pre-configured with server and channel names. From his point of view, it's just like entering that old-school chat, except that it looks less crappy. After that person hangs out a bit with us and likes the place, we teach him how to install and configure a best- suited IRC client.

If the IRC is ever to reach popularity again, I think someone needs to build a, pardon the startupy meme, GMail of IRC. That is, an UI that looks good, hides complexity from you. An UI that lets you click through everything, and explains things like "+v", "@", "-c" or "NickServ" in human-readable terms. With icons and colors and simple sentences.

Then there's the marketing angle, but I bet you, if Google ever built an IRC client for massess, we'd see a great resurgence of this protocol

[0] - [http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use- comput...](http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)

<comment><USER7> Relay.js is a user friendly IRC client, see [http://relayjs.jit.su/](http://relayjs.jit.su/) for a demo. Converse.js ([https://conversejs.org/](https://conversejs.org/)) is an XMPP web client that supports XMPP conference rooms. So I'd say we already have good, nice- looking clients and there's room for improving integration on a single service to reach for the masses.

<comment><USER5> I've never heard of those tools before, thanks.

Unfortunately, Relay.js seems to not support colors in IRC, i.e. the "^C3i'm green^C" mIRC encoding. But it looks sweet though, and if one could just skip the "type the server and channel name" (i.e. embed on a community website), it would pretty much mimic the chat experience, only better :).

Anyway, so even if we have examples of pretty, somewhat simple and good enough XMPP/IRC clients, the next step is to get them to the world at large. That pretty much leaves marketing to focus on.

EDIT:

Somebody should bundle a pre-configured IRC server and a webserver hosting Relay.js into a Docker/Sandstorm ([https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)) container set and give it/sell it to companies as "awesome internal collaboration facilitator that improves communication and helps empower the teams to build products for the next generation of the web", or sth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?

<comment><USER9> True. But on the other hand, its still (against all reason) too hard to actually _do_ anything with such massive archives unless you really prepare for it .. like you, I have more than 15 years of email collected over the decades, but actually being able to do something productive with it depends on just how much time I want to spend setting up a system that can handle the mbox files of the 80's, the Eudora archives of the 90's, the Mail.app sql- database of the 21st Century, and so on. It has persisted, dear mail-format, but oh what a mess it _still_ is after all these years. I'd kill for a solution that just gives me my own full-text search engine to query/manipulate this archive, without first having to configure stream-plugins to do text conversions and so on. I guess this is one of those cases where I should just set up a dedicated Linux machine (finally, a use for an rPi!) with all the years mails, and promptly set a text search tool on the problem .. trouble is, can I do that without having to train the thing to handle SMTP headers first? Intuitively I'd say "probably this is a done deal out there somewhere" but a part of me still cowers at the idea ..

(And before anyone mentions it: no, google is not my solution. I want to do offline manipulation of decades of mail archives .. not just turn it over to some Entity, Inc. to solve..)

<comment><USER10> You might want to have a look at notmuch ([http://notmuchmail.org/](http://notmuchmail.org/)). Said abruptly, it's a wrapper on top of Xapian (the search engine) that you feed with your email, after which you can query using mail-related queries:

        $ notmuch search from:linus crap

and, most usefully, tag:

        $ notmuch tag +rant from:linus crap

Tags work exactly how you would expect them to:

        $ notmuch count tag:rant

There are myriads of frontends (even a web-based one [0]) if you want to go further than cli.

You're gonna have to transform everything to maildir or mh though (unless you can somehow iterate over your mails from the formats you have), but I guess that's not too unreasonable to do anyway.

[0] [https://bitbucket.org/wuzzeb/notmuch- web](https://bitbucket.org/wuzzeb/notmuch-web)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the recommendation - I'll check it out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The fact "email will last forever" is precisely why I believe it is absolutely the best protocol to build automatic services to access and share personal information. I have spoken about it here: [http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76](http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76)

Edit: Someone1234: you don't need to wait for companies to support my proposal. It already works today with Gmail: try my live demo on email@example.com - it works by leveraging standard auto-responder features. As to the comparison with XKCD 927, it is invalid: my proposal is radically different from anything that currently exists, because it is decentralized while all current personal information sharing platforms are centralized.

Edit: rakoo: yes, XMPP would work too, and would probably be a bit better than SMTP because it is real time. However in practice building something over SMTP has more chances of seeing success (because not everybody uses XMPP, but everybody has email).

<comment><USER12> Does this have the classic XKCD 927 problem ([https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/))? Also wasn't this what XML was meant to solve (a single unified standard for interop)?

It could "work" but unless you got at least Microsoft (Exchange server, Hotmail) and Google (Gmail) to sign up then it won't go anywhere (which is largely the issue with all email momentum, Microsoft and Google have no interest so it cannot move forward).

<comment><USER13> XML is a markup to establish protocol, not a standard by itself (other than the basic syntactical standard). A standard would be something like MathML.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The reason email will last forever is that nobody owns it.

If Twitter goes bust then you lose all of your tweets. If Facebook goes bust then all of your status updates go out of the window.

But email is an open, free protocol that anyone can implement and is deliberately designed to be decentralised.

And so the ecosystem will last as long as a few people find it useful.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. Email is so resilient because it's an open decentralized protocol. Every other alternatives I've seen is closed and/or centralized in a way or another. No wonder they fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think that a lot of "startups" are using the fantasy of an email-less world as a marketing tactic. I agree, I don't think email is going to disappear. Whether that is a good thing or bad, it's irrelevant

<comment><USER17> I'm still hoping to see a resurgence in software designed around federated protocols and architectures.

Basically the opposite of things like Google Hangouts, iMessage, Skype, Dropbox, iCloud/Google Docs, and many others.

<comment><USER16> Totally agree. Which is why I'm excited about the Gmail API and Inboxapp

<comment><USER18> Is that centralized or federated?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sure, email is not perfect, but it is the most flexible communication method the internet has to offer. It is not tight to a single organization, or "owned" by a single company and reasonably portable with an open protocol. Tools will be invented to further optimize the experience, but in essence it will remain the same, just like a telephone call hasn't changed. I will not commit an essential part of my business again, to a single company's closed- sourced product (like for instance MS Office in the past, though OSX being the exception).

I recently started using Mailbox as my personal Email Client again, and I am very impressed in how they "optimized" the experience. It basically converts your emails into task items, with different priorities, in lists etc. When combined with notes, it could make any task / note app obsolete.

Unfortunately it only works with GMail and iCloud, but I hope Dropbox keeps investing in the product.

</comment><comment><USER20> _\- Email is not sexy? Design beautiful interfaces. Mailbox has managed to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Sparrow was creating the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience etc._

I wish the author had not said "etc" at the end. He is obviously very knowledgeable about the topic. A lot of people, even people who spend LOTS of time online (like me) have not tried out every email client out there, and this is a missed opportunity to inform me and impress me with his depth of expertise on the domain his company is involved in.

I am sure I am guilty of this at times, where I either assume "everyone knows what I know" or I realize they don't and I don't want to sound like a braggart or something but I find myself feeling like I have been told "surely, you know all these examples and what they did different/right" and the answer is "No, no I do not -- what did they do??"

</comment><comment><USER21> The concept of email is too fuzzy. Is it SMTP that will last forever? This technology is more like sending postcards that every middleman can read. Certainly a more private alternative will replace it someday, and it should be more spam-proof.

Also email serves many purposes. If it is to be replaced, it will be on a use- case by use-case manner. RSS is a better alternative to one-to-many mailing lists. Forums are a better alternative to many-to-many mailing lists. Etc.

But yes, we should improve what we have until we can replace it.

<comment><USER22> SMTP and POP have encrypted analogous. Web server+Forum+Web browsers is hardly a better alternative to email many-many mailing lists.

<comment><USER17> While SMTP and POP protocols can be transmitted over TLS between hosts, which prevents reading messages along the wire, the email data itself is _not_ encrypted. A compromised SMTP server can easily read and copy any message received or transmitted.

<comment><USER23> And, even if you use a side-channel to distribute keys between the sender and receiver (to encrypt the data safely), the header absolutely has to be plain- text. Governments and companies scraping email meta-data is already a huge problem.

A protocol closer to Tor would make for much more secure email distribution, but it would also require a complete protocol rewrite. Potential death of email from a back-end point of view at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The email protocol is simple and flexible.

Ha, okay. I'm going to include actual emails in "the email protocol", because if you just count the network protocols you're not doing anything useful. Emails are anything but simple. They were born in the early days of the Internet, and no doubt time and the impossibility of predicting the future is responsible for how things turned out — but they are anything but simple.

Email messages are ASCII only. You can _put_ non-ASCII characters into a header however. It looks like this:

      Subject: =?UTF-8?B?SMOpbGzDtOKApgo=?=

Writing a parser for this is an unnecessary challenge in this day. (If you ever need to do email, for parsing _or_ outputting, _get a library_.) Watching a coworker unwilling to take the time to the read the RFC try to write a parser for this… is a very special hell.¹

The body also has to be ASCII, so just about every email client out there has to do:

      Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

And then encode the body in base64, wasting space and network bandwidth. Technically, you can send full 8-bit message bodies, but the sender and receiver have to agree ahead of time. Either GMail doesn't support it, or it just doesn't bother even when the email destinations are all GMail. (Or, it could be because some IMAP client might get the message, and not support it.)

There's also that every message has a text version and an HTML version — hopefully semantically similar — but HTML support in email clients (at least the big ones) is terrible. (see for example [http://www.email- standards.org/](http://www.email-standards.org/) ) You'll think support is great on the web after you're done.

I've not covered un-wrapping headers. Or the things people think aren't valid email addresses. (Your average Joe thinks [a-zA-Z0-9]+@<a domain name> matches all valid emails. Oh, and that they're case insensitive too.) Or IMAP. Or encryption. Or even whether email gets encrypted while on the wire from Hotmail to Comcast.

> Slack pretends to be "an email killer"

I'm not sure they're out to kill all emails… just the ones that would be better as a real-time communication.

¹Don't test your library's output email on Gmail, either. Gmail is _creepy_ good at correcting bad input. "It works on Gmail" != it's correct.

I do wish I could send restructured text emails and have the client just render them. In theory, email has everything I need. Clients just need to support it, that's all. I'll admit, that is kinda cool.

<comment><USER25> > Email messages are ASCII only. You can put non-ASCII characters into a > header however. It looks like this:

To me that is a good example of how email is flexible, and also simple.

It's flexible because it could support non-ascii text strings, without changing a thing.

It's simple because the protocol doesn't care what the subject says. It only cares that it's an ASCII string.

That sounds like good engineering to me, as well.

You could argue that a new version of the email protocol could be improved to do away with those hacks, but that doesn't take anything away from email's simplicity and flexibility.

<comment><USER26> Email is simple the way a plane is simple. As long as you don't see all the moving parts, and get to go along for the ride, it just seems like a magical flying tube!

I spent about 18 months on an email client project (was already 3 years in when I joined the team). I can tell you email is insane... so much more broken than you would expect (on all sides).

There is a reason many clients do "gmail" instead of "email". "Email" is a nasty barely functional ball of duct tape greased with WD-40 in the places it needs to go fast -- the fact that it works at all is breathtaking and only explained by the fact that it is one of the "killer features" of the internet.

The number of broken clients and servers is shocking and breathtaking. So you have to accept and expect bad data from everywhere. From the server directly, violating the imap spec, and in the body of the message violating all sanity. Yet, your users will see any failure as "this email client sucks" because the OTHER older email clients have already seen this idiocy and custom coded around it. Email clients end up being giant laundry lists of "if <stupid server> (act way 1)", "if created with <stupid client> (render 'right' way 2)"...

The reason new email clients are relatively slow to be created, and even fewer take off, is they are forced to deal with an insane clusterfuck of standards and corner cases to get to that 80% good enough mark -- or simply build out to one service at a time (we support gmail, hotmail and yahoo... etc).

There are 20+ RFCs you need to deal with the cover the spectrum of "basic" email with calendaring across a number of servers. That is just the "good" standard parts. On top of that you have the hundreds of server oddities that you need to handle else your email client will fail to get email off broken server X. Add to that the hundreds of rendering special cases you need to be aware of (ohh, this game from old outlook, so X means Y).

After you do all that, you have to deal with spam (both how servers tell you about it, how you show it, how you maintain it, etc) and an entire new set of oddities (very similar but simpler) for sending mail.

FastMail has an idea floating around that appears less terrible: [http://jmap.io/](http://jmap.io/) \-- but I am blissfully out of that industry and simply don't care anymore.

EDIT: For the record, I agree with the article, email will be around for a long time, it is the "point of record" \-- many of the "email killers" require your email address to sign up... so...

<comment><USER27> That's why we built Inbox. :)

[https://www.inboxapp.com/](https://www.inboxapp.com/)

In short, the Inbox API is a translation layer between IMAP's eccentricities and modern JSON REST endpoints. Plus it's open source free software.

<comment><USER26> Wow, how long have you guys existed? I am shocked I didn't know about this product. That is IMHO, EXACTLY the product that has needed to be built for awhile. Get all those eccentricities into one library that provides a clean interface.

<comment><USER27> We announced this a couple of months ago, though the company has been around for a while. We're also just quieter than most startups. Less blogging and talk, more code. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Disclaimer: I work for a company for whom email is a core part of business.

Email and letter-writing go together, in my mind. Not so much because email is a literal model of letter-writing, but rather because they give you an important abstraction that I think we all need, which is a form of passive communication.

You may get letters which are urgent, and you may get email that is urgent, but the nature of both is that they are hands-off. You don't need to be present to receive mail or email. Well, there is some physical mail that you do need to be present for! -- that being certified mail, some package deliveries, and those represent perhaps a different abstraction. That aside, you have a mailbox to hold mail, and a carrier to deliver it to you. Nobody needs to talk to you, to tell you that happened. You can go and check your mailbox and see what you have at any time.

People who want to "kill" email may dislike the form, the implementation, but the abstraction is useful. It will likely continue to be useful -- I don't foresee a time when it will not be. Email, in _some sense_ , will stick around.

</comment><comment><USER29> > "People spend on average 2.5 hours per day on their emails"

Source? That seems really, really high to me for an _average_.

<comment><USER30> That sounds about right to me if you include both personal and work email time. You might be surprised at the number of people in large organizations that spend seven hours a day actively reading and writing email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> _Forever_ is a strong word... but I do believe that email will stand still for some good years.

Email will last forever because email has been around since... well... _forever_. That is one key factor that the article misses: practically everyone is used to email. It's really tough to replace something so well known and widespread.

I guess the desire of doing so it's due to so many people struggling with email. How many times have I peeked people's email client looking to hundreds, heck sometimes thousands, of unread emails.

I always had inbox zero. I won't say that for me email is a joy, but is definitely no struggle. I guess I'm more organized than most people anyway...

</comment><comment><USER32> The single most important issue with email: Team Inboxes.

As soon as more than one person works with an inbox, it sucks big time.

But I agree - email will last forever, nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature.

<comment><USER33> A team inbox is almost always better handled by a ticketing system or a mailing list or both.

<comment><AUTHOR> or Front :)

<comment><USER33> A brief look through Front suggests that it is a specialized ticketing system. I predict that, if successful, it will incorporate more traditional ticketing system features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Any argument around "Email" should first define what email is. Does the author mean SMTP will last forever? MIME? IMAP? Email is a way of sending a message using a number of old, insecure and inefficient protocols. Will better alternatives to these protocols gain traction one day? Most definitely. What will remain of "Email" as we know it today is the addressing scheme IMO. The universally acceptable way of messaging a user@any-host is the real power of email, and will remain for the foreseeable future whilst transport and encoding protocols come and go (eg VoIP succeeding PSTN). In fact, email should last as long as the DNS system exists, given that the addressing system is directly tied to it. Being a flexible P2P messaging system, email can be easily extended to provide features of any "email-killer" app out there (including realtime communication) if need be. These innovations haven't happened simply because major email server providers dominate their existing markets (Exchange!) and have little incentive to innovate given the high barrier to entry for startups selling email servers to corporates. Email clients have seen more innovation, but there's only so much a client can do to extend capabilities of email.

plug: for this reason we're developing a full-stack email service in Node comprising client and server apps (end plug)

</comment><comment><USER35> It is, however, a horrifically bad protocol. We don't need a new app, but a better protocol for unified mail, IM and audio/video. XMPP is close, but flawed.

<comment><USER36> I have my own opinions on the subject but curious what you see as XMPPs failings?

<comment><USER35> Very high overhead (largely because of all the XML) and the implicit requirement of a persistent connection.

There are other things, like awkward and unevenly supported voice and encryption, but those are higher level concerns.

TextSecure's protocol is probably closest to what I'd like to see as a standard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Email is wonderful and terrible. SMTP is pretty simple, and everyone with a static IP can run their own email server. Configuring it requires some study, but it's not too hard.

OTOH creating email clients is hard. I wrote a web server and wanted a webmail client. Basic SMPT messaging is straightforward enough, but MIME is a confusing tangle of protocols and rules that is difficult to understand and implement correctly.

I mostly succeeded but it took a long time. Part of the problem is the complexity means protocols are often violated and my webmail client has to deal with loads of exceptions to protocol rules to work in the real world.

But that's hardly limited to email. Look at http, it has arcane rules too, and some of the common security issues on the net are the result of "sloppily" implementing programs using http. (You know, XSS attacks, SQL injections and so on.)

Email has warts but what doesn't. Certainly email "replacements" will have warts too, especially as they are extended to cover the breadth that email has encompassed.

</comment><comment><USER38> I like email and can't see it dying at all. I have several email addresses for various purposes and it's no hassle to manage.

I have about 5 email addresses and 1 work email. It's good having a dedicated "website sign-up" email address for forums and so on, where you don't care about the spam level.

The flexibility in setting up your in-box how you want is a great thing about email. I don't understand people who constantly complain about their in-boxes. Learn to manage your in-box, I say, and stop crying about your first-world inbox clutter problem!

I'm interested in secure online collaboration tools, and it's great to see so many options emerging. These secure tools can easily coexist with email and keep everyone happy.

Email is a familiar, reliable, predictable service that everyone knows about. It doesn't get "updated" every 3 months by some agenda-driven tech giant with ideas about how we ought to be communicating.

</comment><comment><USER39> I hate the tight coupling slack introduces. It should have been called leash instead. Glad to see it slowly going away.

Email is a product of the 60s predating HTTP itself and built to stand on its own. Its non-invasive and loosely coupled which scales across all kinds of people. Not just for ADD nerds like us.

</comment><comment><USER40> When Google Wave appeared on public I really liked and believed it would replace the email. I think one day the, now open sourced, Apache Wave Project will rebirth with: \- a fast user interface (today really sucks); \- decentralized and easy to install servers; \- Features that are missing;

</comment><comment><USER41> E-mail is a sufficient way of communication for almost every case - just like traditional, physical mail was 100 years ago. You can send a party invite to your friends, you can send family pictures to your mother, you can discuss a project with your co-worker and you can send an invoice to your customer - <USER3> of that using a single application. If you need to contact someone immediately - use IM or phone. Why do we need a seperate tool for every scenario? Sure, they provide some useful stuff, but nothing beats simply opening your e-mail client and typing a message to whoever you want.

</comment><comment><USER42> Email will last as long as we are thinking of computers in terms of files and text.

That's the foreseeable future. Anything beyond that is speculation.

</comment><comment><USER43> Depends on what you mean by "forever." If you mean, say, 30-50 years, even maybe 1000, sure, i'll give you that, but i'm still skeptical, but to suggest that there won't be a better communication tool that comes along to replace the written word from one node to one other, i'd say you're deluded. There is lots of room for improvement.

<comment><USER44> Agreed. It might seem pedantic to call this article on its use of "forever", but it is not. By setting this in stone you are actually discouraging innovation. Not everyone who promises ground breaking enhancement over email is right, but someone might come up with something.

And if the article's author really meant forever, I can envision a future of effortless communication through PC facilitated "telepathy" or any other sci- fi concept that obviates email. "Eternity, my friend, is a long f[ __*]ing time "

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Well for me, Email is already dead. Of course, dead software still exists, for information can not be destroyed. But, there will be more surveillance. There will be more counter-surveillance tools becoming popular. But Email will not stay on that list. Over the long run, the electronic mail will fall back behind inherently encrypted solutions. At least I hope that.

<comment><USER46> What do you use instead of email?

<comment><USER45> [https://bitmessage.org/](https://bitmessage.org/)

<comment><USER18> Isn't bitmessage (like bitcoin) susceptible to traffic analysis?

<comment><USER45> No. Bitmessage is essentially a decentralized version of alt.anonymous.messages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I recently joined a company where bulk of the communication is done on hipchat. I find it to be a much much better way of communicating, especially due to the chatrooms. I now only use email when I need to have a conversation regarding a specific subject or something I need to bookmark (star) for later.

</comment><comment><USER48> Dude, if IE6 is still around, there's not chance email is going out of business any time soon. Period. However, with the rising of new communication channels, we might get better at communicating certain pieces of information over time, that's what it's all about, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER49> Something is weird about email: Everyone can pretend to be someone else. It would be sane to reject all emails from a domain, that has no SPF record. I was asthonished when i realized that this is not already happening. Designing a large communication system it is just pure insanity to not include a sentence like this in the spec: "One can only send messages as one of the names he has power over." This could be ensured simply by SPF. It should be safe to assume, that a domain that has no SPF-record is not used for sending emails. I know that this is not the case right now, but it would change really fast, if you would push an update to the SPF-checkers, to enforce that rule. SPAM would be much less of problem than it is right now. Today you have to block ip-addresses, which is a large mess. With this rule enforced, you could block domains. Which are much harder to obtain and have a way smaller quantity.

</comment><comment><USER50> To the point of needing email as soon as you're interfacing with a person outside of your group: I'm seeing more and more options for this built into things like HipChat and Slack (both of which have the concept of 'guest' users).

</comment><comment><USER51> There are certain phrases I hear in startup pitches that immediately cause me to tune out. One of them is some combination of social, mobile and local. Another is "fixing emaiL" or "email is broken".

It isn't.

With all the change that's happened with the Internet two forms of communication have proven to be incredibly resilient: SMS and email.

SMS is resilient because every phone has it. It's portable and it's simple. The best effort thus far at dethroning SMS seems to be WhatsApp. Sure phone companies (particularly US phone companies) charge a ridiculous amount for SMS. It's no longer the valuable bandwidth control channel that it once was. But even so, I don't see it going away anytime soon.

The beauty of email is that it's largely decentralized. With something like Facebok, you get ads inserted into your stream, you're constantly at risk of some privacy snafu and there's always the risk the service changes in some problematic (for you) way or disappears altogether (OK, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon but we've all had services we like get bought out and sunsetted).

Email addresses are mostly non-portable. You can have your own domain and have a portable address but most people don't. Just like a phone number has limited portability (eg only within the same country).

Changing phone numbers and email addresses seems to be an infrequent enough occurrence for most people that they don't really care about it (as a whole).

Certain services provide useful value-adds to email. Spam filtering on GMail is a prime example. There are ads on the Web UI but hey you don't have to use it (there are POP3/IMAP interfaces) and they aren't that offensive (as, say, Facebook ads are).

The fundamental use case of both SMS and email is one person sending a message to another person. Think of this like IP (the protocol). People find each other with contacts. Think of this like DNS (kinda).

Every "email killer" I've seen has made this most important use case harder or just more complicated and, more to the point, for this use case provides no tangible benefits (that anyone cares about).

And in all cases you're giving up the decentralized nature of email so someone has control over your messages and your experience. Why would anyone make that tradeoff? It doesn't make any sense.

So forever? Well that's tough to argue. But for a really long time? Sure, absolutely.

<comment><USER52> The "fixing email" / "email is broken" are quotes you only hear from startup guys and UX geeks. Email is indeed working really well. Most people outside of this niche seems to have no fundamental problems with it.

Just an example: I recently needed to send a script to an 8 year old kid and a grandma at around 75. Couldn't have done it any other way than email. The point being that email is an enormously broad platform.

Its so broad that the second you turn to mobile to solve email, you have limited your way out the competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Couple of years ago RJBS gave a great talk about email, it's complexity and issues - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c)

</comment><comment><USER54> Yes! >> [http://mergy.org/2014/04/please-stop-trying-to-kill- email/](http://mergy.org/2014/04/please-stop-trying-to-kill-email/)

</comment><comment><USER55> IMO, written communication en totale will fade away within the century. Thinking [0] is much faster.

[0] - [http://emotiv.com/](http://emotiv.com/)

<comment><USER56> Having tried it, and recognizing the degree to which this (at least so far) is happening in the "conscious" mind-space rather than sub-conscious/motor- muscle-memory mind-space, typing is _vastly_ faster. Today. It strikes me as an amazingly hard problem to separate one's "inner monologue" from "thoughts i want to transmit". I suspect an easy cheat would be "imagine typing it out" to create a specific, "physical" demarcation in communication types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Made me remember the quote by Reinhold Niebuhr: "Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure."

</comment><comment><USER58> It's insecure and it must die. To be more correct, email can not continue in its current form.

<comment><USER59> Right! Most of the problem is unauthentic email - spam. Why oh why don't my peers sign their email, so I can test the signature and even file them by source/topic? This seems dead obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> [https://zulip.com/hello](https://zulip.com/hello)

</comment><comment><USER61> News flash: startup working on email product says email will last forever.

</comment><comment><USER62> There are tools to make use of HTTP in all sorts of ways. Curl, Wget, Restful APIs, Sinatra, Grape, etc. Fast, flexible, lightweight.

Email - not so much. Want a local email server? There's Postfix - yuckkk. The overhead of spam - yuckk. The lack of tooling, the lack of configurability, the DNS complexity. The fact that it requires a SAAS to do shared inboxes. Yuck.

Email could be so much better.

<comment><USER63> What's wrong with Postfix? Sure, configuring it takes a little work, but it's not _hard_ , especially not by comparison with Sendmail, which was the standard everywhere when I began my career.

<comment><USER64> I didn't even find configuring Postfix to take much work, and I'd never configured a mailserver until a few months ago. Debian's config script autogenerated a basic configuration for me, after prompting with a few questions: receive email for my domain to my unix account, and relay mail only from local or AUTH'd clients. This is the entirety of the manual config I added on top of what Debian produced:

        # use maildir instead of mbox
        home_mailbox = Maildir/

        # reject obvious spam
        smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated,
           reject_unknown_client_hostname,
           reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org

It has a very nice manual too, but I have not had to use most of it, because it just works out of the box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> No, it won't. I distinctly remember being told by many people that email would never replace letter mail because email was too impersonal.

<comment><USER66> "Impersonal" was only ever a label applied to email by people who didn't yet have access to the Internet, jealous they were being excluded. It's the same people who decried smartphones.

In all areas that matter, email is superior to paper letters. And in all areas that matter, no one has proposed an alternative to email that is superior in a way that cannot be applied to email.

In other words, whatever is wrong about email, can be fixed from within the system. Paper letters had to become email to fix what was wrong with paper letters.

<comment><USER67> > "Impersonal" was only ever a label applied to email by people who didn't yet > have access to the Internet, jealous they were being excluded.

This is factually incorrect. _Everone_ I've ever heard use the term to describe email had internet access and was a regular email user at the time they used the term. I'm sure some people who didn't have email have used the term, and I'm sure some of those people had the motivation you describe, but it is simply not true that it was "only ever" used by people without access to the internet (or, more relevantly, email -- whether on the internet or otherwise, as electronic mail existed on networks besides the internet.)

> In all areas that matter, email is superior to paper letters.

"areas that matter" is a subjective category (and, further, superiority in each of those areas is, generally, subjective as well), it may well be superior _to you_ in each of the areas that matter _to you_ , but those subjective judgements may not hold more generally.

<comment><USER13> You say something is factually incorrect based on _your_ own experiences, then comment on subjectivity?

Are you being serious, or kidding? I honestly can't tell.

<comment><USER67> > You say something is factually incorrect based on your own experiences

Well, yes, a categorical claim that something was "only ever" used by people with certain objective features and for a particular reason is factually incorrect if it was ever used by people without those features or for a different reason, so personal experience, while inadequate to establish that it is factually correct, can be quite sufficient to establish that it is factually incorrect.

(You'll note that while I state that the categorical claim is clearly factually incorrect, that it is also quite likely that, while not a categorical truth, there have been at least some dismissals that fit the pattern that it falsely claims is the _exclusive_ pattern for all dismissals of email as "impersonal" \-- the error isn't in saying that _some_ people describe email as impersonal for the particular reason described, but in claiming that that is the _only_ reason email has _ever_ been described as "impersonal" by _anyone_.)

> then comment on subjectivity

The comment on subjectivity was on a different statement (a claim of what is superior and what matters, both of which are inherently subjective) not the categorical fact claim. Recognizing the difference between subjective statements and fact claims is pretty important to being able to participate in a productive discussion of pretty much any topic, IMO.

> Are you being serious, or kidding?

The former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Looking at the listed "Email is..." statements, an important one was missed.

Email is broken.

Disagree? I'm sure your response expressing your disagreement won't end up in the spam folder.

</comment><comment><USER69> "\- People spend on average 2.5 hours per day on their emails

\- Workers check their emails an average of 74 times a day"

LOL</comment>