I always get downvoted for FB criticism, perhaps by their employees, but I have evidence for what I just said: Zuck's many, many, many public apologies.
> Did nobody stop to think ...?
There were the mildly provocative arguments about facebook users being "the product". Like cattle. Many just assumed they were not susceptible to ads or strong enough not to be manipulated. Folks were thinking about this on an individual basis, assuming that yes, some dumbasses would get sucked in by Farmville but that they themselves were impervious.
Turns out it doesn't matter what any one individual thinks. Facebook is all about scale and knowledge. They're selling enormous social power to whoever forks over the money. It doesn't matter to facebook if the real customer is selling soap or authoritarian government.
I think only now are we getting wise to the full implications of Facebook and the like.
The privacy concerns were pretty much hidden from the public the entire time.
Polite advertising combined with targeting is also potentially very problematic. Passive targeting (people who are interested in X do Y so I will advertise X near Y) seems fine, but it in this day and age it intersects with tracking... which brings us back around the circle.
"Facebook was not originally created to be a company, it was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected."
I wrote a tweet series critiquing this:
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
As someone who for years often pointed out the bargain, I am not sympathetic to your position. Almost everyone I know who knew the price did pay it. Often, it was not merely the lack of knowledge, but actively putting their fingers to their ears to drown out inconvenient voices like mine.
The doomsayers were prescient, and to say they weren't there isn't just unfair, it's actively hostile towards societal growth and detecting this as it happens again. The first step to growth is accepting fault, otherwise there's nothing to fix.
That's why people used gmail and it's why people still use gmail and why even the people arguing in this thread that google are evil are all still using gmail! (I'm generalising but I'm betting most do)
When it comes down to it, despite what people say they care more about getting good services at no cost to themselves than they do about their privacy.
While I used spamassassin (not simple), my friend used Thunderbird which did a good enough job.
>That's why people used gmail and it's why people still use gmail and why even the people arguing in this thread that google are evil are all still using gmail!
In the early Gmail days, I didn't know anyone who used Gmail for anti-spam use. It was all about:
1. Space (1GB)
2. Nice interface was a distant second.
Most average people I know did not care about spam during those days. I mean, they cared and complained a lot about it, but getting anyone to change their provider (or software) to handle spam better was an exercise in futility.
Keep in mind - this is during the days when IE 6.0 reigned supreme and had something like 90% of the browser share. Almost no one I knew was willing to change browsers, despite IE not having tabs, not having banner ad blocking or any other extension, and causing all kinds of Windows issues. If they're unwilling to change browsers, I can assure you they're unwilling to change email providers so easily. What tipped things in Gmail's favor was the extra space, when 50MB was advertised as large).
>When it comes down to it, despite what people say they care more about getting good services at no cost to themselves than they do about their privacy.
Agreed there.
Err, what? SpamAssassin is a filtering system and framework, Thunderbird is a MUA. There were plugins to use ApamAssasin in Thunderbird, and there may have been some built in filtering in Thunderbird, but you'll have to do a lot better than just saying it was good to convince me it existed as anything other than a joke.
My job during the time Gmail launched and the years following was administering portions of an ISP, including mail servers and a separate set of SpamAssassin processing servers, as well as separate consulting work setting up SpamAssassin and a mail server for colocation customers.
I also used Thunderbird off and on for a number of years during this same period (when it wasn't Thunderbird, it was Mutt). No MUA without something like SpamAssasin (or some paid for service or package) was even passable during this time period, to my recollection.
> In the early Gmail days, I didn't know anyone who used Gmail for anti-spam use. It was all about:
Believe me, they did. People noticed it. ISPs noticed it. The ISP I worked for thought about shifting over all email for our customers to hosted Gmail, because the spam solution was actually better than SpamAssassin usually could do and it would offload a lot of work. It didn't happen, but it was at least thrown around as a possibility.
> Most average people I know did not care about spam during those days.
My experience fielding support requests during this time period points towards the opposite conclusion. People cared a lot more, it was much more of a problem then. Google trends backs this up.[1] It was bad enough that legislation about spam was being passed during this period, such as the CAN-SPAM act of 2003.[2]
I think perhaps you've forgotten just how bad it was, or were lucky enough to have an address that wasn't very badly affected. You were running SpamAssassin, so you would likely have been one of the better protected (and you could tweak your own rules, which might have helped if you did so).
1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
I think my larger point, that Spam was a major problem of the time period, and that Google was seen as having very good spam detection, still stands.