Email lists are still the best fully-open, privacy-respecting system we
have for this right now.
Everyone else either wants to own their users and monetize violating
their users' privacy or their general power over users -- *or* they
misunderstand the medium and technology, such that they don't realize
that they are violating their users this way, without even getting paid
for it.
With the email lists, you can plug your own privacy-protecting, offline,
distributed user agent into this, and do all sorts of things, including
better threading, powerful rules-based scoring/ranking, automated
collaborative filtering, and even autonomous behavior on your behalf.
Many people had this functionality 20 years ago, atop email and Usenet.
Why most people don't know this: The first dotcom gold rush twisted how
systems are architected, so that dotcoms could build themselves in as
middlemen, snooping and having control over people. And (only
half-joking) a bunch of Californians started a convention of being all
coked up on "performance enhancement" off-label abuse of prescription
meds, which helped them to churn out more lines of shoddy code, without
the annoying distractions of considering the impact and ethics of what
they were doing. And then successive generations of new programmers
came along, and mimicked what they saw, and were actively nudged by
dotcoms' programming tutorials and toolkits and such, to do systems
architecture in secretly user-hostile ways.
(It's non-ideal that the Racket email lists are hosted by Google, at
this time, but at least -- with the SMTP/POP/IMAP/etc. distributed
architecture, designed before snooping and control became the dominant
business model for dotcoms -- individual users still have the option of
defeating intimate cross-site profiling in this instance.)
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