8 ms·

I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email and search, but there isn't much to this article. An old gmail account being noi

I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email and search, but there isn't much to this article. An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address. Airtable has some nice functionality, but I don't think it's head-and-shoulders above sheets and this article doesn't give me any reason to change my mind. Same things goes for Meet vs Zoom. Honestly, despite Google's history of trashing projects I'd put my money on gmail/docs outliving hey/notion and so he might just be planting the seeds of a painful switch later. When I switched my email I did it with a domain I own so that I can avoid the same fate. That's not to say google doesn't have problems. Privacy aside, ads as a primary source of revenue can have a negative effect on usability of their products (like search), but I wouldn't call that "squandering a 10-year lead", it's more like "failure to find a second golden goose"

jurassic 6y ago
> An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address. Hey's screener feature shows there's a lot of room to innovate on giving users control of their attention beyond the filters and labels that Gmail has deemed sufficient for more than a decade now. Setting up forwarding to use Hey as a read client for my incoming gmail email has shown me that my address being old and public is not the problem. Inbox had bundling that was a promising direction, but that seems to have been scrapped when they shut that client down. I'm not a tinfoil hat person and don't really mind being tracked, but it doesn't surprise me that a company that makes its living off monetizing attention would never lead on giving control of it back to users.
- kikki 6y ago
  I watched the HEY video and I don't get it - the screener feature is not innovation - it's a block list with a different name. Gmail has this. The way Jason hyped up every feature and then you realise it's something that already exists with a special "product name" (Imbox, really?). I can see why people buy into the marketing speak but look a little deeper.
  - jurassic 6y ago
    Gmail does not have this. Hey inverts the default behavior to one that is consent-based, and things can only reach your inbox if you thumbs up the first time they send something to you. This is not some minor technical point, it is at the core of Hey's value proposition. In Gmail, the default is that everything gets to you and it's up to you to play whackamole with filters and unsubscribes, requiring several clicks each time. In addition to the simple whitelist behavior, on the initial Hey screening you can (with a single click) route second-tier messages into Feed and Paper Trail, which is a much better UX than what you can build in gmail by creating a filter for every sender that labels + autoarchives.
    - kikki 6y ago
      Look a little deeper. Your "screener" section is an inbox. You can either whitelist or blacklist messages that come into here. In your Gmail inbox, you can also block addresses and never see them again. It is the same interaction - no matter what marketing spin you put on it. If that's HEY's value proposition, then they're in for a rude awakening. Personally, I think the proposition is simply using something other than Gmail, which is a fine enough reason without needing to put any marketing spin on it. $99 for an alternative though is a difficult ask.
      - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
        The entire point is that it's separated, that you have two separate inboxes. The underlying mechanism is the same, but the user experience is quite different. In my opinion it's similar to Roam in that the framing leads to a different workflow, even though neither has any truly revolutionary "technical feature". If you think this is just "marketing spin", I think you're simply not part of the target demographic, which is people that have currently have issues with e-mail.
  - agentdrtran 6y ago
    Gmail does not have something like Hey's screener.
hodgesrm 6y ago
The article rings completely true to me. One simple example: folders in Google Drive. * It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily. * Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist. * Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find them easily as well. I don't understand why Google does not get how important this is for business documents. It's a breath of fresh air to use Dropbox or Box at this point.
- deelowe 6y ago
  I'm confused. Doesn't shared drives solve this problem? You can set up a group, created a shared drive for that group, and then everyone has access to what's stored within it.
  - milesskorpen 6y ago
    Shared Drives are a disaster, because the files in them are removed from your personal drive which makes them less discoverable for you. They work when highly managed (e.g., our training team for sales org) but not for product development teams in my experience. The expanding symlink functionality makes everything worse, because people think they're moving folders, but they're not, and permissions don't get rationalized. Ugh.
- fireattack 6y ago
  Can you elaborate more? I have no issues to put files or Google Docs in whatever folders I want in Google Drive, and they stay where they are (after all, Google Drive has local sync. It would be unusable if they don't).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - callmeal 6y ago
    The issue is when there's more than one team that needs access. There are multiple ways to share a document and the links to the original are all different (based on how it was shared: via a shared drive or via a shared folder or via a shared document link). And finding that shared document (if you don't remember how it was shared in the first place) can be a nightmare. Sometimes you don't have a choice - we are a small team, and we're pretty good about using a shared drive and a shared folder. But sometimes you have to share a document with an external collaborator (or someone in another firm shares a document with you). And if you forgot how that document was shared, then google makes it practically impossible to find the original.
SenHeng 6y ago
We recently switched from Meet back to Zoom, because Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset. Zoom does some kind of active noise-cancelling where it will avoid picking up whatever the person on the other end just said, preventing the echo effect. Meet doesn't, it picks up everything. So if you use a speaker, everything the other person says gets repeated back at them. When Meet recently announced noise-cancelling, we got really excited, only to be disappointed when they were referring to cancelling of background noises and not of participants.
- agustamir 6y ago
  > Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset Really? Is that restriction on desktop or mobile? I've been using speaker mode on meet(mobile) for a while now. Or is it implicitly imposed by you due to lack of noise cancelling features?
  - mdoms 6y ago
    No this is definitely not correct for mobile or web platforms. You 100% do not need a headset, although you should use one because Meet's echo cancellation is pretty aggressive and causes all kinds of problems without a headset.
  - SenHeng 6y ago
    It's not a technical imposition, if that's what you're asking. We can use speakers with Meet, but then everyone now hears themselves speaking.
hinkley 6y ago
Last spring I sat down to binge re-watch a TV series and just went back through my inbox looking for every mailing list I was on, unsubscribe, and then delete all previous messages. Probably took 8 hours total, but I deleted thousands of messages and now I get about 6 messages a day in my inbox, most of them from humans or services I just recently used. It’s worth my time to look at it again.
- mostlysimilar 6y ago
  I do this every few months and it feels amazing each time. Even if I'm intentional about unchecking the marketing email boxes, somehow I still end up on dozens of mailing lists.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    I've recently been bothered because I hate all my email clients (except Outlook, weirdly enough, but I don't want to use Outlook with my Gmail accounts, because tag support isn't awesome...) and realized, of course, half my problem is I'm trying to manage too many emails I have no interest in reading. There are a lot of newsletters I like, though.. for things related to fitness and outdooring, that are wholly in the "sign up for this virtual version of the event you were interested in!" and I've simply resigned myself to unsubscribing from all of them. I'll figure all this out later, but so much email feels like the parts of the web and RSS I work hard to avoid. So, unsubscribe it is... (That said, I've been trying HEY, and I don't like it [Such. Big. Fonts.] but I do like their "bundle" feature, and I wish I could set tags in Gmail to auto-delete after //n// days... that would make some things nicer to live with.)
    - hinkley 6y ago
      I have separate folders for these 'someday' mailing lists. It's like your attic. If you really needed the stuff it would be downstairs, but until you run out of space you can't convince yourself to get rid of any of it.
laxatives 6y ago
How did you transition your email address? I've wanted to get off, but I can't do that without wiping all of my previous conversations or losing contact with many people.
- loughnane 6y ago
  I still have the old emails in gmail, I just moved to protonmail for new things and put up a vacation autoresponder. letting people know I don't use it anymore. I might migrate, but honestly I don't go through old emails almost ever, so I'll prob just export an .mbox and deal with importing it sometime in the future if I ever need it.

jurassic 6y ago

> An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address. Hey's screener feature shows there's a lot of room to innovate on giving users control of their attention beyond the filters and labels that Gmail has deemed sufficient for more than a decade now. Setting up forwarding to use Hey as a read client for my incoming gmail email has shown me that my address being old and public is not the problem. Inbox had bundling that was a promising direction, but that seems to have been scrapped when they shut that client down. I'm not a tinfoil hat person and don't really mind being tracked, but it doesn't surprise me that a company that makes its living off monetizing attention would never lead on giving control of it back to users.

kikki 6y ago
I watched the HEY video and I don't get it - the screener feature is not innovation - it's a block list with a different name. Gmail has this. The way Jason hyped up every feature and then you realise it's something that already exists with a special "product name" (Imbox, really?). I can see why people buy into the marketing speak but look a little deeper.
- jurassic 6y ago
  Gmail does not have this. Hey inverts the default behavior to one that is consent-based, and things can only reach your inbox if you thumbs up the first time they send something to you. This is not some minor technical point, it is at the core of Hey's value proposition. In Gmail, the default is that everything gets to you and it's up to you to play whackamole with filters and unsubscribes, requiring several clicks each time. In addition to the simple whitelist behavior, on the initial Hey screening you can (with a single click) route second-tier messages into Feed and Paper Trail, which is a much better UX than what you can build in gmail by creating a filter for every sender that labels + autoarchives.
  - kikki 6y ago
    Look a little deeper. Your "screener" section is an inbox. You can either whitelist or blacklist messages that come into here. In your Gmail inbox, you can also block addresses and never see them again. It is the same interaction - no matter what marketing spin you put on it. If that's HEY's value proposition, then they're in for a rude awakening. Personally, I think the proposition is simply using something other than Gmail, which is a fine enough reason without needing to put any marketing spin on it. $99 for an alternative though is a difficult ask.
    - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
      The entire point is that it's separated, that you have two separate inboxes. The underlying mechanism is the same, but the user experience is quite different. In my opinion it's similar to Roam in that the framing leads to a different workflow, even though neither has any truly revolutionary "technical feature". If you think this is just "marketing spin", I think you're simply not part of the target demographic, which is people that have currently have issues with e-mail.
- agentdrtran 6y ago
  Gmail does not have something like Hey's screener.

hodgesrm 6y ago

The article rings completely true to me. One simple example: folders in Google Drive. * It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily. * Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist. * Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find them easily as well. I don't understand why Google does not get how important this is for business documents. It's a breath of fresh air to use Dropbox or Box at this point.

deelowe 6y ago
I'm confused. Doesn't shared drives solve this problem? You can set up a group, created a shared drive for that group, and then everyone has access to what's stored within it.
- milesskorpen 6y ago
  Shared Drives are a disaster, because the files in them are removed from your personal drive which makes them less discoverable for you. They work when highly managed (e.g., our training team for sales org) but not for product development teams in my experience. The expanding symlink functionality makes everything worse, because people think they're moving folders, but they're not, and permissions don't get rationalized. Ugh.
fireattack 6y ago
Can you elaborate more? I have no issues to put files or Google Docs in whatever folders I want in Google Drive, and they stay where they are (after all, Google Drive has local sync. It would be unusable if they don't).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- callmeal 6y ago
  The issue is when there's more than one team that needs access. There are multiple ways to share a document and the links to the original are all different (based on how it was shared: via a shared drive or via a shared folder or via a shared document link). And finding that shared document (if you don't remember how it was shared in the first place) can be a nightmare. Sometimes you don't have a choice - we are a small team, and we're pretty good about using a shared drive and a shared folder. But sometimes you have to share a document with an external collaborator (or someone in another firm shares a document with you). And if you forgot how that document was shared, then google makes it practically impossible to find the original.

SenHeng 6y ago

We recently switched from Meet back to Zoom, because Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset. Zoom does some kind of active noise-cancelling where it will avoid picking up whatever the person on the other end just said, preventing the echo effect. Meet doesn't, it picks up everything. So if you use a speaker, everything the other person says gets repeated back at them. When Meet recently announced noise-cancelling, we got really excited, only to be disappointed when they were referring to cancelling of background noises and not of participants.

agustamir 6y ago
> Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset Really? Is that restriction on desktop or mobile? I've been using speaker mode on meet(mobile) for a while now. Or is it implicitly imposed by you due to lack of noise cancelling features?
- mdoms 6y ago
  No this is definitely not correct for mobile or web platforms. You 100% do not need a headset, although you should use one because Meet's echo cancellation is pretty aggressive and causes all kinds of problems without a headset.
- SenHeng 6y ago
  It's not a technical imposition, if that's what you're asking. We can use speakers with Meet, but then everyone now hears themselves speaking.

hinkley 6y ago

Last spring I sat down to binge re-watch a TV series and just went back through my inbox looking for every mailing list I was on, unsubscribe, and then delete all previous messages. Probably took 8 hours total, but I deleted thousands of messages and now I get about 6 messages a day in my inbox, most of them from humans or services I just recently used. It’s worth my time to look at it again.

mostlysimilar 6y ago
I do this every few months and it feels amazing each time. Even if I'm intentional about unchecking the marketing email boxes, somehow I still end up on dozens of mailing lists.
- jasonv 6y ago
  I've recently been bothered because I hate all my email clients (except Outlook, weirdly enough, but I don't want to use Outlook with my Gmail accounts, because tag support isn't awesome...) and realized, of course, half my problem is I'm trying to manage too many emails I have no interest in reading. There are a lot of newsletters I like, though.. for things related to fitness and outdooring, that are wholly in the "sign up for this virtual version of the event you were interested in!" and I've simply resigned myself to unsubscribing from all of them. I'll figure all this out later, but so much email feels like the parts of the web and RSS I work hard to avoid. So, unsubscribe it is... (That said, I've been trying HEY, and I don't like it [Such. Big. Fonts.] but I do like their "bundle" feature, and I wish I could set tags in Gmail to auto-delete after //n// days... that would make some things nicer to live with.)
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I have separate folders for these 'someday' mailing lists. It's like your attic. If you really needed the stuff it would be downstairs, but until you run out of space you can't convince yourself to get rid of any of it.

laxatives 6y ago

How did you transition your email address? I've wanted to get off, but I can't do that without wiping all of my previous conversations or losing contact with many people.

loughnane 6y ago
I still have the old emails in gmail, I just moved to protonmail for new things and put up a vacation autoresponder. letting people know I don't use it anymore. I might migrate, but honestly I don't go through old emails almost ever, so I'll prob just export an .mbox and deal with importing it sometime in the future if I ever need it.