“when space is unlimited, the battle is for trust and relevance in an increasingly uncertain and noisy world”

You almost got it, but like an 8 year old trying to understand rocket science, you are missing a few important details.

The reality is that space is never unlimited, because PEOPLE have limited time to absorb. It doesn’t matter how vast the internet is, it doesn’t matter how fast you can deliver spam in any way shape or form, people only have a limited time to deal with it.

What happens when most of the email you get is spam? You don’t read “only the good stuff”, you basically turn the email app off, or you white label only your friends, or you create disposible email accounts you use once and ignore.

It isn’t a battle for trust – it’s a battle for the good companies and individuals to even get notices, because the spam, crap, and nonsense is burying them.

Trust is nice, but when you stop paying attention to one source system completely because it is mostly spam or mostly worthless, then everyone else loses.

Ask myspace.

Not to mention that the original article goes over this point again and again. But nice work making yourself look stupid while trying to insult someone else.

Wow, not reading that at all. I don’t see you suggesting that people are dropping email because it’s useless spam filled crap, or that myspace went the same way.

You need to learn to write more clearly!

I’m just going to say that I’m guessing that, because the article this is talking about already mentions that, I don’t think the writer felt the need to.

One of the reasons I won’t allow commercials in my view on the internet. They are always clamoring for attention and I trust none. About the time you think it might be ok, up comes one of those warnings about spammers have managed to slip in an iframe with malware links.

Installing programs are nearly as bad. Most of them I wind up saying no thank you to. I don’t want the trash that comes with it.

Maybe the first thing I do with a new computer is take out the all the crap ‘pre-installed’. Most of it I don’t want and the rest of it’s gonna terminate in a month or two, so it’s not really useful.

I love Cracked but I wish Christina H. would go away. I don’t understand how Cracked could still keep a person like her, after she wrote an article recently about how racism and stereotyping are wrong, but almost only when it’s directed at her race, and how only white people are racists.

What happens when most of the email you get is spam? You don’t read “only the good stuff”, you basically turn the email app off, or you white label only your friends, or you create disposible email accounts you use once and ignore.

Wow, not reading that at all. I don’t see you suggesting that people are dropping email because it’s useless spam filled crap, or that myspace went the same way.

Read #3 on the list. Here, I’ll even cite and quote it for you since you obviously think the bold text is just there as a cosmetic design:

A certain percentage of all human communication is sales pitches — even before people had phones, dudes would show up at their door selling snake-oil cures and horse boosters. But email is almost entirely spam — 88 to 92 percent of all messages. For those of you who aren’t good with numbers, that’s almost goddamn all of them.

For this reason, I don’t know anyone who has just one email address. Most people have a primary that they only give out to important contacts, and several more that they use to sign up for shit. That way, when they invariably start receiving messages about how to grow more hair and a bigger cock, who cares? You’ll never log in to that Hotmail account to ever see them.

Or at the very least, you’ll know to take precautions when you do.

Has there ever been a means of communication that was just totally hijacked by scammers like this, to the point that they absolutely own the medium? How many of you have a separate phone line set up to catch just telemarketers? Or a separate mailbox to catch junk mail? Or a separate home to distract door-to-door salesmen? I’m guessing not many.

And this isn’t like complaining that there are too many commercials during the Super Bowl — we need email, it’s how approximately 100 percent of us do business now.

Yet we find ourselves having to trash accounts as they become too visible to spammers — they’ll reach a critical mass of bullshit that just makes them unusable. You can’t even tell somebody your address — if you post it on a forum, blog, website — anywhere that is accessible by the public eye — then spammers will find it and inundate it. If you’re posting it in public, you have to spell it all out so the crawlers can’t find it (like, “meatwhip at flopwhopple dot com”). It’s like spelling out dirty words around a 3-year-old child.

Of course, we do have spam filters and junk folders to help thin it all out, but the protection itself is one of the many ways spammers have fucked over the basic function of an email. Is there a single person reading this article who hasn’t heard the phrase, “You didn’t get my email? Huh, I sent it yesterday. Check your junk folder.” Meanwhile, the main inbox is still filled with so much broken English, it looks like some straight-up Tower of Babel shit.

And here’s the thing: These are businesses, people who need us to like and trust them enough to buy their product. If any real business did this shit in real life, you’d not only boycott their product, but you’d throw elbows into the bridge of their nose until they could smell their own hell-bound soul.

So please tell us what your argument was again? Something about E-mail not being mentioned?

They should talk! Cracked web site riddled with javascript and web bugs/trackers, to the degree I rarely see.

In the prehistoric 1950’s one hour tv shows ran 52 minutes. There were half-hour shows that consisted of 27 minutes of content and 3 one-minute “word from our sponsor” messages. Those shows can’t be shown anymore. It would require almost one third of the show to be deleted. One cable channel used to show the old 70’s Dragnet shows (maybe they still do) and to avoid massive cutting they digitally increased the tempo, but not the frequency, of the soundtrack. Sgt. Friday’s machine-gun delivery now sounded like a tobacco auctioneer. And unlike web ads there is no blocker. You can mute the sound, go make coffee or go to the loo but the show isn’t going to resume until they have had their say. Five minutes later they will go it again. And again. Why do we download pirate tv shows?

Yet again, it doesn’t point out that more and more people are 100% turning off email, and only accept messages through their blackberry, or through facebook, or through IM style programs.

It doesn’t point out that all the yelling and screaming to get attention is in fact the cause of the problem, not the solution. It doesn’t discuss who people tune out of entire mediums or sites when they become too piled up with the very things we seek to avoid (think myspace, and Facebook teeters on the edge for many every day – how’s your farm doing?)

Point #3 is more about people not wanting to deal with companies that spam or use aggressive mailings – but has little to do with people disconnecting from the medium altogether.

Ah, I see. In that case, never mind then. Only trying to help.