Hacker News Reader

Comment by FridgeSeal | Hacker News Reader

" “modernize” email, allowing “engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.” "

Whenever a service or company purports to make something "engaging" and "interactive" you just know that useability and actual, tangible usefulness are going to go out the window in favour of marketer-driven choices.

We don't 'engage more' with your software/service because you changed everything to optimise for engagement and time spent, we engaged more because it took more time/steps to get the same thing done.

Arguably what we should be doing is optimising for less time spent on an app/service for the purposes of enabling a better/more efficient/more enjoyable experience by letting users get what they want to do done quickly and easily.

View on HN

You are making a mistake in thinking you are the customer. You are the product.

Right, but I think it's fatalistic to just write off any attempt to come up with better solutions: nothing will change if we don't at least start thinking about, proposing and testing other ideas.

I think it's a reasonable assumption that most people here are devs or interested in software/programming/etc. Marketers aren't going to be the ones who are actually interested in making better products, they're practically premature-optimisation-in-user-hostile-directions personified, so someone else has to at least propose these ideas.

When using gsuite, I am the customer.

Then hopefully I can turn it off in my GSuite administration account...

...doubt it.

I have always wondered - is there someone you can chat with or call for GSuite?

Yes. It was my first and only call with Google tech support. Noticeably outsourced, but competent after escalation.

> competent after escalation.

Was escalation as simple as "I would like to speak to a supervisor, please," or was there a more complicated incantation?

I believe the phrase you're looking for is "Klaatu barada nikto!"

I said "necktie" and now my computer has daemons.

Hail to the king, baby!

In the same way when you pay for cable TV you are the customer... not really.

If you live in a town where FIOS is active, you are magically a customer again.

Until they sell you off to Frontier. Frontier decided all the movies I bought from Verizon weren't mine anymore. No compensation, no apologies.

The whole idea of “selling” something that the customer don’t actually receive, and has no rights to, is insane. It’s tantamount to false advertising, and I think it should be made illegal.

As much as we all hate cable, telephone companies are more evil.

Verizon in particular is amazing in their priorities from an operational perspective are getting rid traditional phone business at all costs and spiting the CWA.

That's how the world used to be. Now you're either a customer or not. You will always be the product.

You are making a mistake in participating in Google garbage as a user. You are an item for sale.

For totally unrelated tinfoil-hat reasons I started using fastmail yesterday. Now I feel very vindicated in my choice, but it makes me wonder; since Gmail is so pervasive, will this action by them end up f-ing up email for everyone, the same way that many sites claim to only work on Chrome?

AMP for email would be another reason to start using fastmail myself. I probably share the same "tinfoil-hat" reasons, but I never got around to it (shame).

FWIW it's already possible to build apps inside email. There are now full ecommerce stores that run inside gmail messages.

Please give some examples. This sounds horrible, but therefore also true.

At the Inbox Awesome conference this year there was a talk on this, not sure if it’s online.

And you couldn't have invested the time to write a second or third sentence summarizing it?

They run stores in the vendor's email, or the customer's email? bug difference

Real improvements would be ones that allow me to engage less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com