I used to feel apprehensive about emailing people until one day I just decided to power through and do it. I agree with the post, it's like you unlock an additional layer of communications. Everyone is suddenly contactable! I would also say that most poeple are really nice 1-1, I cannot remember a nasty reply (worst that happened to me was just my email being left ignored).

I'm glad I'm not the only one! I, too, have been emailing creators, randomly, to thank them for their work. Especially when I feature their work in my newsletter.

I emailed Ken Thompson and Noam Chomsky in the past, and they replied! It probably wouldn’t work any other way.

I would add that I love emails when they are written as emails (i.e. at least one coherent paragraph).

Email, as a medium, prompts us to think (at least for a few seconds), not "generate human tokens". Sure, we may feel being "communicative" or "productive" while chatting or Slack, but (in my experience) it is not always the case.

I love the idea of emailing people with appreciation for things they've created.

I've considered doing this a few times, but have to admit I've never actually got round to sending people appreciative emails, maybe this blog post is the prompt I need.

There's a lot of makers on HN, has anyone here ever received emails about things they made?

I used to be fairly active on r/generative, someone once DM'd me to show me a pen-plot they'd made based off of something I'd made, and it made my whole week.

Email as a technology is insanely crufty.

It feels somewhat hacked together (because, largely, it is); and there are significantly more bots than people using it (which is somewhat self-fulfilling).

But when I read the leaked/disclosed emails from founders during tech's boom in the late 00-s and early 10-s, I'm left feeling like: this is kinda nice.

You don't need to write long prose, email chains are reasonably self-contained, can include practically anyone and since nobody seems to have a total dominance on mail clients; they pretty much stick to the lowest common denominator. (though, HTML seems to be very much accepted behaviour for email clients, even though it was NOT when I grew up).

So, in the end, it's the safest medium to reach the most people, and incidentally it's also the most "comfy" in that I can optimise my own experience of email if I want to. Nobody cares if you use outlook/gmail/thunderbird/mutt or whatever. It's just email.

This is a pretty strong contrast to the modern web which pretty much requires Chrome or modern messengers which require/enforce their own first-party clients. Even if they happen to support federation (like Teams) which isn't a given.

The best thing to come out of the internet!