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Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

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Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#51

Post by soraminazuki »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #29
thesuitonym wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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. Just on my way to listen to MY mp3s.

You can turn it off in the Settings app.

Go to the Music section and you'll see a toggle labeled "Show Apple Music".

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#52

Post by toastal »

jorts wrote: post #7
CoastalCoder wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: why would you expect hate for using Yahoo mail?

A lot of people like to give you a hard time for using an “old” email address like yahoo, hotmail, or aol.

A few years back I was told I almost wasn't considered for an interview because I was, at the time, using a Yahoo email address.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#53

Post by nickthegreek »

hobs wrote: post #30
racl101 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah 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 add…

Or just use adblock and never see any?

Only if you are watching via web browser.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#54

Post by jjulius »

dzek69 wrote: post #44

And 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…

Stopped clocks, and such.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#55

Post by the_third_wave »

bbarn wrote: post #8
jorts wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people like to give you a hard time for using an “old” email address like yahoo, hotmail, or aol.

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.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#57

Post by propogandist »

racl101 wrote: post #21
pjmlp wrote: post #14

Only GMail? YouTube is almost unusable nowadays.

Yeah 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 add…

Brave browser and/or UBO on Firefox does the job, while preventing Google from building profile about logged in YT watching habits.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#58

Post by godshatter »

gruez wrote: post #37
Spivak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

They will still care, but they have more freedom to take the longer view.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#59

Post by MAGZine »

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. :-(

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#60

Post by vasco »

Spivak wrote: post #46
gruez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

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."

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.

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