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> Nothing against paying for services but there's a noticeable and very aggressive drive towards lockin and monetization of its users. Google is an advertising

> Nothing against paying for services but there's a noticeable and very aggressive drive towards lockin and monetization of its users. Google is an advertising business. Always was and always will be. YouTube is an advertising supported service. Compared to normal TV where you’d be watching 8 minutes of ads for every 22 minutes of content, YouTube having you watch 5-30 seconds of ads before you can press the “skip” button is a huge reduction in total ad time relative to TV standards. Yet expectations have shifted so much toward free services that even showing (mostly) skippable shirts ads on the internet seems to make people angry. > - Frontpage search is full of ads Google is a search engine that makes money by showing ads. It shouldn’t be surprising that there are multiple ads on search results. That’s the entire deal with a free search engine. > - Gmail used to have some Infinity plus storage plan but now after 15gb is used you can't receive email. And they're using Photos towards this quota. This seems fair to me. 15GB is a lot of e-mail. The company behind the linked blog post will only give you 1GB free and limit your search capabilities. 10GB will cost you 20 Euros per year. Even Google’s paid annual plans feel like a bargain. Honestly I don’t really see the problem. Google was never a free no-strings-attached provider. There’s a lot of talk about “selling your data” from uninformed critics, but they don’t actually do that. They put ads on services and that’s how they provide them for free. It’s no different than the commercials on TV or the ads covering cheap magazines and newspapers. The only difference really is that internet users are extremely demanding of free services.

chimprich 5y ago
> Google is a search engine that makes money by showing ads. It shouldn’t be surprising that there are multiple ads on search results. Google grew to be a hugely profitable behemoth having a small number of easily distinguishable ads per search page. I don't think anyone is saying that they shouldn't be hosting ads; it's more the ever-decreasing quality of the product. Every few months the number of ads goes up and they become harder to distinguish from content. Meanwhile, the quality of search goes down. Google search now is a significantly worse experience than ten years ago. Despite a decade of engineering advancements and hardware improvements, they keep degrading their own service. Google grew so big despite (or because of) the fact they didn't try to squeeze every last drop of profit out of their business. This generated a lot of goodwill which has now evaporated and gone into the negative.

chimprich 5y ago

> Google is a search engine that makes money by showing ads. It shouldn’t be surprising that there are multiple ads on search results. Google grew to be a hugely profitable behemoth having a small number of easily distinguishable ads per search page. I don't think anyone is saying that they shouldn't be hosting ads; it's more the ever-decreasing quality of the product. Every few months the number of ads goes up and they become harder to distinguish from content. Meanwhile, the quality of search goes down. Google search now is a significantly worse experience than ten years ago. Despite a decade of engineering advancements and hardware improvements, they keep degrading their own service. Google grew so big despite (or because of) the fact they didn't try to squeeze every last drop of profit out of their business. This generated a lot of goodwill which has now evaporated and gone into the negative.