Well I can tell that in my generation, mailing lists are definitively much more considered as obsolete and disliked.
This is largely a statement about fashion/trends and overlooks one massive advantage mailing lists have over the several *generations* of web approaches: while they are crusty (they have been since the 90's) they are also relatively eternal. You want to traverse the entire history of discussions on the Squeak mailing list? The archives are there, in a trivial and open format, and so you can. Just this week I looked up some 20 year old posts in squeak-dev, it's not a theoretical argument. (try doing that with your sourceforge... err, google+... umm, slack... history)
Everyone has a GitHub account (or if not yet, this costs you one minute for millions of projects) while for a mailing list, you have to
fill in a subscription form for every new project ...
Here you're showing you've already fallen behind: the github trend for discussing things is already fading and those trendier than you have already moved on to the next thing: Slack is where it's at! In a year or two it will be something else... and the treadmill keeps going but not really going anywhere.
Now I've been saying this somewhat kidding: I'd actually love to see something *better* replace email for discussions. But it has to be open[1] and adaptable to various existing technologies as well as the new ones that come along. So far, there has been no critical mass around anything viable mainly because the masses (even in the tech space) keep hopping from trend to trend. So many old fogies say 'meh, why bother'. It's not that we love email so much, it's that everything that's been proposed to replace it is worse and fleeting.
[1] github issues fail on the open front. Unlike git which you can always prop up your own server for, you're always one corporate decision away from issues being broken/taken away.
IMO email has failed in so many points where alternatives provide better solutions. How many "> > > > original post > > > quoted by me > > quoted by you > don't eat my quote characters!1", unwanted
line breaks after
every third word or
so, different
confusing fonts and sizes, and much more have I been reading in this list! Platforms have the uniform Markdown standard to
get rid of all this mess. Also, managing subscriptions for individual threads is so much easier on GitHub & Co. I think could carry on for a few more paragraphs, but that's probably not the point. :-)
I don't like HTML email myself and find it a lot easier just to read the text version. I know... it's not nearly as pretty, but it does work and avoids many of the formatting issues you're complaining about.
Thanks,
Phil