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Comment by whiteandnerdy | Hacker News Reader

I _guess_ he means that siloing email provision to a few large providers means that its harder to run your own email server without being flagged as spam.

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Does he not remember how much spam we received before those sorts of upgrades? Email spam in the late 90s and early 2000s was insane. And every grandmother who plugged in their PC at the time got hit by it. "I ordered v1gr4 cheap from this business, why hasn't it shown up 4 months later?!"

Sure, I guess it's harder to run your own email server, but the trade-off was virtually zero spam making its way to my inbox. I think that's a trade worth making, since I vividly remember the dark days of email.

One thing I've noticed about people who are nostalgic for the past, is that they either misremember or forget the negative things while wearing their rose-colored glasses.

I saw someone pining for the good old days of the late 90s internet due to a lack of ads everywhere and I gently reminded them that due to a lack of bandwidth and modems capable of download at speed, a gif file took 5 minutes to download and view, videos were basically non-existent to download as real-player was in its infancy serving up what amounted to flip-book quality clips which still took 15 minutes to download a 15 second clip.

The internet wasn't in some golden age back in the late 90s, it was slow as fuck, quality was shit and there was barely any content. We take so much for granted today...

Today it’s google that decides what spam(aka marketing emails) gets delivered to my mailbox. No matter how many times I mark some emails as spam, they always seem to find the way to my inbox.

But I guess that’s what you get when you use an email service from an advertising company.

Phishing emails seem to always sail right through their filters. I'm lucky that I'm extra paranoid.

I honestly can't remember the last time I received any spam that didn't get caught by the filter. Right now, I have 12 mails in the spam folder, and that's my normal running 30 day average.

While I agree, but I'm sure there is a balance. And clearly they don't try to find it. It's better business to lock everything in for yourself and say "we protect you".

Google is all about control. They decide who is in and who is out.

And that only works when the central power is benevolent.

However we know there has never been in the history of any human structure an entity becoming the central power that stayed benevolent.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

>videos were basically non-existent to download as real-player was in its infancy serving up what amounted to flip-book quality clips which still took 15 minutes to download a 15 second clip.

And then even after video was available, it was incredibly unreliable.

Am I crazy, or does anyone else think YouTube became popular because the videos almost always worked when you hit Play?

People seem to think the community features were responsible for YouTube's success, but I specifically remember finding videos, then looking them up on YouTube instead, because the original source was some garbage video player that you'd click and nothing would happen.

Anectodally the internet was reliable, fast as hell, and there was a vast world to explore for me in the 90's. And I'm not talking just text downloads. And certainly not referring to 28.8k modems. 56k was ok, shotgun 56k was better. I went pro in CS once I got ADSl and I dearly miss client side registration because it was so damn reliable and snappy with rarely any desync problems. Back then it was very easy to just aim further ahead of your moving target with the distance being proportional to your ping. I distincly remember playing kingpin and quake in a hotel room once and I had a 250 ping. All I did was prefire way early or in the case of the long range shots.. Oh god it was so satisfying to lead them by a few extra "feet", click, sit back and then after what seemed like forever I'd hear that thump thump thump of the rifle and they'd drop. You simply can't do that these days with reliability. You play against jerks on VPNs from AU who warp 20 feet before shooting you.

I don't mean to say you're wrong, but I thought you might find it interesting. I was just a dumb kid but we downloaded stuff and had small 5-man lan parties where we played online too since we didnt have enough for balanced matches. It wasn't bad at all and we didn't even have a proper hub until much later on.

Nowdays every realtime app suffers it seems. No matter where I'm at. And if you go to a big regional lan party everyone is queueing online. No local servers, or if there are it's kinda dead or it's private hard core competitive games, which I do love, but I miss the goofing off and socializing in lan servers too. The changes for me have been less than ideal, as a pro gamer and just regular gamer.

Also as a UX/UI dev I've noticed things have become.. Annoying as hell to use. Even intentionally thanks to questionable business practices.

Today I can plan my day online in 20minutes or less. Back in the day it wasn't too easy for me I wasn't the best student.

Sorry for the novel. Thanks for sharing.

I want all the solutions Google provides and none of the drawbacks. If Google can't do that, they are obviously incompetent and worthless.

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