Agree these are advantages: Mailing lists are simple - Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly - Mailing lists interoperate - They're asynchronous - They're portable - They can be freely interconverted - They can be written to media and read from it

Disagree these are advantages: Mailing lists require no special software - They impose minimal security risk - They impose minimal privacy risk - They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up - They scale beautifully - they're relatively free of abuse vectors - They handle threading well

I still use mailing lists, both at work and personally, but they are 1970s technology and it feels like it. We could build mailing lists for this century that keep these advantages and fix what's broken, but there's no business model in it.

Minimal privacy risk is such a BS "advantage". You put your email out there for everybody to read it. So privacy with mailing lists does not exist

If I want to remain anonymous, I need to register another email address, which is a massive pain in the ass to register AND then to read or reply to the mailing list.

With a forum I register, chose an anonymous nickname and can participate and get updates into my normal inbox anonymously.