When you post something to the internet, like a comment on a blog post or a social media post, there is this expectation that what you are doing is public. If your identity is tied to it, it becomes this permanent reflection of who you are, and in general, people act accordingly.

Email has no such public component. Even though an email might become public in some capacity, it general doesn’t, and people act accordingly. There is a lot more yelling, a lot more serect-divulging, and lot more bad behavior over email.

I’m not sure what I think of that.

Part of me thinks it’s nice we have these different communication channels that can be used differently.

Part of me thinks it’s best to behave in such a way that it doesn’t matter if email is public or private. It might as well be public because you treat people well no matter what.