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?
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
#102The availability of free email services is a wonderful thing. But if email is important to you, it probably shouldn't be in Gmail.
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].
[1] Old Slow AIs, aka "companies". http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artifici...
Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
#103No ads on IMAP, so there's a simple fix.
Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
#104Google 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…
>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.
Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
#105I 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…
That analogy doesn't hold up.
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.
Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marissa mayer?
Maybe the new CEO can personally redesign the logo with help from an intern. That should fix things, right?
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.
Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
#107Google 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…
Are we still getting surprised by this? I feel like I've read a version of your comment on posts like this for the past couple of years.
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.
Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
#108Just 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.
"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.
Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
#109Google 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…
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.
Wouldn’t half of that go to tax, though?
Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
#110They'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.