Google 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.
Customer-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.
If 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.
I have Google Fi and I believe your information is out of date. When it turned from Project Fi to Google Fi there were other changes made, and support turned to absolute crap. Not only that but buying phones from Google Fi is super risky now, as the phones keep getting stolen in transit and then Google refuses to do anything. Even more of an issue is that they've outsourced their phone insurance to another company that denies all claims.
Google Fi is a perfect example of how horrible Google is at customer service. They start new projects with reasonable CS but they simply can not scale it as the service takes on more users- or they drop it on purpose to improve their margins.
Yeah, isn't this the company that is notorious for screwing account holders with AI automoderation? Like the Terraria dev that was reportedly locked out of his email while working on a Stadia port.
Except maybe eBay. I wanted to call eBay and ask how I purchase a support contract so I could report a bug in their returns system, but there's no way to contact them for that. But yeah... they're at the same level.
I almost lost ~$10k when selling some NVIDIA GPUs on eBay but the buyer claimed they had "fallen out" of the box.
I had insurance on the box but the buyer wouldn't return the box to Fedex for inspection. (Because it was fraud)
Getting this fixed was excruciating and ended up having to DM people on LinkedIn and guess their internal e-mail addresses to get this resolved. Absolutely horrible!
Just had an excellent experience getting a warranty exchange on my Pixel Watch that stopped taking a charge. Talked to a real person within 2 minutes and the whole call was complete in 18 minutes.
>the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose
Not entirely true. They are squeezed left and right by Apple. Google pay Apple per active user as the default search engine. As Apple continue to increase their user base, the higher the total cost for Google to remain default. All while Apple, in the name of privacy and fundamental human right, started a crusade against online ads, mainly targeting Facebook but tactically taking Google along with it. In order for Google and Facebook to keep the same profit margin with declining CPM, they have to place more ads to compensate for it. Which is the whole starting point of enshittification. This may also have some negative side effect on Google image and Android, and more people switching to Apple.
>There is (or was, anyway) an opportunity for a very long-term play in which Google
There was never any long term plan or strategy from Google. Moonshots were like a fun project to work on with zero business planning. Google never had a product mindset. They could have done what you wrote, they could have battled Microsoft for OS dominance, they could have done shit loads of things. But they didn't.
I have been watching Google before they even IPO. For vast majority of its life they have always been in a more money ( or capital ) than they know what to do with it.
Put this in to perspective. Alphabet had $282 BILLION in revenue in 2022. I don't know exactly what they will pay in 2023, but in previous years it was somewhere around $10 billion a year.
Google incentivizes it's employees in a certain way. Those employees have a very high expectation of not only income but wealth.
Management has demonstrated an ability to waste an enormous amount of that money (Alphabet/Google is certainly not alone in that regards.) Because they own a monopoly they can get away with it. Because the monopoly is in advertising they don't have to be that exceptional in terms of delivering new and improved products. Because of the stock ownership structure and because they've had tremendous revenue growth for so long they really haven't had to answer to their investors about their failure and waste. In some regards a lot of those investors are asleep and don't really understand what is going on.
However, the managers need to crank the monetization dial to hit whatever incentives are set for them to become wealthy or grow whatever wealth they already have.
This is a bag of tricks (the monetization dial) that has worked well for over a decade. When it runs out, Google's revenue growth will end and employees will no longer get to become wealthy by being employees. Maybe they will suddenly get a lot of capital discipline and experience a second wind like Microsoft appears to have. Maybe they will start looking more like Yahoo. To be determined.
> They are squeezed left and right by Apple. Google pay Apple per active user as the default search engine.
I don't know if I would call that squeezed. They aren't required to be the default search engine. They run the bigger global platform (Android) and I would guess they get to be the default there for free?
Their financial model is similar to a TV or newspaper.
Imagine you create a newspaper, you start out showing no ads, lots of people buy it, it is all good.
Then you raise money from investors to grow, and they start asking for more revenue. So you add one advertisement.
Then the investors want out, so you have to IPO...more ads. Then you have to keep the share price up because execs want options, and your HR consultant tells you that the "top" execs need to see a rising share price (as if you need a "top" exec to add more ads to a webpage)...more ads.
The ability to add more advertisements is limited by the space in the newspaper, but there is almost no marginal cost associated with adding more ads. So it looks like very clean growth, very strong economics.
This is basically how Google and Facebook work. Their revenue growth looks puzzling because they seem to achieve very consistent, very predictable revenue growth with no extra resources. The reason why is that they can add more ads to a page very easily, and can control their level of revenue growth so they can keep employees/investors happy (in that order). It is true that they have also achieved some pricing growth but that advantage has been capped (and is largely a function of their monopolistic position, i.e. Doubleclick allows Google to play both sides). Most of their growth has been increasing ads per page.
There is no way for them to function as public companies in this environment (again, I would say the situation with employees is actually taken more seriously than investors) without making their product worse. They won't stop before the product collapses.
And the end game [for the newspaper] is to get rid of articles, puzzles, cartoons, letters from readers, get rid of subscriptions and go 100% advertisement. It is entirely possible for google to go there. Search being free is really half way there already.
>The ability to add more advertisements is limited by the space in the newspaper, but there is almost no marginal cost associated with adding more ads.
You are also limited by potentially causing users to stop buying the newspaper. Google will be matching the metrics to see if users actually use the app less when adding more ads. It's possibile there will be no statistically significant difference and consumers are okay with the new ad level. If they start leaving Google can revert the change.
When users start leaving, they will not return if changes are reverted because they will have lost their goodwill. It would take more than a reduced ad load for me to go back, for example.
As I said, there is almost no chance that they reverse before the product is killed because they are optimizing for revenue, not user growth (and when you take this at the margin, increasing ads per page is the only way).
I have never seen a company stop before this point either. The institutional imperative to continue gaming the numbers is overwhelming.
Yes, that is correct. The assumption in the example is that users are flattish, and you need to "do something" to get marginal growth.
In the early days, you saw very real pricing growth (due to better targeting) and volume growth due to user growth. Over the last ten years or so, I believe that a lot of the growth has been greater ad density, and ad density is much more important for controlling financial results...which is the key point when it comes to exec behaviour. Execs can't turn on user growth, they can add more ads to a product if they see numbers coming in light.
> But I guess now it's time to start looking at different email providers.
Already moved to Proton personally, I was OK with Google G-Suite or whatever the hell it's called these days when it was free, because I was trading my data for a pretty good service, but then they wanted to slap a price tag on it simply because they could, and to me that was a clear signal it was time to get out.
I'm not paying for Google to monetise my data.
Protons spam filter isn't as good, the keyboard shortcuts are taking some getting used to (really wish they would implement a "Gmail-like keyboard shortcuts" option), and message search could be improved (I'm sure it will), but besides those I don't miss a thing, and knowing that my privacy is respected is by itself worth the price tag.
Am I naive to think that when you make $226 million in a year like Pichai that money should stop being your major driving force and that your reputation is more important? Like what else could he buy? But his reputation is taking severe hits. Maybe I just don't understand ultra rich people though. Maybe money is everything.
Part (and I do mean part) of the explanation is that people’s expectations around peer group and lifestyle changes. He’s probabaly looking at Larry Ellison and feeling poor, and that he needs to have (make up a number) $1b in the bank to support his lifestyle (planes, houses, hobbies, philanthropic giving, etc.). I bet if you asked in 2004 (pre-google) what the comparable number was, it was like $20-40m…
Mega-yachts and associated maintenance, larger private jets and associated maintenance, naming any given building or school etc. in the world after yourself
I'd classify those things as ways of showing off your reputation, not improving your quality of life. Once your yacht is of a certain size, the only reason to make it bigger is to demonstrate how much wealthier you are than other yacht owners.
And that's fine, but I wish we lived in a society where "runs a company that doesn't mistreat users" (or treats employees well, or helps the planet, etc) was clearly more important to someone's reputation than the size of their yacht.
> Once your yacht is of a certain size, the only reason to make it bigger is to demonstrate how much wealthier you are than other yacht owners.
This may or may not be the opinion of people in the position to actually assess it. It can be the difference between being able to go to a place you want to go or not, based on range or seaworthiness. It can be the difference between having an amenity on the craft or not.
You’ve already missed the point - it doesn’t matter. It’s that peoples’ expectations change.
(Yes there are diminishing marginal returns etc., but once you’re used to X, 50% of X feels painful, even if 50% of X is still an extremely luxurious lifestyle)
> but once you’re used to X, 50% of X feels painful, even if 50% of X is still an extremely luxurious lifestyle
Let's say that X is your favorite food. If you already have 100x the amount you could ever eat, a 50% reduction won't feel painful at all, because you'll still have far more than you could ever eat.
I'd posit that at a certain point, you have more of everything than you could ever use, except for things that demonstrate your wealth to others. The naming rights to buildings are one example—they don't actually increase your quality of life in any way, they just show how wealthy you are.
Maybe I was wrong about the threshold for this, and it's actually higher than $200 million dollars, but it can't be that far off...
The CEO just executes the will of the board, who in turn execute the will of shareholders (types A and B shareholders, specifically, for Alphabet) who are mostly focused on delivering maximum returns. If you look at the voting power of Alphabet shareholders, it is dominated (~60%) by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
It is humorous to see posts laying the blame for increased ads on Gmail at the CEO's doorstep. What is Gmail's split of ad revenue compared to Search or YouTube? A hundredth of a percent?
Remember that these bigcos have tens of thousands of salaried employees, and those employees all get stock options. A bigco CEO might no longer be motivated by personal gain, nor by public reputation; but rather, by private reputation, within their own company, among their employees.
After all, their employees — especially the executives — are the group of people a CEO is surrounded by every working day. So, assuming they're neither a sociopath nor an Effective Altruist, why wouldn't they feel a strong empathetic desire to "help" the people right in front of them?
And presuming they want to help those people, why wouldn't they then conclude that the best, most scalable way they have to do that, is to make sure that those people are all set for life by holding high-value amounts of company stock; and that the most comparative-advantage-y way the CEO has of accomplishing that, is to make the share price go up?
Or, to put that another way: a pirate captain doesn't go home once they're personally rich. They made a (perhaps unstated) agreement with their crew: they won't go home until everyone is rich, and they can all comfortably retire. Until then, they'll continue to exploit others for their own gain.
>Am I naive to think that when you make $226 million in a year like Pichai that money should stop being your major driving force and that your reputation is more important?
Perhaps it is, but your reputation among which group? HN users or the other billionaires that you're hanging out with?
The alternative I was envisioning was similar to what Costco does on the retail side. Nearly every other retailer aims to maximize profits from their customers. Costco tries to offer the lowest prices it possibly can. This has huge implications for how the company is structured and where it uses its energy. Imagine a tech company that focused entirely on making the user experience as good as it possibly could, rather than one trying to extract as much money as they can this quarter.
Some people just don't care about things like that. They might pretend to care because that might get them what they want, but they see actually caring to be a weakness.
I was shocked the last time I used Google without an adblocker. The first 4-5 search results were ads. I had to scroll to get to the first actual result. There also seems to be less effort to distinguish ads from regular links.
I wonder which genius adsense manager thought "hey we could double our revenue if we show 4 ads instead of 2, user experience be damned".
I find it darkly amusing that the first five ad results are usually the same as the first five “natural” results. Which I click on depends on if if I hate them more than google.
> Google 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.
I'm surprised it this has taken this long to be honest. I expected everything to turn to shit with in a years of going public.
> tying executive compensation to short-term share price
We won't get anything other than this unless Google decides to do a huge round of buybacks and go private. The spice must flow because only growth makes money for the people who actually own Google.
>We won't get anything other than this unless Google decides to do a huge round of buybacks and go private. The spice must flow because only growth makes money for the people who actually own Google.
And after they go private why do you think they won't care about growth/money?
A longer view of what? Taking advertising market share from Amazon and Facebook? Let's be real, even if Google were private and didn't have to dance to the tune of Wall St come earnings season, it's not like they'd be using their billions for the betterment of humanity.
If you're public you must grow, if you're private you can choose when and how to grow based on what makes sense for the business. The only thing really pushing you is competitors and inflation. There are no shareholders/investors breathing down your neck for returns.
When you're private you can actually say, "you know what, I'm content where we are being filthy rich."
You can only comfortably say that if all of your co-investors are on board (or you have none - unlikely in Google’s case) and if you will never need to raise any additional capital for any reason. It’s very difficult to run a modern business, especially in tech, without being beholden to anyone.
All true, although in some cases you can avoid the "need to raise capital problem" by using normal business loans rather than selling ownership stake. You still need to grow to pay back the loan but you don't have the problem of new investors with their hands in the pot making demands.
But why do you think "investors/shareholders" are bad and private owners, good? Private owners are just 100% owning shareholders, whatever notions you have about one group you should have about the other.
You have no guarantee a private owner wouldn't speed up the enshittification process.
> You have no guarantee a private owner wouldn't speed up the enshittification process.
Sure, but as a private company at least you control who who wants to do that and are not bound by the "the price must go up" behavior of the shareholders since you only care about the dividends (this is a oversimplification).
The owner is a shareholder too. It's all the same thing, you're creating distinction where there is none. If anything a public company has way more controls and transparency. People usually cry when a company is taken private by private equity to squeeze every cent out of it. What do you think private equity is if not "a private owner not bound by shareholders"?
I understand your sentiment but human history has shown us that "being content being filthy rich" is short lived at best. It is a way of keeping score and even people who no longer need to work at all don't just want more money, they want a LOT more money.
I think it's kind of interesting to think that Google has been doing this for a long time but they've been doing it at an uneven pace for different properties.
Search actually seems like it got this treatment first, and in a creeping slow way, and it wasn't even necessarily 100% Google's fault. It seems like it probably got pushed a long at first by SEO types.. and then at some point Google realized it was profitable to actually play along with the whole game.
And still we have sooo many devs who praise and glory their Google overlords. Chrome can do No Wrong. Android is Fantastic. Etc. It’s quite amazing actually.
I saw this a lot in like 2014, but it's been a while since I've run into anyone that fanboys Google or Android like they were in the past. People would fawn over Google.
I agree. It's been quite a while that every decision they made was on the worse side of things. It surprises me how regular it is. Especially since they have access to history of big wealthy corps, and big pockets.. but apparently not what it takes to correct course.
Most of the people at Google now got in on their third try. That means Ads/Search/Brain etc rejected them for not meeting the bar, but they kept on going because they wanted the brand-name job. Lots of employees who are open to serving the brand versus evolving it.
With only iOS and Android as realistic choices, we genuinely need a more viable (real) Linux phone soon. I have zero faith that Google will let something like GrapheneOS stay in the somewhat usable state that it is in now.
Ah yes, the phone where I will have to install some obscure drivers via some console command found on ubuntu forums from a 3 year old thread made by AssBlaster123 just to get microphone to work properly and then end up not having fingerprint scanner working because this particular phone uses Goodix or whatnot.
We don't need "real linux" phone, we already have mobile OS based on linux, it's called Android. You can decouple it from Google, companies already do that, it works. Whether an Android phone without Google services is a viable product is another discussion - and IMO the one we should focus on.
Google'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. :-(
I 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.
When I used iPhone up until this year, I also felt like the flaws were as though nobody uses iPhones at Apple, which is obviously not the case. However, there is a lot of brainwashing going on telling people that something that is bad is actually good.
Whenever Apple locks people into one of their properties, people say, "ooh, smart move". Maybe it is, but it's shitty. Siri couldn't turn my lights off, for example, and Google and Alexa have no trouble with that.
Google "full screen mode Safari iPad" for another highly confusing design decision. In portrait mode, Safari of course fills up the screen with chrome.
iOS is full of these annoying little features that are WONTFIX.
>Holding the power button no longer turns off your phone, but instead opens voice assistant(?!)
I've got an up-to-date Pixel 6 and this is not true. Hold the power button, and I'm presented with options for powering off, restarting, making an emergency call and "Lockdown".
I'm on Pixel 6a I can confirm that holding the button triggers the assistant. I'd like to mention I think what triggered this behavior is me getting a pair of pixel buds.
The products must change because engineers need to do something to show impact and get promotions. Therefore, if the product has reached the maximus of quality, but you need to change it, you end up with zugzwang. Always follow the incentives.
I would argue it's not the engineers that need to do something, rather middle management that needs to show 'results' and show that they are there to bring 'value', even if it's not real value. I seriously doubt changes like moving fingerprint sensor under the screen come out from an individual contributor.
It’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.
I 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.
This 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.
Also 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...?
Yes, I asked the question facetiously...I worked in equity research for consumer products companies, and you see this (alarmingly) at good and bad companies.
"We did X, it went very badly...don't worry, we have fired the consultant who was responsible"...the question you want to ask (but cannot) is then: why I am paying the salary for the monkey, not the organ-grinder? The worst part is that I have seen this at companies that are doing well, you just have to accept the fact that you are getting pickpocketed by a bunch of idiots who control the money printer.
It wasn't sarcasm, it was just being humorous...and, indeed, I have replies saying how ridiculous it is to expect executives to be able to run a company. The sarcasm wouldn't have been detected because the reality is that this kind of thinking has become embedded in US corporate culture: reward with no responsibility.
The 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?
The exec does know how to work it out: You hire a consultant to give you an answer.
The job of the executive isn't to know the answer to every question. Their job is to make sure questions get answered. There are an infinite number of ways you can do this and hiring a consultant is a valid option.
As I said, the job is not to know the answer to the question but to work out how. If you are hiring someone from the outside, you are outsourcing basic functions.
If his job is as simple as hiring consultants, why do you need to pay someone $1m+/year to hire a consultant. Just hire a guy on $10k/year who tells you to hire a consultant.
It isn't a valid option. This is one of the reasons why most corporations are poorly managed (right now, I would guess that there are maybe 10 CEOs of US listed companies who will go down as great CEOs...that is being optimistic, almost every CEO is paid like they are a star). Their "thinking" is outsourced to someone hiring a bunch of grads with no experience, that is what consultants are...it is like advertising, churn and burn grads.
A key part of making better decisions is taking those decisions yourself and learning from the outcomes. But the way things happen now, all of the experience is gone and it is just a revolving treadmill of people who move through jobs too quickly to ever see the result of what they did or take responsibility for it. Hiring consultants is an indication that the company lacks executives with the capacity to perform their function correctly (unfortunately, this is the case at most companies now).
I think you're starting from the conclusion you want CEO is bad and reverse engineering a justification along with making up supporting facts.
I hire consultants and outsource activities all the time. It isn't all I do but a key part of it. There's no chance you'd find someone to do my job for 10K a year. There is no chance I would want to hire dozens of employees each time I have a rare off question.
Your example and position make no sense: hiring an outside group is always wrong and hiring inside team is always right. I don't learn anything different either way. You call it a basic function, but what if I wont want to indefinitely keep a team on staff to answer seed questions?
I never understood the desire for sesame seeds in the first place. To me, they only add an annoying texture. I would probably pay more for a bun without them, given the opportunity.
I think that's a pretty good illustration of how cost and value do not naturally align to each other. If a business can find a significant divergence between cost and value, it can take advantage of that gap by calling it profit.
Because if consumers genuinely don't notice the sesame seeds are gone, that means they never cared in the first place, and this is a better outcome for everyone. Why were farmers growing useless sesame seeds in the first place? Now they can switch to blueberries or whatever and the world is better off. It's kind of like, thank god those nasty canned olive slices finally disappeared from salads. Also, the company can't get away with raised prices because those buns are still next to regular buns from other companies, and consumers will buy the cheapest one. (Or if inflation is happening, everybody's raising prices, but that has nothing to do with sesame seeds.)
On the other hand, if consumers are actively seeking out sesame seed buns, there is absolutely a point at which they notice and say, what the hell, this brand hardly has any sesame seeds, I'm going to buy the competing brand that still has a normal amount of sesame seeds. The company sees sales are plummeting, and they quickly add back seeds until people are buying them again. But there is an optimal number of sesame seeds here. It makes no sense to double the sesame seeds when consumers don't care.
The idea that a company can keep removing something consumers want to pay for, but they won't notice, just doesn't exist in the real world. In the real world, either consumers do want to pay for it and sales will suffer, or it turns out consumers don't actually want to pay for it and the company gives consumers a simplified product that is still subject to market price competition like every other product, and everybody is better off for it.
If you are an exec at MCD, your main focus is on making numbers. That is it. Your bonus is based on this, your options are based on beating expectations...nothing else matters.
What this means in practice is that companies look for ways to cut costs and fill gaps when a number comes in light (because you can cut costs immediately but growing revenue requires long-term investment). And, over time, you see significant deterioration in product from lots of decisions made to make a number in a quarter.
An even more interesting aspect of this problem is that these companies only ever cut back on things like product. FMCGs were doing this for years, and most companies in the sector were still horribly overstaffed.
You are right, this doesn't happen in industries where there is more competition. But this is not true for almost every consumer-facing product where there are limits to competition. Indeed, FMCGs have been reducing product quality for years but it has only been changing consumer tastes that has led to more innovation through new products/categories. In other wards, no-one tries to start a new mayonnaise company because Hellmann's began adding more oil...you try to get distribution into the large grocery stores, and they will laugh you out the door (but you turn up with a vegan mayonnaise, and they are interested).
Another example of this is Tesco in the UK. They are famous for producing executives which make a series of short-term decisions over a very long period that add up to a bad situation (and there is no new competition, Tesco over-index to locations that have no other supermarket chains...you would lose tens of billions trying to just get a foothold).
Since you brought up McD's, then how do you explain why they're now rolling out Big Macs with more sauce, not less [1]? Along with a bunch of other improvements like melting cheese rather than sticking it on burgers cold.
If nothing else matters than making numbers in a quarter, if companies "only ever cut back on things like product", then how do you explain this example of actual corporate behavior?
It's not like McD's vs Burger King is full of competition in a way that Hellman's vs Miracle Whip isn't, to use your mayonnaise example. (Or Kraft, or store-brand, to continue with mayo.)
This idea that there are major "limits to competition" in "almost every consumer-facing product" just isn't reality. Companies compete with each other ruthlessly.
Like, not a distant competitor like Bing that poses some hypothetical future threat, but like, a present threat to Google Search that they battle against daily.
Likewise for the major other properties - Gmail? YouTube?
The only products where there is IMO intense daily competition is Android and Chrome, where Google's dominance is far from complete. In Google's top money-making properties the competition is pretty mild, and IMO we're seeing user-hostile changes because of it.
I would liken McDonald's more to Android than to Google Search. It exists in a furiously competitive landscape where market share moves significantly year-to-year, and despite being a dominant brand within its space it doesn't even come close to owning the entire space.
In any case, that's neither here nor there, I would like to engage with something you brought up that I do think is interesting:
> "On the other hand, if consumers are actively seeking out sesame seed buns, there is absolutely a point at which they notice and say, what the hell, this brand hardly has any sesame seeds, I'm going to buy the competing brand that still has a normal amount of sesame seeds."
This is true! And I think this moment is coming for Google. You are right - there are limits to how much you can shit up a product before consumers respond. I think the main thrust of your idea is legitimate: while a near-monopoly in a product category gives you a lot of leeway to fuck about with the product, that leeway is not infinite! At some point you're accountable to your users!
The argument isn't so much whether or not that threshold exists (IMO it clearly does), it's what happens organizationally when the company reaches that threshold and can't deal with it. If you've spent the last 10 years staffing your corporate management with sesame-removers, what happens when you finally hit the thresholds and your customers flee?
That to me is the more interesting question - whether or not Google's culture and staffing can navigate what's coming. They have hobbled along on early successes for too long, and IMO it remains to be seen if they are constitutionally able to handle a product crisis.
> Is there a serious competitor to Google Search? Like, not a distant competitor like Bing that poses some hypothetical future threat, but like, a present threat to Google Search that they battle against daily.
Bing is what Google battles against daily. Bing is such a competitive threat that when reports came out three weeks ago that Samsung products might switch to Bing as a default, Google's stock dropped 4% [1]. Google has been innovating its search furiously over years and years because competition is just a click away -- knowledge cards, snippets, massive machine learning under the hood. Google pays Apple something like $8-12 billion a year to maintain its default. Google wouldn't do that if it didn't see Bing as a present threat.
> Likewise for the major other properties - Gmail? YouTube?
Microsoft Outlook? TikTok? Gigantic competitors. More businesses pay for Outlook than do for Gmail. And TikTok is crushing YouTube among teens [2].
That example has no relation at all to the topic. You seem to think that they are mutually exclusive or that "only" (in the part you have quoted) refers to something it does not. Just read what I said again.
It is reality, I worked in equity research specializing in consumer products so am reasonably familiar with the space. Consumers just see the product, but the economics are about a lot more. The actual product is but one area of competition (as I explained, just anecdotally product-focused consumer companies are the best kind of shorts because they will almost always saturate their market and be unable to build an area of solid competitive advantage...because product doesn't really matter).
I suspect you will have a problem comprehending this again, so to be clear: this does not mean that companies do not compete on product. It just means that product is often not the predominant factor.
I am not sure what you are saying but there is less competition in FMCG than QSR. Distribution consolidated heavily, and FMCGs have consolidated heavily too because the game is largely about expanding SKUs on existing distributor relationships (the economic model is actually very similar to Google, if you have a distribution network then it improves economics to add SKUs...this has been key for PEP) and advertising spend.
If you look at QSR, a lot of the product innovation that you see is superficial because of the limits of the operating model. Most of the "product innovation" is competition on advertising, there is real competition here (unlike with FMCG where ad spend is often defensive) because of consumer behaviour/the product consumption cycle (if you have ever been outside the US, you will realise that advertising on US TV is extremely unusual in this regard). And property has definitely become more important over the past decade (the growing chains are ones that have grown into the demographic shifts of the past ten years, chains with locations in legacy areas, i.e. malls, that are in decline have suffered).
Again, there is no competition at the margin. The world doesn't work that way. If MCD remove sesame seeds from their bun, there is not going to be a new entrant with more seeds. Maybe they add more seeds, maybe they add more sauce but that doesn't change that if they removed seeds to make numbers (which has happened before), there is very little risk to their competitive position. Again, the proof of this is how the world actually works, not based on some theoretical model of competition that you just thought up sitting in your bedroom.
I read your comment very clearly, and you're speaking in absolutes like "nothing else matters", "only ever cut back on things like product", "no-one tries to start a new mayonnaise company". And these absolutes simply aren't true.
And sure nobody starts a mayo company but Hellman's is absolutely competing in the same product category with relatively newer entrants such as e.g. Amazon Brand, or Whole Foods 365 brand, on top of other long-existing competitors. My example was directly addressing your topic -- perhaps you're the one who needs to read what I said again. Because according to you, it's inexplicable that McD's is improving their Big Mac by adding sauce.
But just because you don't seem to be understanding my point, let me try one more time with another one of your examples:
> If MCD remove sesame seeds from their bun, there is not going to be a new entrant with more seeds.
Popeye's was winning the chicken sandwich wars, so McDonald's launched their McCrispy. Shake Shack was popularizing better-tasting burgers, so McDonald's switched from frozen to fresh made-to-order quarter pounders. Competition is alive and well.
If McDonald's removed sesame seeds from all their buns tomorrow, it would be national news and they would absolutely lose sales as people switched to Burger King which would probably launch a national advertising campaign about how they've still got sesame seeds unlike a certain cheapskate competitor that seems to have forgotten what makes a burger complete.
A lot of our popular consumer products and foods have reached a kind of "steady state" because they're what people like at the right price point and there isn't much innovation to be had on a yearly basis. There isn't a tastier version of Coca-Cola left to be made. But you're interpreting this as "no competition at the margin" which is completely false. The steady state is maintained because of competition. The moment a company cuts quality to deliver something consumers don't want, the competition will eat them alive (remember New Coke?).
And believe me, I've worked at major corporations, not that it matters though. Please don't throw around insults like someone sitting in their bedroom, it's not for HN. But perhaps you have more of an internal corporate view and are missing the broader economic fundamentals here because of that?
I am not speaking in absolutes. I typed out specifically a section just for you to tell you that I am not speaking in absolutes. As I said, the reason you think this is because you didn't read what I am saying carefully enough.
I won't bother replying or reading this for obvious reasons. Good luck.
...And yours is such a Hacker News response? I don't know why you're even saying that.
But yes, everybody's heard of shrinkflation, so I don't know what your point is.
When inflation is happening or product-specific input costs are increasing, companies can either raise prices or shrink quantities. They have to do one or the other if they want to stay in business.
Consumers are well aware of what's happening. Everybody knows a Haagen Dazs "pint" isn't a pint anymore.
But shrinkflation isn't bad and it isn't hidden. If someone doesn't want to pay more than $5 for a container of ice cream, then keeping the price $5 but reducing the quantity is better meeting consumer demand, than keeping the size but upping the price to $6. It's the better tradeoff.
In fact, shrinkflation is a perfect example of my argument -- 10 oz bags of potato chips haven't shrunk down to 1 oz. It happens in a narrow band, just like the number of sesame seeds might. Things don't shrink down until they just disappear, unless consumers want them to.
These days I read downvoted comments first on HN. Everything you said is spot on (or to be honest, just common sense), but you're going to enjoy your downvotes.
If we replace 10% of food with sawdust and people keep buying it, that proves that consumers don't actually want to pay for the real thing and the company that sells it them is doing them a favor.
On the other hand, if consumers see that sawdust is one of the top four ingredients in the ingredients list, nobody's going to buy it.
So I don't know what your point is, because your hypothetical would never happen.
Whereas phasing olive slices out of salads is something that's happened. Or replacing fancy glossy plastic clamshell packaging with cheaper generic recyclable cardboard packaging when buying things online.
My comment is mostly a reference to this video[1].
Replace 'sawdust' with 'cheapest sugar available' and that is something happens all of the time, and is arguably worse, because sawdust doesn't cause addiction, diabetes, heart disease or obesity.
Although a joke, sawdust is listed as 'cellulose' in food ingredients, and it's commonly used in food[2].
You're factually incorrect. Sawdust is not cellulose, and sawdust is not used in food. Cellulose is a purified extract from wood, just like sugar is a purified extract from sugar beets. And shredded/crumbled cheese have long used cellulose for its anti-caking properties. It's not a scam, it's so your cheese doesn't clump.
Remember 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.
Our 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.
Just 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.
Too late for some. I will never go back to Windows, won't ever use Bing. Still don't trust any MS product even though I do use VSCode (mostly due to Remote not being available in VSCodium). So objectively speaking I agree that the stench is mostly off, but subjectively I have 0 trust in MS (and I did have some trust before).
The 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Never 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.
There 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.
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.
> I'm curious if/when market dynamics will limit the extent to which Microsoft/Google do this.
Market dynamics in this case is just good ol' market failure. Google can 10x the number of pre-roll ads on Youtube, and lose maybe 1% of their audience. Where's every going to go, Peertube? Vimeo? Dailymotion?
Audience is going to Instagram Reels, TikTok.
Many small business find showing Ads there convert better than on Youtube.
Also, they are less distracting and more immersive for showing Ads compared to Youtube.
Other Social Networks have to bring a better Search Experience and Long Duration video.
Then Youtube can easily have a challenger.
Also, showing too many pre-roll ads might reduce the ROI on Ads for the advertiser.
I believe an Ad won't convert as good if it's part of a series of Ads.
Their Main Ads product is progressively getting worse.
Search Ads are less effective than before.
Meta, TikTok etc are way better for many small businesses than Google Search.
They might think that adding more places to show Ads is the solution,
I believe it will be better if they check how effective their Search Ads are for their customers.
There'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.
Just 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.
I 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.
This 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.
How 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.
If 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.
I 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.
I'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.
Just 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.
I 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.
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
They'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.
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.
Paying for premium doesn't even do enough, IMO. I pay for premium and it's worth the cost to remove the barrage of ad bumpers from videos, but YouTube is still completely cluttered with promoted content. If I turn on my TV to YouTube I want to see just my recommendations - just my actual recommendations, not fake recommendations designed to trick me into consuming whatever Youtube wants. I have not once ever watched news coverage on YouTube yet it seems like any workday that happens to coincide with a national tragedy, YouTube wants to make that the front page of my TV when I sit down after work.
I had the same realisation. At this point, YouTube Premium is probably the subscription I would give up last. Premium is (for now) quite a nice experience, and there is so much nerdy niche content that would never get made commercially, certainly not to the same scale.
I have noticed that my recommendations seem to be getting worse lately, but unsure if that's a flaw in the algorithm or because I've spent years draining the backlogs of the channels I follow.
Out of curiosity, what does Premium do for you that is a positive? This is an earnest question, as recently my old Android phone died and I got a new iPhone.
On Android, I'd just use Newpipe[0] which I absolutely loved; they kept up with Youtube's breaking changes (usually a day-of debug build until the fix reached the main release), and it was such a nice and out of the way music player with everything you could want. (Adhoc playlists, great functionality for queue next/queue, really intuitive UI, backgrounding, etc)
On iOS, I wasn't really able to find an equivalent besides side-loading modified Youtube.app clients to enable the basic features I'd want (all of which are locked behind premium normally). Even with the premium features unlocked, the Youtube app really doesn't behave like an iOS app should, and it's significantly worse than Newpipe in my opinion.
So I'm just curious what about Premium is worth it for you and what it brings that justifies being a subscription. If the answer is just "it's the only option", I get it, can't really argue with that, but really hoping there's something I'm missing that makes Youtube Premium more palatable.
It allows me to pay for a service that I use and I know costs money to run - for a reasonable fee (although it just went up in price and is less reasonable now), given how many hours our family watches per month on YouTube.
Creators still get paid from YouTube premium views, and some creators see better revenue from that than from YouTube ads. I like supporting the creators I watch. I refuse to participate in regular ads. Sponsored segments are (barely) tolerable and skippable.
I run an ad blocker and try to provide compensation to the sources I consume regularly. Patreon, news subscriptions, YouTube premium, etc. So just blocking ads through Newspipe or similar but still consuming a lot of video - doesn't feel right to me.
Appreciated, and I'm not immune to the payment situation for Creators and for Youtube itself; my claim isn't that the content should be free or that the Ads are inherently evil, it's about the Youtube app/platform in general.
As a user of a piece of software, it's very difficult to even use the darn thing :) Finding new channels is really tough even when logged in and letting the algorithm work for awhile. So for me it fails to bring me new stuff to check out, it fails as an application in terms of usability and features, and for the few channels I am willing to follow, I'm a lot more comfortable just contributing on Patreon.
That basically leaves Youtube with the server costs, and yeah, that's not something to scoff at and it's not something I expect Alphabet to pony up for.
But for me, the terms and conditions for all that isn't worth paying a subscription to Youtube for; the app barely keeps feature parity with contemporary apps, Youtube itself is pretty poor at getting me new stuff to watch, etc. I'd really rather just go back to smaller, multiple platforms and iTunes like purchasing.
Understood and I agree with most of what you said here. Thank you for clarifying.
I've just personally crossed a threshold where I can't avoid the fact I use enough of it that I should be paying for it. I'd like to think I'd just boycott it entirely if I decided it was too expensive. Not sure if that'd be true in practice. I'd definitely boycott the official app, though - the experience is pretty bad.
Historically, I've avoided using a non-official app due to some questionable distribution methods for some of them, and due to not wanting to anger Google into shutting my account off for non-supported access. The latter is why I no longer use Google search nor Gmail anymore.
Just because I technically could get something equivalent for free, doesn’t mean I necessarily want to.
I’m fortunate enough that the monthly subscription isn’t exactly breaking the bank, so it’s a good way to support the content I enjoy, and is more realistic and affordable than subscribing to dozens of Patreons.
I also do the majority of my viewing on my TV via Apple TV (and previously the built in TV apps), so the options for third party alternatives are very limited even if the above were not the case.
I use Premium and I think it's worth it. Otherwise you 're right. Especially trying to jump around while watching video can be really frustrating, with an ad getting thrown at your face each time you click the player bar, and it is often the same ad...
Ads aren't the only problem. The YouTube recommendation algorithm works a little too well. I'll watch one video on a topic and then YouTube thinks I'm in love with it and floods my feed with 100 other related videos. It's terrible for discovering new content.
Have 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.
Don’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.
Also 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.
"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?
AFAIK 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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
(though that one at least I legitimately chide people for using, because I have family members whose devices got infected because juno failed to filter out malicious emails appearing to come from personal contacts).
I'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.
Email 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.
They 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.
>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.
> 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.
Good 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.
Google 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".
If 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.
Perhaps 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.
Fundamentally 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.
As 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.
Hmm... 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.
Slightly 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?
As 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).
I 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.
In 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.
That 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.
The government should keep their hands as far away from e-mail as possible. This is a solved problem since decades ago. There are great working e-mail services that anybody can afford. The government is not a God who will step down and make everything all right.
> This is a solved problem since decades ago. There are great working e-mail services that anybody can afford.
I disagree, based on accounts by librarians that they're becoming tech support of last resort for various unaccountable and uncaring email providers that the most vulnerable in society are trying to use just to get by, causing basically everyone involved to be miserable and worse-off than they might be in a better-functioning system.
I don't think government should be the only provider (and I don't think I even implied that?) but do think that if one of the main ways of interacting with vital government and private-sector services is going to be email—and it is—then it makes a lot of sense for the USPS to provide a viable option for that, for basically the same reason that it makes sense to have a USPS at all.
Oh, 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.
More than likely the USPS would be motivated to build an excellent spam blocker, and then charge bulk mailers for delivery. =) The USPS doesn't "block spam" physically because the USPS gets most of their revenue from it.
The 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].
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