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Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
- mtmail 3y agoRelated from 3 days ago "Gmail is showing ads in the middle of the inbox" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829697
- propogandist 3y agolinks out to a better article and writeup at-least, techradar is a bottom of the barrel content regurgitation outlet https://9to5google.com/2023/05/05/gmail-ads-increase-2023/ https://9to5google.com/2023/05/05/gmail-ads-increase-2023/
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoI hope I don't get hate for this, but I still use my old Yahoo! email account in parallel and I find the email experience much better than what Gmail has become. Especially the use of tabs yahoo enables and the non-intrusive ads on the side make my productivity and multi tasking way better. To me, the only advantage to Gmail is integration with the Google ecosystem, especially for Android users, but purely for email, it seems to have stagnated, but not in a good way like wine, compared to the old HTML days of 2005 when it blew everything out of the water. How Gmail still not have tabs is bewildering to me.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoHonest question: why would you expect hate for using Yahoo mail?
- jorts 3y agoA lot of people like to give you a hard time for using an “old” email address like yahoo, hotmail, or aol.
- bbarn 3y agoI'm more likely to give someone a hard time for using email at all. I find it increasingly less useful every year. Currently it's a massive storage of confirmation emails and receipts for me.
- goldcd 3y agoBut if you look at it as a "unified notification framework with powerful management tools and wide API access" - it's a market-conquering monster.
- the_third_wave 3y agoEmail is just as useable as it was years ago as long as you run your own server. The oft-mentioned spam problem has been dealt with, I hardly ever see any of it - as in maybe a few items per year - and certainly get less spam on my self-hosted addresses than I see on the Gmail-address I keep around for testing whether Gmail accepts mail from my server. This is another ruse often thrown by those who don't believe in self-hosting services, insisting that Google and Microsoft simply refuse to interoperate with self-hosted mail servers. While I can not speak for others I do know this not to be true for my server. It probably comes down to correctly configured SPF and DKIM records, making sure your server does not act as an open relay so as to avoid getting t blacklisted somewhere and using a smarthost (i.e. an authenticated SMTP relay) to send mail. The latter is especially important if your network segment happens to be listed on some DNS blacklist somewhere. Self-hosting has the added advantage of offering "unlimited" storage space, as many addresses using whatever creative schemes you want - I give specific addresses to all commercial/government/organisational institutions I communicate with which allows me to spot who abuses or leaks addresses and makes it possible to block those and only those addresses. SMTP and IMAP have their warts but they remain among the few well-specified open protocols which enable communication with anyone who can follow the standards. Any "successor" to these better be just as open, well-specified and preferably backwards-compatible with SMTP or it probably won't fly.
- hbn 3y agoI think you'd be more likely to get a gentle ribbing from your friends in real life than here on HN where there's a general distaste for the web past 2010 anyway
- nashashmi 3y agoIt is terribly insecure. Leaked passwords. Random account access. Backdoor access for govt. I still use yahoo.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoI think that was a long time ago. Now they have MFA and haven't had any public security incidents.
- nashashmi 3y agoThey also supposedly hash out their passwords now. So the leaked passwords are less of a problem. (I use a completely unique immemorable password.) They also have device key sign in. But somewhere someplace, I cannot trust them on security anymore. I know of a few vulnerabilities that I cannot explain. And so my emails will remain for insecure purposes.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago>Honest question: why would you expect hate for using Yahoo mail? Because every time I read about yahoo on HN it seems to be only negative opinions and in general people look funny at you when they see you with an yahoo email address instead of a Gmail one which has become the norm for average joe consumers. I mean I know they're not a sexy company anymore and they didn't have a competent CEO but their e-mail offering still slaps IMO. I use it mostly for non-critical activates like signing up to websites and online shopping.
- klibertp 3y ago> in general people look funny at you when they see you with an yahoo email address instead of a Gmail That's the only problem I have after migrating to Fastmail: it takes serious effort to make people over the phone understand that I have an email in a different domain. I can spell it letter by letter, but people often still can't figure just where this funny thing I'm dictating should be put. There's a problem with @ sign, too - somehow, people tend to forget it exists. Well, it exists to separate user from domain, and since they don't know the domain part exists, they don't need to know about the separator I guess. TLDR: if not on GMail, you need to make a habit of sending the address in an SMS, forgo all hopes of giving it to someone over the phone.
- nashashmi 3y agoI agree that the Yahoo interface is pleasant. And you can integrate Gmail access into it.
- cout 3y agoI started using gmail so I wouldn't have to worry about properly configuring spamassassin any more. I'm sure there are other services that the spam problem as well as gmail, but as long as the friction of using gmail remains lowish, I will continue using it, because of the time it would take me to decide on and switch to an alternative.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI guess I should have seen this coming. If Google is concerned enough about their bottom line to have layoffs, then presumably they're also looking for low-hanging fruit to (they hope) increase revenue. This reminds me of Microsoft's increased injection of ads into Windows 11. I'm curious if/when market dynamics will limit the extent to which Microsoft/Google do this.
- thesuitonym 3y agoNever gonna happen. If people get so upset that they start moving to other products, then we'll see MSFT and GOOG do what all belligerent companies do when they start losing eyeballs: Increase advertising on the remaining users until they, too, get fed up and leave, and eventually the companies wither and die away. Will that happen? Probably not, but it's more likely than either company realizing they're alienating their users.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoThere are no other platforms though. Even Apple is cramming their apps with ads for their services. They’ve ad-walled me over 20 times in the last 18 months on the way to listen to my music with an Apple Music adwall. Just on my way to listen to MY mp3s.
- thesuitonym 3y agoWhile it's not an excuse, I guess I'll just say that the Apple Music app is not a necessary part of the OS.
- ryukafalz 3y ago> There are no other platforms though. Sure there are. $5/month gets you email/contacts/calendar hosting at Fastmail (and several other similar alternatives). Linux desktops are healthier than ever and have no ads. (Including plenty of music players for playing your own MP3s!) There are countless Fediverse instances that won't advertise at you... there are plenty of options if you look beyond the big players. Now, for phone OSes, your choices are more limited. GrapheneOS with F-Droid is alright for now, though I'd love to see mobile Linux get more usable again.
- rcxdude 3y agoI wondered why the old mobile web interface suddenly has an un-dismissable banner at the top pushing the app.
- TheCaptain67 3y agoVery annoying !!!!!
- laylomo2 3y agoJust another logical step in Google’s brand erosion. After a sufficient erosion has taken place a new CEO will be appointed to “bring back” the old Google. But by then it will be too late.
- rudasn 3y agoMarissa mayer?
- morkalork 3y agoMaybe the new CEO can personally redesign the logo with help from an intern. That should fix things, right?
- handsclean 3y agoI hadn’t heard the back story for this and tried searching it. DuckDuckGo returned generic logo design advice, Google and Bing returned a bunch of results about a similar but different story, Kagi got it in the first result. This was with a very lazy query, just copy-pasting part of the comment, but still telling, I think.
- PurpleRamen 3y agoThe logical step would be Marissa.ai. Google is so deep in AI and Google-Scale optimization, automating their management with an AI including the CEO, should just be a matter of time.
- 90-00-09 3y agoGreat idea! Marissa.ai would have 2 tasks: - redesigning Google logo - buying a failing social network Pretty easy to build I would think.
- htag 3y agoWill it be too late? Balmer's stench is almost completely off Microsoft.
- cozzyd 3y agoGood thing they haven't figured out how to do that in Thunderbird yet...
- bluedino 3y agoOr on my phone
- curt15 3y agoWhat about disabling IMAP access and forcing users to use the Gmail webapp?
- temp12192021 3y agoI guess they could just create bogus entries that show as emails for IMAP/POP users.
- pjmlp 3y agoOnly GMail? YouTube is almost unusable nowadays.
- racl101 3y agoYeah I caved in. Paying now. But I realized I watch more docs on YouTube than any other streaming video platform. More than Netflix, more than Prime, more than Disney+, more than HBO. So I cancelled Netflix and Disney+ and now just keep HBO and Prime. I don't love Prime but I still like the Prime delivery. So whatever, makes sense. I consume YouTube the most. Might as well not make my life hell and suffer through adds.
- hobs 3y agoOr just use adblock and never see any?
- nickthegreek 3y agoOnly if you are watching via web browser.
- propogandist 3y agoBrave browser and/or UBO on Firefox does the job, while preventing Google from building profile about logged in YT watching habits.
- mdasen 3y agoI've been so happy moving my email to iCloud. It isn't perfect or anything, but it's nice having email that's just boring IMAP. Apple takes my $1 each month for custom domain support and 50GB of storage and I get their hide-my-email service.
- layer8 3y agoJust as a minor caveat, Gmail has an email size limit of 25 MB while iCloud Mail has a limit of only 20 MB. When moving an email archive from Gmail to iCloud, that difference can cause an issue for large (> 20 MB) emails, where you have to remove attachments or similar if you don’t want to lose those messages completely.
- shuckles 3y agoThe $1 also includes iCloud Private Relay. It’s among the best deals (non-open source) in big tech.
- sys_64738 3y agoI moved all vital email for financials, banks, etc., to iCloud and leave the dross in GMail nowadays. Given that folk are lock out of GMail for breathing the wrong air, it's in your best interests to protect yourself from Google going rogue.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoThe availability of free email services is a wonderful thing. But if email is important to you, it probably shouldn't be in Gmail.
- mikro2nd 3y agoThe email that is important to me is not in Gmail. Gmail is there for all the throwaway/don't-care email, like signing up to websites I "don't know" or for corporate zombie OSIAs[1]. [1] Old Slow AIs, aka "companies". http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artifici...
- yamtaddle 3y agoIn the US, it's pretty ridiculous that the USPS isn't doing email yet. Free account with some strict limits (especially on per-day sending) for all residents, paid options available, support at post office locations and partner libraries. It's nigh-necessary for communicating with government and participating in the economy—USPS ought to do email.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoThat would make a ton of sense to me. It fits in with the USPS' existing mission, and would ensure a brick and mortar location citizens could prove their real physical identity to regain access to their online account. It probably wouldn't help you escape email ads though, the USPS is heavily funded by bulk mail.
- roothog 3y agoThe USPS is a terrible spam blocker.
- yamtaddle 3y agoOh, definitely, but it'd at least (ideally, though not necessarily) make it easy to filter for messages from e.g. official government accounts or real individuals something like that. I wouldn't expect any spam blocking from them, really, but rather an easy way to isolate the important messages. Which is like spam blocking, but in reverse, and is something they could be uniquely positioned to do very effectively. Then again, they allow mail that fraudulently tries to appear "official" or important when it's just an ad (and sometimes an outright scam!) so all that would have to be legislated to ensure it happens, I suppose. Would love to see "mail system reform" on a party platform, but I guess that doesn't get the voters out.
- josefresco 3y ago"A distinct lack of announcement has so far been evident." Was this written by AI? No sources, no screenshots.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoGoogle now seems deep into the enshittification [1] process. Of all the big tech companies, they seemed the most customer-friendly, the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose. But I guess the economic logic of tying executive compensation to short-term share price simply overwhelmed other considerations. The stock must go up, so revenues must grow, so Google must monetize everything to the maximum extent. There is (or was, anyway) an opportunity for a very long-term play in which Google or similar companies resist the profit urge, make enough money to cover costs and sock away plenty for moonshots and continued development. Focused on optimizing products for users, rather than for revenue, they could have become the Everything platform. But I guess now it's time to start looking at different email providers. [1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
- cout 3y agoDid you mean to say customer-friendly or user-friendly?
- o10449366 3y agoCustomer-friendly? Maybe if you've never required support or human engagement for any issue. If you have, Google is by far the worst among the big tech companies.
- georgyo 3y agoIf you have Google Fi, it's surprising how good support it. Create a request and a real person calls you within 5 minutes to help out. They are actually helpful as well. The best part is you don't go through 15 minutes of robo voice assistance debugging hell.
- mynameisash 3y agoI have Google Fi, and I like the support, but I also want to call out that being better than the other telcos is a very low bar.
- nologic01 3y agoHave people tried/documented gmail to proton migrations? There is a forwarding functionality that could reduce the migration pain but you never know what kind of can of worms you might get into.
- Tutanota 3y agoHi there, Tutanota team here, we've compiled a guide how to forward from Gmail to any service, works also for Tutanota. ;) https://tutanota.com/gmail-alternative#switch https://tutanota.com/gmail-alternative#switch
- metters 3y agoDon’t know what users here think about posting links to one’s own site, but I’ll risk it. I migrated from gmail to proton, and wrote down the steps and experience. [1] Should be the same for tutanota or others, don’t know about migration script (easy switch) of others, though. For me it worked without any hiccups. [1] https://blog.metters.dev/posts/leaving-gmail-behind/ https://blog.metters.dev/posts/leaving-gmail-behind/
- nologic01 3y agoThats a really useful overview
- tombert 3y agoFundamentally I think I've put a line in the sand that I will just pay for things instead of being bombarded with advertisements. As a kid I didn't have any money and so I put up with ads, but now as a yuppie with plenty of cash, I feel it's better to not constantly be sold to. I've been happy with Protonmail, they don't charge a prohibitive amount. Kagi is also ok. I wish there was a good alternative to YouTube, but sadly basically every YouTube competitor (e.g. Odysee, Bitchute) seems to just become a dumping ground for a bunch of neo-Nazi idiots, but at least YouTube does have YouTube premium, and I can skip through the sponsored ExpressVPN and Raycon ads.
- retrocryptid 3y agoHmm... I look at my Google mail through Thunderbird and have yet to see an increase in ads. I don't put it past Google to insert ads as downloadable messages, though.
- ben7799 3y agoThis might be the thing that makes me go to a zero google experience. I have mostly been off search for a while. Gmail is the stickiest thing by far. enshittification indeed.
- robotburrito 3y agoI switched to fastmail.com a few years ago. It's not expensive and so far seems to work quite well for me.
- 8organicbits 3y agoThere's a thousand little things that just feel better with fastmail. Loading the Gmail webapp is so slow that I sometimes switch to HTML only. Fastmail: fast. Or if I get a message, I read it via a mobile app notification, and decide to delete it. For Gmail I need to open open the app to find a delete button. Fastmail lets you do that from the notification. I assume Gmail is trying to prioritize archive over delete, but I actually want to delete things. I forgot Gmail has ads since I block them, but I never would have believed in 2006 that Gmail would one day look like these screenshots. Horrible.
- 8organicbits 3y agoJust noticed another... I've long considered Gmail's spam filtering to be top notch. Gmail is currently marking messages from google.com/alerts as spam. Google doesn't seem to be paying attention to their products.
- ydant 3y agoI was reading this thread thinking, "I haven't noticed any ads on Gmail"... then remembered I've been using Fastmail for more than a year on my personal account. So I guess that's a good thing - the fact I'm using Fastmail and not Gmail anymore just mainly disappeared from my consciousness.
- quyleanh 3y agoMaps, Photos, Drive will go after soon. I just see Facebook somewhere. Ads everywhere even when people leaving it.
- dzek69 3y agoAnd who says it? A site that first try to trick me into letting them sell my data for ads, then displays up to 8 ads at the same time on a screen (there are more if I scroll), then wants to install a constant advertising script into my computer (allow notifications popup) and when I wanted just to close this thing it advertised me their newsletter. And they have courage to reproach others for adding advertisements to their product, lol
- jjulius 3y agoStopped clocks, and such.
- LeonM 3y agoJust to be clear: Gmail is displaying ads for free use of Gmail. If you pay for Gmail (Google Workspaces, previously known as G-Suite) then they do not serve ads.
- kavalg 3y agoSure, but for how long?
- setheron 3y agoIs it worth paying for workspace? If I'm a single person? I'm open to paying $100 for Google products. I already paid for Google one
- consp 3y agoAlso not for those using the free (soon to be killed off over and over again story) legacy version. Almost switched since they were going to kill it but was too lazy to do it straight away and they didn't do it in the end, so lucky me.
- kmac_ 3y agoI pay for Google One and still have adds in Gmail.
- mikro2nd 3y ago"free use of Gmail" but only if you're using Google's email client. If you're using the POP (and, presumably, IMAP) API, you're not going to see any ads, amiright?
- LeonM 3y agoAFAIK you don't get ads in the Google email client as well, only when using gmail.com from your browser. When using any POP/IMAP client, you won't get ads as the POP/IMAP protocol has no provisioning for it. Unless Google injects the ad into the email body (which is near impossible to do reliably) they cannot show ads even if they want to.
- 3y ago
- MAGZine 3y agoGoogle's products do seem to be getting progressively shittier, in profound and confusing ways. take their home assistant, which used to be able to find information online and compose an answer to your natural langauges queries. Now she just says "I don't know, but I found this online..." Google Search seems to be getting truly terrible. Results completely unrelated to what I'm looking for are placing in the first page of results. Android seems to get more janky by the day. Lots of UI elements across different apps that mostly work, but sometimes don't. Holding the power button no longer turns off your phone, but instead opens voice assistant(?!) Changing a long-standing and universal power-off gesture to what used to be the screenshot gesture was rage inducing when I had to go and figure out how to power off my phone again. Content sharing is a disaster on Android too. They keep INSISTING you use their specific 'share' buttons for webpages, none of which are consistent. Sharing a link from Google Now? click the share icon, then copy. Do not use the "Copy link" button, which only sometimes works. Using google image search? Hit the three dots icon, and then "share" text, and then click copy. Don't you dare try and long press on the image. I assume funneling everything through the OS share menu adds telemetry to both what is being shared, and who it is going to. Removing the fingerprint reader from the back of the pixel devices is a huge flop imo. It was very useful to bring down the setting shade, and was way more reliably than the under-screen reader. And now they have a foldable pixel device. I've never seen anyone use a foldable phone. It's like nobody at Google actually uses their products. I've been a long-time android user but it's becoming harder to justify as nobody at Google actually seems to give a damn about their products anymore. :-(
- tsunamifury 3y agoIt’s becoming equally shitty on the the apple side of the fence as well. To the point where I barely see daylight between iOS and pixel. Which is a huge drop for apple.
- rchaud 3y agoI agree that the "Share" modal on Android is one of the most confusing parts of the OS. It makes more sense if you try thinking of it as UI kludge, a halfway measure that tries to speak to an audience of 'digital natives' who didn't grow up with copy/paste and multi-window tasking, as well as the prior generation accustomed to more traditional computing functions.
- DerekBickerton 3y agoI liken this to a sesame seed bun manufacturer. After some experimentation, they realize that shaving roughly 10 sesame seeds from each bun means they save one cent every 100 buns. They continue to sell the buns at the normal price and consumers are none the wiser: After all, who's going to notice 10 sesame seeds missing? But the sesame seed bun manufacturer continues the experiment. They continue to remove the seeds, making small savings each time, until eventually: they just start selling buns with no sesame seeds. The bun sells for the same price as the seeded one. But the core value prop has been lost due to greed. Exactly what's happening here at Google.
- twelfthnight 3y agoThis is actually a real thing. I worked at a consulting company partnered with McDonald's and they asked if we could help them optimize the number of sesame seeds on their burger buns.
- skippyboxedhero 3y agoAlso raises the question: why does an executive need a consulting company to tell them to put less seeds on the bun? We can accept that "optimize" does not mean more...so...?
- s1artibartfast 3y agoThe question makes perfect sense to me. I don't know the ideal number of seeds on a bun off hand, and don't expect the executive does either. Do you know it?
- skippyboxedhero 3y agoWhy would me knowing it matter? So shareholders are paying for the exec, and they are paying for the consultant who is doing the exec's job? If you work as an exec at MCD, working this out is the kind of thing that you should know. It is the reason why you are being paid money to be there.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoThis is part of why I chose a paid e-mail service. 1: No ads, ever 2: No reason to sell my data. They already have income, and if users found out they were selling data, they'd quickly bail from it (At least with the service I use, which is aimed more at users with privacy concerns), which would ruin their steady revenue. 3: Actually a reason to IMPROVE the product, because again, users will leave if the competition is better. Plus, it's not that bad price-wise. I think it comes out to $3 a month for what I do with a yearly sub.
- charcircuit 3y agoHow do you quickly bail from email? It is a lot of effort to switch to a new email. The friction to levave is so high that your points 2 and 3 are not true.
- ydant 3y agoIf you own your own domain name for your email, then it's pretty simple and will take a few hours of effort to get fully moved over. Part of why I pushed myself to move away from Gmail was I was still using the @gmail address occasionally. Luckily, I'd been using my own domains for a long time for most emails, so it's been a pretty easy transition - I still have Fastmail poll Gmail for emails to make sure I see the ones that still go to @gmail.
- TheBozzCL 3y agoThat's easy for tech people... but an insurmountable hurdle for everyone else. I say that as a techie with his own domain.
- tomjen3 3y agoI am in the process of doing that, and my answer has been to move all the things that I can to the new account, and then keep the old one around until nothing more I care about comes there. And you can be I own the domain for the new email. Not going to make that mistake again.
- 3y ago
- 1101010010 3y agoManufactured outrage to distract from the far more sinister and subtle behavioral management constantly at work on google users.
- 1024core 3y agoGoogle is run by MBAs now. This is all they know: how to maximize for next quarter's profits, or profits until their RSUs vest.
- account42 3y agoPerhaps this is a good thing. Google has gotten too big and to many people rely on it in various ways. If Google cannibalizes itself then noone will need to bother killing it.
- esafak 3y agoSo the world can use bing instead? MS is standing right behind Google.
- rchaud 3y agoGoogle went public almost 2 decades ago, ads have always been their bread and butter. "MBA" on Hacker News at this point is just code for "Engineering leadership is greedy".
- charcircuit 3y agoIf you have a holdout group that doesn't get this new ad experience you can test if this change in okay to do long term. It's possible Google mispredicted how much ads were willing to tolerate and have been showing too few ads. Finding the right amount of ads is not optimising for the short term.
- 1024core 3y agoGoogle has been showing Ads for 20+ years. Did they _just now_ discover that users will tolerate more ads? BTW: it's very hard running a long-term study about the ad load. It is too noisy. And you can read whatever you want to read in such studies.
- archsurface 3y agoI afraid at this point, this topic being so old now, that anyone still using google products is a bit of a laggard. People have been going google-free for ages because of the ever worsening experience - search this site, you don't need me to provide refs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoSlightly off topic but has anyone experienced an increase of spam messages yhat are not caught? Actually not just spam but actual phishing emails. I’d swear I only saw these for the fist time in the past year or so after many years using gmail. Maybe the percentage of spam making it through has not increased over the years but many more spam messages are being sent?
- SanjayMehta 3y agoNo ads on IMAP, so there's a simple fix.
- heavyset_go 3y agoThey've also scaled up the amount of ads I see on Chromecast devices. When I first bought one, I didn't see any ads. When I started to see ads, simply using an adblocker was enough. Ads eventually circumvented my network-level ad blocking and DNS. I'd see an ad every once in a while on YouTube. Sometimes ads would play after watching videos. Then ads would play before casted videos. Then videos would get interrupted to show ads on the Chromecast. Then videos would be interrupted multiple times per video. Then ads would play between videos. On top of all of that, they're playing multiple ads per ad break now. I thought that was bad, but then I saw what kinds of ads my friends and family were seeing on YouTube via their streaming devices. Google learned that my friend would watch YouTube videos at night to go to sleep. So how does Google exploit that situation for maximum ad revenue? The YouTube app will show 30+ minute ads at night, one after the other, since they'll likely be asleep as they play. The app knows that they won't skip those absurdly long ads.
- systemtest 3y agoI pay 140 euro per year for Microsoft 365 Business Standard. That includes an Exchange server, 1TB of storage and licenses for Office products. No ads, no data-scraping and I even have business support in case something doesn't work.
- esafak 3y agoOnly problem is, now you've got a bunch of Microsoft products on your hands.
- somsak2 3y agorefers to "many screenshots" and yet provides none of them in the actual article, classic. anyone have actual references to what this looks like?
- Arcuru 3y agoI'm confused, I never see any ads in Gmail (using the web interface or the mobile app), and I don't pay for it. Is that really still a thing? If my email app was showing me ads I'd obviously switch and/or start paying for it.
- rchaud 3y agoI haven't seen an ad on Gmail since at least 2010. I remember it because how snappy the email interface was back then.
- abraham 3y agoGmail seems to only show ads if you have categories on. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3094499?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3094499?hl=en&co=GENI...
- hartator 3y agoNice. Last still-good Google product that they will manage to kill.
- uses 3y agoRemember when gmail first came out like almost 20 years ago? You had to get an invite! People loved it. It was a big deal - it made people actually love google. It wasn't just a search engine, it was this awesome company making awesome things and sharing them with you and it just made so much sense. Gmail was a billion times better than the alternatives (hotmail? yahoo mail?) and the competition just looked lazy and bad. The early 2000s was a wild time when the internet and computers got fast enough that it was unleashing all these pent up ideas that suddenly could actually work. But nowadays it's like nobody knows what to do next, so we just spin our wheels optimizing ads and making the world terrible with recommender systems.
- JamesAdir 3y agoYou're right and the problem is that I can't think of any product from Google for the last 10 years that had the same effect.
- munificent 3y agoCan you think of any product from any company in the past ten years that has made you feel that way?
- 90-00-09 3y agoOur digital footprints expanded dramatically in the last 10-20 years. While not a single app, a combination of apps made me feel "better" in a way that Gmail made me feel all these years ago. This February I switched to Kagi, Proton Mail, Bitwarden, Apple Calendar/Reminders/Notes. This combination made me feel like I am once again in control of my digital life and can be more productive without sacrificing attention.
- rubatuga 3y agoI'm really impressed by free web apps like figma! It almost feels like a native app due to their use of WASM.
- rubslopes 3y ago
- gliixo 3y agoAs of a couple days ago, I've completely nuked all my google stuff. Migrated over to Firefox and duckduckgo completely. Google has completely lost me. Search results are awful, everything is just awful. It really is a shame
- b33j0r 3y agoGood thing I mostly use it as my identity and rarely actually use my inbox anymore. When two people per year are surprised or upset that I didn’t see their e-mail, I tell them just to call me and leave it for the tape machine if I miss them. E-mail has some important uses still, but come on… when was the last time you wrote a virtual letter to your friend? Another example. We all have to print documents pretty much once a year these days. So I fix my printer once a year. The office worker on the other end of the (ugh) phone is always so confused that I am not dealing with reams of paper every week. I call it progress.
- zeruch 3y agoAs others have stated, the enshittification curve is a hockey stick, and the decline will only accelerate until they either have a Nadella/Grove/Jobs moment, or they turn into the new Yahoo (or worse).
- user3939382 3y agoThe dividends of switching to Fastmail just keep piling up. Gmail is so far back in the rear view mirror I can barely see it.
- metters 3y agoTrue for most, if not any, reputable email service provider besides Google, MS, and Co.