Comment by gus_massa

Comment by gus_massa a day ago

In the math department, we had a Moodle the students in the first year of my university in Argentina.

When we started like 15 years ago, the emails of the students and TA were evenly split in 30% Gmail, 30% Yahoo!, 30% Hotmail and 10% others (very aproxímate numbers).

Now the students have like 80% Gmail, 10% Live/Outlook/Hotmail and 10% others/Yahoo. Some of the TA are much older, so perhaps "only" 50% use Gmail.

The difference is huge. I blame the mandatory gmail account for the cell phone.

Anyway, we had weird problems with Live/Outlook/Hotmail and Yahoo because they classified some of our emails as spam. Gmail usually works better.

Anyway^2, everyone is using WhatsApp, so it doesn't matter.

lxgr a day ago

In what way would you consider WhatsApp a replacement for email? Instant messaging is a completely different use case.

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inemesitaffia 20 hours ago

Not for everyone.
Anyway, I got asked to provide a "real" email address by support at my mobile provider.
I gave them a yahoo email.

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gus_massa 3 hours ago

Here, for a lot of profesional (from medical doctors to plumbers) the only contact is a WhatsApp numbers, no email, no real phone.
At work, 70% of the messages are by WhatsApp. We have like 10 buildings distributed in a 3 million person city, like 3 miles away from each other. So there is a lot of global coordination (mostly by WA). Also inside each building each subgroup of TA (like Algebra+Monday-Thursday+Morning) has one WA group, and the students have an unofficial WA per course.
We even have a WA group for the "HOA" of my home. (It's an apartment.) People can't maintain a mailing list or use CC correctly, but can use WA.
And there is another WA for the parents in each course of my children in primary school. Everything is discussed there, in particular invitations to birthday parties. Also, the school has like 3 official methods to send info (that is very confusing), but someone kindly repost all the info in the WA group.
Also, WA has a few aventajes: [1]
* If someone sends a message, they get angry if you don't reply in less than 5 minutes.
* If you realize something a Saturday at 11:30 pm, you can't send a WA about that, because the other person will think you expect them to get out of bed/party to reply.
* You can't mark a message as unread to reply it later or in a few days.
* It's even more centralized than email
[1] /s

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