9 ms·

Gmail really wants me to say yes

111 points by awinter-py 7y ago

theamk 7y ago
> The day that 20% of consumers put a price tag on privacy, freemium is over and privacy is back. It's ironic coming from person with @gmail.com email. Fastmail's service is $5/month, but they chose the free one which harvests their data instead. If even the privacy advocates are not using their own advice, I doubt freemium is going to be over anytime soon.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  They could be paying for Gmail (through GSuite). Afair the ToS for GSuite claims they won't harvest your data. Anecdotally, I have my private mail at Fastmail and my work mail at GMail and I've never seen an ad related to work emails (or private emails ofc, but that was to be expected)
- jaabe 7y ago
  I use gmail and I value privacy, I pay for g-suite though. I tried all of them, fastmail, protonmail, tutanota, Runbox and a few others, and none of them came close to using gmail. So I figured, what the hell, g-suite is around the same price and it gets me 30gb of cloud storage as well. I wish google was a little more clear on where the privacy starts and ends though. Like if you want to use google home with a g-suite, you have to enable a bunch of tracking. I know this has to do with the fact that google wants to separate business from personal use, but really, I don’t want two e-mails.
  - Semaphor 7y ago
    Just out of interest, what do you prefer with gmail over fastmail? I find using FM to be a much better experience.
    - ac29 7y ago
      Two things I like about Gmail over Fastmail: - I can have multiple inboxes displayed in Gmail at the same time, such as is:unread or is:starred - I can compose an email while reading another in the same window/tab That being said, there are a lot of things I like about Fastmail over Gmail, notably that its way faster. As an admin (our business uses both Fastmail and Gsuite), I also like how much simpler and more standards compliant Fastmail is as well.
    - owenwil 7y ago
      I’ve never seen a spam message in Gmail, and can’t say the same for the latter.
      - thrower123 7y ago
        I've noticed the GMail spam filter seems to be really poor over the last six months or so. I'm getting obviously spam emails claiming to be from mispelled versions of ADT and insurance companies, with mystery-meat reply-to addresses, that look like they were composed by a drunken six year-old, landing in my inbox almost daily. I mark and report them spam, and yet gmail won't even pick up on them if the same mail comes through again later from the same sender.
    - jaabe 7y ago
      Spam, I got a lot of it on fastmail and even though I kept flagging it as spam, it kept coming. The mobile client, I really like the gmail iOS client. I think fastmail was better than the native iOS mail client, but I just really like the gmail one. Google docs, photos and drive are nice additions, but it’s mainly the first two.
      - Semaphor 7y ago
        I keep reading about the spam problem. Can't confirm that for me. I extremely rarely get spam in my inbox while on gmail I got about the same amounts but also quite a few false positives. The mobile client: I don't know the iOS client but urgh. The Android FM client is pretty lame :D Luckily, I rarely use it. I use next cloud for all docs, images, etc. and neither has an integration so that's a toss-up for me ;)
  - beagle3 7y ago
    I used to use gauite (and still do at work) but switched to fastmail for my private stuff, and it feels faster and better in every possible way, with the exception of not having google docs or equiv
  - nhooyr 7y ago
    fastmail is a lot nicer on macOS/iOS at least because apple and fastmail partnered to allow push email notifications. http://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-available-in-ios-mail/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-available...
- avocado4 7y ago
  Lol who would pay for an email service? No reason unless you want g suite bundle.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    You pay for a service when you wish to be the customer rather than the product.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > Fastmail's service is $5/month Fastmail also based out of Australia. There are dimensions to hypocrisy, not all of which are relevant from every perspective. Product choice is complexly multi-dimensional. A better response might involve asking why such a proclaimed privacy-conscious consumer remains with Gmail.
  - theamk 7y ago
    I suppose you are talking about "Assistance and Access Bill"? I don't see how this relates to this discussion, which is about your email provider using your email text for commercial profits. That said, if you prefer US government to Australian government, I am sure there are also privacy-preserving email providers in US as well. And there is also Swiss Protonmail, outside of both US and UK jurisdictionm, but it is more expensive.
preordained 7y ago
Not to mention always asking me for more information for "recovery..." Get out of my life. I want you for email (for the moment anyhow) and nothing more, that's exactly how I want it, just back off. Even as I say this...I think I really do need to switch to an email provider that understands boundaries, paid or otherwise.
- creato 7y ago
  I think this is a little over the top. They're pushy about this because they want people to have an account recovery method so people can recover their account if necessary. It really is important to them for that reason. This is probably any online services' single biggest source of customer service headaches: people forgetting/losing their credentials and needing the account unlocked. This is a really problematic thing for companies to deal with because any "human" customer service solution is both expensive but more importantly, very vulnerable to social engineering attacks.
scarejunba 7y ago
This feature is great. Lots of pearl clutching going on. Just type 'No thanks' or whatever if you don't want to go, dude. Seriously. I have this pet theory that the West has achieved safety and peace of such a degree that people have to box shadows to get that little bit of thrill in their lives. No, there's no scary dystopia coming. You've just got to chill. This is like me panicking that Jetbrains wants me to print out secrets to stdout because I typed out sout<tab> while writing something handling a secret. My god! They must be moving us to a scary dystopia where everyone's plaintext password is in logs somewhere where Jetbrains can steal it!
- fenwick67 7y ago
  Your comment is a long-winded equivalent of "who cares".
  - archon810 7y ago
    And it should be at the top of this discussion thread.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Haha, you're absolutely right! I'll do that next time. What a ludicrous post. I can't believe anyone is even taking it seriously.
- infinitezest 7y ago
  This strikes me as misguided in the opposite direction of OP. Keeping an eye on how we relate to the tech we use every day (and vice versa) is wise, especially as we integrate it into our lives more and more. Maintaining an attitude of "everything is fine now and will always be fine" is a great way to be taken advantage of, particularly when it comes to companies that have such a penetrating reach.
- lolc 7y ago
  > No, there's no scary dystopia coming. The reason it's not coming may be because there are people actively watching out. It's hard to tell what would happen if we didn't have them. Society gets better because of people willing to tackle hard questions. They are often inconvenient in how they ask you to reconsider life choices. > You've just got to chill. Until you get overlooked by the trained heuristics because they see how exposure to your thoughts cause lower click-through on ads. Then you scream and nobody hears you. And the metrics are all green.
colordrops 7y ago
> Why am I not more pissed about this? I think because ‘maybe yes forever later’ isn’t a sign of G’s dominance or power over my life, it’s a sign that they’re afraid of losing it all and are employing dark patterns to hold on to me. And like most strategies conceived in desperation, it has a 50/50 chance of backfiring and driving people away. This is too optimistic. Google has got a grip on consumers and they will certainly not be driven away by dark patterned prompts. Anyway it's definitely not 50/50.
yeleti 7y ago
My life is locked into one gmail account. All my notifications, passwords, bank statements, invoices, to and fro emails from exes, etc. etc. come to this gmail account. I have to rewind too much of my time to go to every place that uses my gmail account and change it. I can't do it. I'm locked in for life.
- taneq 7y ago
  And now think what would happen to you if your Gmail account was locked. No recourse, no response except form mails saying "your account is banned because it's banned." No way to recover any other account using it as recovery mail. No way to access your records or email history. Maybe locked out of your phone too. You're boned. That's what made me extract myself from Gmail. I created my new email address and forwarded my Gmail account to it, and then for every email coming to the Gmail address I updated the sender with my new address. It took me about six months before all my important mail was using my new address, but it actually wasn't that hard and I feel hugely less vulnerable to Google's whims. Edit: At the same time I also started using a proper password manager, making me again much less vulnerable to losing an email account because I no longer rely on resetting passwords to get into my multifarious online accounts.
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    If your account is banned do your auto reply(canned responses) stop working? Coz that would be a proper stop gap to tell important people(job offers/contact requests for eg) to your website/email you actually use etc.
    - eridius 7y ago
      If your account is banned how would you even set up an auto-reply to tell people about your new email?
      - creatornator 7y ago
        Presumably it would be set up before-hand? If you preferred the other email, you might deprecate the gmail account and set up an auto-reply for all traffic to update contact information. It would require giving up gmail early. The question would be if auto-reply keeps working after being banned
ghayes 7y ago
I’m a little... confused, is this blog post informed by one data point and then extrapolates a set of conclusions / reasons / motives? I can understand the sentiments of the article and poster, but I am not convinced of the premises that Gmail always prepares affirmative responses, and I’d love to see more data on that point specifically.
- aeternus 7y ago
  I'm also not convinced. I frequently see Gmail suggestions that I would not consider positive, for instance: I'm not interested. What is this about? Who are you?
prlambert 7y ago
I was the PM on this feature (and these are my views not Googles, as per normal). The truth is actually much more banal. Most people are just really positive over email. The model is trained to offer reply suggestions that have the highest chance of being accepted, from a large whitelist of the most common short replies. The whitelist contains many negative options. We're optimizing for click through rate. That's it. There's no editorial judgement, definitely not "‘no’ struck someone as too negative and they had to take it out." We actually experimented with intentionally inserting more negative options to increase diversity. Doing this reliably causes a hit to our metrics. Discovering this made me pretty happy about the world. Most people are generally pretty friendly to one another (at least over email!).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- valleyer 7y ago
  I'm sure you considered whether optimizing for click-through rate at the expense of diversity of response "moods" (or whatever) was the right tradeoff. Why did you ultimately decide it was?
  - prlambert 7y ago
    We also take qualitative metrics pretty seriously and found that this experience was well received on a more subjective level, high csat in particular. It surpassed the success criteria we set out for the feature and I'm happy about where it landed. Of course it's not going to be ideal for everyone, so we have a setting to disable. To be clearer on our metrics: In addition to qual there's also a precision/recall tradeoff, so saying ctr alone was an oversimplification. We have coverage targets, but that doesn't really impact the positivity of the suggestions.
    - mistermann 7y ago
      I make absolutely no claim of accuracy to your particular situation here, but the unique speaking style you use (unique to a layman, but quite common I suspect among people who find success in SV) made me immediately recall a Noam Chomsky interview I watched quite some time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU The key line being: "I'm sure you believe everything you're saying, but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
cakoose 7y ago
Another explanation: "no" responses require more information. If you are saying yes, then that's basically all you need to say. If you're saying no, you usually also provide a reason, so you probably wouldn't use any of the short, generic "no" responses Gmail would come up with.
- dsl 7y ago
  This was my initial reaction. Every time I use the suggested replies feature it is in the affirmative, because that is an easy response. No takes some wordsmithing I'd rather do myself.
- lozenge 7y ago
  Agreed, there are dozens of ways to say no, and choosing the right one for a particular email is a much more important choice than what phrase you use to say yes.
skybrian 7y ago
This is the new superstition of the digital age: instead of saying "huh, that's funny" when some autocomplete suggestions strike you as odd, invent a myth about your personal relationship to the gods of computing (the big tech firms) to explain it. There are a lot of things about the computers we use that we simply don't understand unless someone tells us (because we weren't involved and don't have access to the code) and yet I guess many people want to pretend that they know what's going on?
aj7 7y ago
I use those prompts more and more. In business communications almost exclusively. I had to return a contract to my termite guy. Gmail guessed right twice.
kkarakk 7y ago
>A lot of ML still comes down to feature engineering i.e. it’s art as much as science. Is it though? Or has this just become the polite way of saying "you don't know what you're doing but I - abe the artistic - do?"
owenwil 7y ago
I don’t really understand why the author is being annoyed about a model that takes time to figure things out based on what it learns from the user. I use these buttons all the time, and they’ve grown to be more useful/accurate as things go on–it’s definitely something I would be sad to lose.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
francescovv 7y ago
OP touches on a slightly tangential topic: This is kind of meta because I’ve turned this autocomplete feature off, I’m sure of it. Did I just do it on my phone? Did my wifi blip so the AJAX didn’t work? I certainly didn’t turn it on. This strike home hard for me, as a pervasive problem. So many tech companies conveniently "forget" about user preferences all the time. For example, on my kobo e-reader, I'm positive I've disabled auto-update. And yet, one day few weeks ago it auto-updated and the new version stopped displaying side-loaded .epub files (from project Guttenberg). No rollback, no appeal. Seller's 2-year warranty has recently expired. Now essentially I have a modestly expensive semi-brick that will only let me read two titles purchased via kobo store, and nothing else
- tomglynch 7y ago
  I have an issue with something similar. I often get emails from email lists where I'm pretty sure I have previously unsubscribed. But I can never be sure if I actually did and they're ignoring it, or if I unsubscribed from something else.
enriquto 7y ago
> Works for me. | I'm down. | Absolutely. As a non-native English speaker these sentences are very confusing to me. I'm not used to English in an informal setting, and they seem overly informal answers with implied meanings.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  They're relatively informal, but they all generally mean "yes" and I would not be against using a response like this when replying to a friend or close acquaintance.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    Wait, does "I'm down" mean "yes" ? I thought it means "I'm a bit depressed".
    - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
      Yes, although as a Brit I see this as an Americanism, it's certainly not common usage here. I believe it's generally used when being invited to an event for example - "Do you want to come bowling with us on Friday?" "I'm down" However, it's not always interchangeable with "yes" - for example: "Did you get the server migration finished over the weekend?" "I'm down" ... Would be completely wrong.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      “I’m feeling down” usually means you’re depressed; “I’m down” is expressing agreement/inclination (as in “I’m down to go eat”).
assholeGobbler 7y ago
You're a fucking moron. The only thing your model is getting trained on is the saccharine social facade. It is as tone deaf as the statistical analysis that predicted with over 90% certainty, the 2016 elections. This feature directly caused me to cease using gmail altogether. How does that fit into your click-through rate analysis?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bananaheel 7y ago
I stopped using gmail because of this feature.
a_imho 7y ago
Now I think black mirror a little, but occam’s razor still prefers incompetence to malice. Hanlon's razor.
gcb0 7y ago
Sounds good! Thanks.
guyromm 7y ago
does anyone remember this little gem? http://www.linehollis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/capture_24072016_173706-cropped-e1473084382629.png http://www.linehollis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/capture...
nullc 7y ago
> You can taste the dank PM sweat dripping from the prompt that instead of saying ‘Yes’, ‘Later’, ‘Never ask me again’, says ‘Yes forever’, ‘Maybe later’. Sooner or later I’m going to slip and tap yes by accident and then some app will get microphone access on my phone. This is exactly how 'enhanced' location access worked on android for years. It would actually grey out "no" option if you told it to save the choice! But on the subject, there was actually a publication on the effort it took to get this system to not just return minor variations of the same answer.

111 points by awinter-py 7y ago

> The day that 20% of consumers put a price tag on privacy, freemium is over and privacy is back. It's ironic coming from person with @gmail.com email. Fastmail's service is $5/month, but they chose the free one which harvests their data instead. If even the privacy advocates are not using their own advice, I doubt freemium is going to be over anytime soon.

skrebbel 7y ago
They could be paying for Gmail (through GSuite). Afair the ToS for GSuite claims they won't harvest your data. Anecdotally, I have my private mail at Fastmail and my work mail at GMail and I've never seen an ad related to work emails (or private emails ofc, but that was to be expected)
jaabe 7y ago
I use gmail and I value privacy, I pay for g-suite though. I tried all of them, fastmail, protonmail, tutanota, Runbox and a few others, and none of them came close to using gmail. So I figured, what the hell, g-suite is around the same price and it gets me 30gb of cloud storage as well. I wish google was a little more clear on where the privacy starts and ends though. Like if you want to use google home with a g-suite, you have to enable a bunch of tracking. I know this has to do with the fact that google wants to separate business from personal use, but really, I don’t want two e-mails.
- Semaphor 7y ago
  Just out of interest, what do you prefer with gmail over fastmail? I find using FM to be a much better experience.
  - ac29 7y ago
    Two things I like about Gmail over Fastmail: - I can have multiple inboxes displayed in Gmail at the same time, such as is:unread or is:starred - I can compose an email while reading another in the same window/tab That being said, there are a lot of things I like about Fastmail over Gmail, notably that its way faster. As an admin (our business uses both Fastmail and Gsuite), I also like how much simpler and more standards compliant Fastmail is as well.
  - owenwil 7y ago
    I’ve never seen a spam message in Gmail, and can’t say the same for the latter.
    - thrower123 7y ago
      I've noticed the GMail spam filter seems to be really poor over the last six months or so. I'm getting obviously spam emails claiming to be from mispelled versions of ADT and insurance companies, with mystery-meat reply-to addresses, that look like they were composed by a drunken six year-old, landing in my inbox almost daily. I mark and report them spam, and yet gmail won't even pick up on them if the same mail comes through again later from the same sender.
  - jaabe 7y ago
    Spam, I got a lot of it on fastmail and even though I kept flagging it as spam, it kept coming. The mobile client, I really like the gmail iOS client. I think fastmail was better than the native iOS mail client, but I just really like the gmail one. Google docs, photos and drive are nice additions, but it’s mainly the first two.
    - Semaphor 7y ago
      I keep reading about the spam problem. Can't confirm that for me. I extremely rarely get spam in my inbox while on gmail I got about the same amounts but also quite a few false positives. The mobile client: I don't know the iOS client but urgh. The Android FM client is pretty lame :D Luckily, I rarely use it. I use next cloud for all docs, images, etc. and neither has an integration so that's a toss-up for me ;)
- beagle3 7y ago
  I used to use gauite (and still do at work) but switched to fastmail for my private stuff, and it feels faster and better in every possible way, with the exception of not having google docs or equiv
- nhooyr 7y ago
  fastmail is a lot nicer on macOS/iOS at least because apple and fastmail partnered to allow push email notifications. http://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-available-in-ios-mail/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-available...
avocado4 7y ago
Lol who would pay for an email service? No reason unless you want g suite bundle.
- majewsky 7y ago
  You pay for a service when you wish to be the customer rather than the product.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> Fastmail's service is $5/month Fastmail also based out of Australia. There are dimensions to hypocrisy, not all of which are relevant from every perspective. Product choice is complexly multi-dimensional. A better response might involve asking why such a proclaimed privacy-conscious consumer remains with Gmail.
- theamk 7y ago
  I suppose you are talking about "Assistance and Access Bill"? I don't see how this relates to this discussion, which is about your email provider using your email text for commercial profits. That said, if you prefer US government to Australian government, I am sure there are also privacy-preserving email providers in US as well. And there is also Swiss Protonmail, outside of both US and UK jurisdictionm, but it is more expensive.

preordained 7y ago

Not to mention always asking me for more information for "recovery..." Get out of my life. I want you for email (for the moment anyhow) and nothing more, that's exactly how I want it, just back off. Even as I say this...I think I really do need to switch to an email provider that understands boundaries, paid or otherwise.

creato 7y ago
I think this is a little over the top. They're pushy about this because they want people to have an account recovery method so people can recover their account if necessary. It really is important to them for that reason. This is probably any online services' single biggest source of customer service headaches: people forgetting/losing their credentials and needing the account unlocked. This is a really problematic thing for companies to deal with because any "human" customer service solution is both expensive but more importantly, very vulnerable to social engineering attacks.

scarejunba 7y ago

This feature is great. Lots of pearl clutching going on. Just type 'No thanks' or whatever if you don't want to go, dude. Seriously. I have this pet theory that the West has achieved safety and peace of such a degree that people have to box shadows to get that little bit of thrill in their lives. No, there's no scary dystopia coming. You've just got to chill. This is like me panicking that Jetbrains wants me to print out secrets to stdout because I typed out sout<tab> while writing something handling a secret. My god! They must be moving us to a scary dystopia where everyone's plaintext password is in logs somewhere where Jetbrains can steal it!

fenwick67 7y ago
Your comment is a long-winded equivalent of "who cares".
- archon810 7y ago
  And it should be at the top of this discussion thread.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Haha, you're absolutely right! I'll do that next time. What a ludicrous post. I can't believe anyone is even taking it seriously.
infinitezest 7y ago
This strikes me as misguided in the opposite direction of OP. Keeping an eye on how we relate to the tech we use every day (and vice versa) is wise, especially as we integrate it into our lives more and more. Maintaining an attitude of "everything is fine now and will always be fine" is a great way to be taken advantage of, particularly when it comes to companies that have such a penetrating reach.
lolc 7y ago
> No, there's no scary dystopia coming. The reason it's not coming may be because there are people actively watching out. It's hard to tell what would happen if we didn't have them. Society gets better because of people willing to tackle hard questions. They are often inconvenient in how they ask you to reconsider life choices. > You've just got to chill. Until you get overlooked by the trained heuristics because they see how exposure to your thoughts cause lower click-through on ads. Then you scream and nobody hears you. And the metrics are all green.

colordrops 7y ago

> Why am I not more pissed about this? I think because ‘maybe yes forever later’ isn’t a sign of G’s dominance or power over my life, it’s a sign that they’re afraid of losing it all and are employing dark patterns to hold on to me. And like most strategies conceived in desperation, it has a 50/50 chance of backfiring and driving people away. This is too optimistic. Google has got a grip on consumers and they will certainly not be driven away by dark patterned prompts. Anyway it's definitely not 50/50.

yeleti 7y ago

My life is locked into one gmail account. All my notifications, passwords, bank statements, invoices, to and fro emails from exes, etc. etc. come to this gmail account. I have to rewind too much of my time to go to every place that uses my gmail account and change it. I can't do it. I'm locked in for life.

taneq 7y ago
And now think what would happen to you if your Gmail account was locked. No recourse, no response except form mails saying "your account is banned because it's banned." No way to recover any other account using it as recovery mail. No way to access your records or email history. Maybe locked out of your phone too. You're boned. That's what made me extract myself from Gmail. I created my new email address and forwarded my Gmail account to it, and then for every email coming to the Gmail address I updated the sender with my new address. It took me about six months before all my important mail was using my new address, but it actually wasn't that hard and I feel hugely less vulnerable to Google's whims. Edit: At the same time I also started using a proper password manager, making me again much less vulnerable to losing an email account because I no longer rely on resetting passwords to get into my multifarious online accounts.
- kkarakk 7y ago
  If your account is banned do your auto reply(canned responses) stop working? Coz that would be a proper stop gap to tell important people(job offers/contact requests for eg) to your website/email you actually use etc.
  - eridius 7y ago
    If your account is banned how would you even set up an auto-reply to tell people about your new email?
    - creatornator 7y ago
      Presumably it would be set up before-hand? If you preferred the other email, you might deprecate the gmail account and set up an auto-reply for all traffic to update contact information. It would require giving up gmail early. The question would be if auto-reply keeps working after being banned

ghayes 7y ago

I’m a little... confused, is this blog post informed by one data point and then extrapolates a set of conclusions / reasons / motives? I can understand the sentiments of the article and poster, but I am not convinced of the premises that Gmail always prepares affirmative responses, and I’d love to see more data on that point specifically.

aeternus 7y ago
I'm also not convinced. I frequently see Gmail suggestions that I would not consider positive, for instance: I'm not interested. What is this about? Who are you?

prlambert 7y ago

I was the PM on this feature (and these are my views not Googles, as per normal). The truth is actually much more banal. Most people are just really positive over email. The model is trained to offer reply suggestions that have the highest chance of being accepted, from a large whitelist of the most common short replies. The whitelist contains many negative options. We're optimizing for click through rate. That's it. There's no editorial judgement, definitely not "‘no’ struck someone as too negative and they had to take it out." We actually experimented with intentionally inserting more negative options to increase diversity. Doing this reliably causes a hit to our metrics. Discovering this made me pretty happy about the world. Most people are generally pretty friendly to one another (at least over email!).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
valleyer 7y ago
I'm sure you considered whether optimizing for click-through rate at the expense of diversity of response "moods" (or whatever) was the right tradeoff. Why did you ultimately decide it was?
- prlambert 7y ago
  We also take qualitative metrics pretty seriously and found that this experience was well received on a more subjective level, high csat in particular. It surpassed the success criteria we set out for the feature and I'm happy about where it landed. Of course it's not going to be ideal for everyone, so we have a setting to disable. To be clearer on our metrics: In addition to qual there's also a precision/recall tradeoff, so saying ctr alone was an oversimplification. We have coverage targets, but that doesn't really impact the positivity of the suggestions.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    I make absolutely no claim of accuracy to your particular situation here, but the unique speaking style you use (unique to a layman, but quite common I suspect among people who find success in SV) made me immediately recall a Noam Chomsky interview I watched quite some time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU The key line being: "I'm sure you believe everything you're saying, but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

cakoose 7y ago

Another explanation: "no" responses require more information. If you are saying yes, then that's basically all you need to say. If you're saying no, you usually also provide a reason, so you probably wouldn't use any of the short, generic "no" responses Gmail would come up with.

dsl 7y ago
This was my initial reaction. Every time I use the suggested replies feature it is in the affirmative, because that is an easy response. No takes some wordsmithing I'd rather do myself.
lozenge 7y ago
Agreed, there are dozens of ways to say no, and choosing the right one for a particular email is a much more important choice than what phrase you use to say yes.

skybrian 7y ago

This is the new superstition of the digital age: instead of saying "huh, that's funny" when some autocomplete suggestions strike you as odd, invent a myth about your personal relationship to the gods of computing (the big tech firms) to explain it. There are a lot of things about the computers we use that we simply don't understand unless someone tells us (because we weren't involved and don't have access to the code) and yet I guess many people want to pretend that they know what's going on?

aj7 7y ago

I use those prompts more and more. In business communications almost exclusively. I had to return a contract to my termite guy. Gmail guessed right twice.

kkarakk 7y ago

>A lot of ML still comes down to feature engineering i.e. it’s art as much as science. Is it though? Or has this just become the polite way of saying "you don't know what you're doing but I - abe the artistic - do?"

owenwil 7y ago

I don’t really understand why the author is being annoyed about a model that takes time to figure things out based on what it learns from the user. I use these buttons all the time, and they’ve grown to be more useful/accurate as things go on–it’s definitely something I would be sad to lose.

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francescovv 7y ago

OP touches on a slightly tangential topic: This is kind of meta because I’ve turned this autocomplete feature off, I’m sure of it. Did I just do it on my phone? Did my wifi blip so the AJAX didn’t work? I certainly didn’t turn it on. This strike home hard for me, as a pervasive problem. So many tech companies conveniently "forget" about user preferences all the time. For example, on my kobo e-reader, I'm positive I've disabled auto-update. And yet, one day few weeks ago it auto-updated and the new version stopped displaying side-loaded .epub files (from project Guttenberg). No rollback, no appeal. Seller's 2-year warranty has recently expired. Now essentially I have a modestly expensive semi-brick that will only let me read two titles purchased via kobo store, and nothing else

tomglynch 7y ago
I have an issue with something similar. I often get emails from email lists where I'm pretty sure I have previously unsubscribed. But I can never be sure if I actually did and they're ignoring it, or if I unsubscribed from something else.

enriquto 7y ago

> Works for me. | I'm down. | Absolutely. As a non-native English speaker these sentences are very confusing to me. I'm not used to English in an informal setting, and they seem overly informal answers with implied meanings.

saagarjha 7y ago
They're relatively informal, but they all generally mean "yes" and I would not be against using a response like this when replying to a friend or close acquaintance.
- enriquto 7y ago
  Wait, does "I'm down" mean "yes" ? I thought it means "I'm a bit depressed".
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    Yes, although as a Brit I see this as an Americanism, it's certainly not common usage here. I believe it's generally used when being invited to an event for example - "Do you want to come bowling with us on Friday?" "I'm down" However, it's not always interchangeable with "yes" - for example: "Did you get the server migration finished over the weekend?" "I'm down" ... Would be completely wrong.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    “I’m feeling down” usually means you’re depressed; “I’m down” is expressing agreement/inclination (as in “I’m down to go eat”).

assholeGobbler 7y ago

You're a fucking moron. The only thing your model is getting trained on is the saccharine social facade. It is as tone deaf as the statistical analysis that predicted with over 90% certainty, the 2016 elections. This feature directly caused me to cease using gmail altogether. How does that fit into your click-through rate analysis?

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bananaheel 7y ago

I stopped using gmail because of this feature.

a_imho 7y ago

Now I think black mirror a little, but occam’s razor still prefers incompetence to malice. Hanlon's razor.

gcb0 7y ago

Sounds good! Thanks.

guyromm 7y ago

does anyone remember this little gem? http://www.linehollis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/capture_24072016_173706-cropped-e1473084382629.png http://www.linehollis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/capture...

nullc 7y ago

> You can taste the dank PM sweat dripping from the prompt that instead of saying ‘Yes’, ‘Later’, ‘Never ask me again’, says ‘Yes forever’, ‘Maybe later’. Sooner or later I’m going to slip and tap yes by accident and then some app will get microphone access on my phone. This is exactly how 'enhanced' location access worked on android for years. It would actually grey out "no" option if you told it to save the choice! But on the subject, there was actually a publication on the effort it took to get this system to not just return minor variations of the same answer.