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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

They probably want to kill the reverse chronological grid because many tools to delete Google Photos in bulk rely on it. Photos is a great source of storage consumption (“let us auto back up every photo you’ve ever taken…”), and when it’s consumed you no longer receive email in gmail. Your only option out of this hostage situation is to delete things from storage or pay Google a subscription. Conveniently, it is painful to delete things en masse from Photos, so they hope this will frustrate you into a subscription.

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> they hope this will frustrate you into a subscription.

Imagine a salesman trying to trick you into buying something. We immediately get wary of their behaviour and want them to go away. Sadly we have built huge tolerance for apps. They trick us into subscriptions. If not that, they trick us to use the app for hours at end so that they can show relevant ads. It's incredibly toxic behaviour but somehow we don't mind it when it's coming from app.

I got off Google Photos in 2021[1]. Even with some automation, I spent days deleting the photos. Very soon, with the new changes, the steps will likely become redundant.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...

Is consumer spending on these kinds of services significant? It feels like chasing pennies, but then again, numbers must always go up.

I could instead believe it is different enough to make an internal splash and that usability concerns were not considered.

Enough of my (technical and non-technical) friends have struggled with this and caved to the dark pattern that it has become a topic of discussion at dinner a few times. This probably means there is a significant amount of ARR tied up in it.

I pay for Google Drive but am slowly pulling out (after I read that Google was flagging files with just a 1 or 0 as pirated content I felt that I couldn't trust it any more). Looking at the pricing now I'm sure they had a 200GB option but now it's 100GB and the straight to 2TB.

> when it’s consumed you no longer receive email in gmail

my storage has been full on the 200 GB plan for a year and I'm still getting my emails

What happened to that whole "organize the world's data" mission? That isn't something to quit on part way through. Aww.. would Elgoog really backtrack on this?

If that's true, why did they add the features to detect unneeded photos (e.g., post it notes, duplicates) and bulk delete them?

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