In many cases you can send a message to the list without subscribing, but this isn't well documented.
In general I think the problem is just laziness; the people running the project optimize it for themselves (active participants) rather than their users. It doesn't help that the most popular software (Mailman/Pipermail) is mediocre.
> the people running the project optimize it for themselves
This is pretty reasonable, if you think about it: it's worth making life nice for the people donating hundreds or thousands of hours of their time to answer questions, as well as for the people who only plan to interact with the system for a couple of questions.
To the OP: Try the http://gmane.org/ NNTP/web mirrors of mailing lists, if you don't want to sign up for them. In particular, reading lists via NNTP from gmane in Thunderbird is pretty nice, with real threaded discussions going back as far as you want, and no need to sign up, etc. (screenshot: http://hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/TextMate/gmane-thunderbird.png)
I really think the main problem is not the concept of mailing lists (and email/nntp) generally, but instead, as you suggest, the software that runs it. Google groups/mailman/etc. are all IMO pretty crappy from both maintainer and user perspectives, but they work well enough that no one's really putting effort into better mailing list software. Likewise, most mail clients are pretty crappy –either unconfigurable or with a difficult learning curve for configuration, with insufficiently easy-to-set-up and insufficiently flexible rule systems, etc. – when you get down to it. I should be able to absolutely instantly (<10 seconds) set up my email client to filter for only replies to my topics or mentions of my name in a particular mailing list (for example), but currently this is an involved process in every mail client I've ever used.
Of course, email is so so so much better for extended technical discussions than any web forum I've seen, that we all stick with it despite its flaws.
> I really think the main problem is not the concept of mailing lists (and email/nntp) generally, but instead, as you suggest, the software that runs it.
Making email better is undervalued. Love to see startups help extend it.
The problem is... How? Other than providing some sort of web front-end onto email (which is already done... Gmail.. Yahoo Mail.. etc), what can you do? You can try and use some sort of fancy email processing algorithms to do fancy things with email, but how does one make a business of that? Charge people to pass email through your system that sanitizes it and spits it out with better/cleaner headers for email clients to use?
I mean do more stuff through email, like Posterous and Xobni did. People are comfortable with the interface. I think Google Wave starts in email actually. But they extend it into XMPP.
You got me on the money equation. But I'm sure there's some way to make it.
In general I think the problem is just laziness; the people running the project optimize it for themselves (active participants) rather than their users.
Unless your users are actually contributing money or time (most won't), I'd call that smart, not lazy.
This works and it doesn't. Some lists have disabled this, IIRC or enabled moderation (someone has to 'ok' the mail before it's allowed on the list) to stop spammers from trying to get their advertising onto mailing lists (presumably to reach the list audience as well as to get into search results through the list archives).
But yes, you can just send your email to (for example) python-list@python.org and then when people do a reply-to-all it will reply to you and the list... But what about a list-reply? (Gmail automatically replies to the list, not the sender) Does the mailing list software also forward mail from your thread to you, even if you're not subscribed?
I did a survey on this for which to use with clients and came up with http://www.phplist.com/ which I've used a few times and found to be the best of breed OSS solution in this space. YMMV.
In general I think the problem is just laziness; the people running the project optimize it for themselves (active participants) rather than their users. It doesn't help that the most popular software (Mailman/Pipermail) is mediocre.