Microsoft is putting more ads in Outlook on iOS and Android | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is putting more ads in Outlook on iOS and Android

theverge.com

If ads make money and money is used to build walled gardens which make more ads and money; the unregulated expansion of ads into the daily attention of ordinary people doing ordinary people things, could become a new digital serfdom for those people.

Put another way, if already large companies with existing revenue streams build ad environments that essentially self-generate substantial new revenue, "economic monsters" grow themselves in legal ways without rival. Similar arguments have been made historically over other means of fiat revenue generation, but crucially those who are tasked with oversight and correction, are also benefiting from the new system, and are rationally disincentived to curb or block it.

For extra zing, add "AI" to that formula as you see fit. For extra academic weight, add a few hundred pieces of evidence from the works of Thomas Piketty and Capital in the 21st Century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

Can you imagine if they start putting ("privacy friendly" ads) in VSCode's side bar? I think people will complain for a little bit, and just accepted, they would probably pay a couple of Youtube Tech influencer like Google is doing in the privacy space, and move on. I know this is speculative, but I can see it coming sooner rather than later.

don't worry someone will ship ublock origin for vscode :) And, if push comes to shove I might just block whole microsoft asn.

If that happens then every single dev will just download VSCodium and keep going

Is there an intelligible value proposition here, or is this a case of microsoft offering a demonstrably worse user experience than stock android or ios clients unless the user has a paid subscription?

Outlook on iOS is actually an excellent email client. Now that it forces ads I wouldn't use it without an Office365 subscription. It's basically dead if you use a different email provider.

"The change has been rolling out over the past few months and essentially means Microsoft is making it harder for free users to avoid ads in Outlook mobile. Whatever inbox mode you use, there’ll be ads somewhere in the mix — either at the top of your Other tab or the top of your regular inbox. Indeed, the only way to now avoid ads in Outlook mobile is to pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription."

"Microsoft confirmed the change to The Verge. “For free users of Outlook, ads are shown in their inbox and they can choose to enable the ‘Focused inbox’ feature if they would like to see ads only in the ‘Other’ inbox,” says Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston in a statement."

Subscribe or use the ad-supported version. That makes sense.

However, I don't understand the point of the Focused Inbox feature. Why not show me all my email and let me create folders and define rules for how my email should be organized?

Having their algorithm guess what it thinks is important or not means I need to check two tabs to see all my email. I don't trust their algorithm to not put something that is important into the 'Other' tab where I might not see it.

You can disable Focused Inbox and Outlook doesn't support it for most accounts anyway.

From my usage Focused Inbox doesn't seem like that much of an algorithm, it for the most part just seems follow similar rules that Gmail has used for things like the > and >> marks from very early in Gmail history: addressed to you and only you, no Listserv headers of any sort, is a known contact in your address bar.

I check both tabs of course, but the primary usefulness of Focused Inbox I've found is in notification management. Lock screen notifications are limited to Focused Inbox, so I often read that "tab" at a glance on my lock screen (during Scheduled Summaries, these days) and reading the "Other Inbox" is closer to "regular email time".

Also it's called "Focused Inbox" in part because it only affects the Inbox. Create your own folders and rules and they bypass the Inbox including Focused Inbox.

For work I use the Outlook web frontend on desktop and mobile both, instead of their native apps, as it's just less terrible. But maybe that's not an option for individual free accounts?

Why would anybody use the Outlook app on iOS as opposed to the built-in one?

It's an feature-rich well-designed performant program and I strongly prefer it to the built-in mail app. With ads, of course, not so much. I'd consider paying $5/year to remove the ads if Microsoft allowed it.

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