I'm sure that in many users' minds a newsgroup is just another kind
of mailing list.
The conclusion seems fairly obvious...
perhaps to you. I can find two fairly obvious, but contradictory,
conclusions:
1. people are confused by the apparent similarity, so we'd serve people
better by trying to make the differences more apparent
2. people want to treat the two as identical, so we should try to make
them work as similarly as possible
My conclusion is number 2.
actually I don't believe that "users don't perceive much (any?) difference
between mail and news."
Well, I did say "many users" rather than "users". In the absence of any
hard data, I can't contradict you with facts, but I'm afraid I still
think many non-technical users will be of that mind.
I think email and usenet are going to work differently no matter what,
and in fact we find those differences useful. After all, email (and
email lists) already existed when usenet was created. Usenet was created,
and became popular, because it worked better for some purposes than
email.
people figure out very quickly that there are differences in privacy,
style, and other social norms between the two media.
There are great difference in social norms between different mailing
lists and different newsgroups. I don't think the medium makes much
difference.
I think the medium has an effect, because some kinds of discussions
work better in one than the other. People choose to participate
in one or the other based on how well it works for them.
they may get annoyed when either system doesn't support the
functionality that they need - but this isn't an argument for making
the two systems the same.
What is the main argument for keeping them different? At the UA level,
of course. I don't mean under the hood.
They're going to work differently. Do users want an effective interface
to each, or do they want a less effective interface for the sake of
consistency? (or does it depend on the user?)
After all, we use the same
controls to drive a vehicle, whether it has a petrol (gasoline), diesel,
or hybrid electric engine.
a better analogy would be that controls are somewhat different on an
automobile, a bus, a large truck, and a forklift - because each of these
serves different purposes and needs somewhat different controls.
(the engine analogy applies if you're comparing, say, email-over-SMTP
vs. email over UUCP)
Personally, I would love to have a keystroke in my MUA that did
reply-to-all for non-mailing list messages, and reply to some specified
list, if present, for mailing list messages. I would then train my
fingers to use it instead of the "reply-to-all and then think whether
you need to trim the recipients" that I currently use - often forgetting
the trimming bit.
and then you'd fragment cross-posted discussions, probably without
realizing it. maybe there's no substitute for thinking?
Keith