The grand old enshittification curve strikes again. Remember, as stated by Cory Doctorow, the process of enshittification entails these steps: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse t…
Ever had one of those in-dash or on-window outdated GPS units that cost a pretty penny to keep current?
Ever had online storage and file transfer/sharing before Google Drive?
Ever searched before Google itself presented their search engine?
Ever had a "smart"phone before Android?
They may suck now with the increased enshittification of services… before they came along the web was a very rough place. And expensive as hell. Don’t discredit Google because you weren’t around to see how they improved things. Before it became about appeasing the stockholders, what Google bringing to the web was a -really- exciting time. Getting 1GB (and an ever increasing quota) for free webmail was fucking astounding, absolutely unheard of… and that was with the best spam filtering anyone had ever seen. Now everything that wasn’t done before Google did it is taken for granted.
That said. I have to admit there’s a sense of sadness within me when it comes to all of this. Google HAS gotten worse. And it’s compounded by the fact that I remember how much better they used to be. Now I’ve come to have to accept that I’ll be retiring my (singledictionaryword)@gmail address and start using Google services less. I’ll still be using Android, but exclusively third party roms and without dependence on GApps as default… and knowing that it has come to this fucking sucks.
1999-2009-ish was a fun time online. Endless possibilities. Google was a big part of that.
What exactly was wrong with email before GMail? I resisted GMail for years because it had no advantages over Yahoo mail, and only mixed advantages over mail via IMAP.
Before Gmail, my old Hotmail account had a whopping 2MB of storage, and others were similarly small. Gmail was a few GB right from the start, forcing the rest to compete and offer more storage.
Storage, yes, that’s the one thing I’d say GMail improved. Thankfully the rest of the industry was quick to implement the same things.
Otherwise… I mean, it took them a very long time to realize the whole “tag based” email management needed to be, if not removed, at least “hidden” and made to look more folder like. It was a confusing horrible mess, even to many of us who understood it.
I think people have a tendency to look upon whatever the current dominant platform is with rose tinted glasses because they compare what they have now, which has undergone dozens of changes, but as each was incremental they assume it didn’t change the fundamental original, to the prehistoric UIs of Hotmail in the 1990s. In reality, at the time of the introduction of GMail, they were all using roughly the same web technologies, and GMail was the one that looked cruder.
I don’t even like the UI today, but it’s a huge improvement on 2000s GMail.
Yahoo mail was garbage tier before Gmail forced them to redesign.
Honestly. You really had to go experience the horrors of free web based email before Gmail ever got existed to truly understand the full scope of what they accomplished.
Honestly. You really had to go experience the horrors of free web based email before Gmail ever got existed
I would have thought it obvious I did actually experience “free web based email before Gmail ever (…) existed” based upon my comment.
I created my Yahoo account in 1999.
It really wasn’t that bad, and moreover early GMail UIs were absolutely awful. I mean garbage. The UI was cluttered and messy, and Google were trying to enforce a completely different model of email management on everyone that made sense to programmers in an abstract way but not intuitively. I’m a developer, and I didn’t want it.
The only thing I saw that people liked about GMail when it first came out was the large amount of storage. And as I had never hit my Yahoo limit (which was something like 50Mb IIRC, but this was back before everyone was emailing pictures and files to each other), I didn’t see it as a great deal.
I seriously think you all are comparing 1996 Hotmail to 2020 GMail or something, because GMail was just not that big a deal. It definitely wasn’t an improvement in anything but storage over Yahoo Mail.
Ever used email before GMail?
Ever had one of those in-dash or on-window outdated GPS units that cost a pretty penny to keep current?
Ever had online storage and file transfer/sharing before Google Drive?
Ever searched before Google itself presented their search engine?
Ever had a "smart"phone before Android?
They may suck now with the increased enshittification of services… before they came along the web was a very rough place. And expensive as hell. Don’t discredit Google because you weren’t around to see how they improved things. Before it became about appeasing the stockholders, what Google bringing to the web was a -really- exciting time. Getting 1GB (and an ever increasing quota) for free webmail was fucking astounding, absolutely unheard of… and that was with the best spam filtering anyone had ever seen. Now everything that wasn’t done before Google did it is taken for granted.
That said. I have to admit there’s a sense of sadness within me when it comes to all of this. Google HAS gotten worse. And it’s compounded by the fact that I remember how much better they used to be. Now I’ve come to have to accept that I’ll be retiring my (singledictionaryword)@gmail address and start using Google services less. I’ll still be using Android, but exclusively third party roms and without dependence on GApps as default… and knowing that it has come to this fucking sucks.
1999-2009-ish was a fun time online. Endless possibilities. Google was a big part of that.
What exactly was wrong with email before GMail? I resisted GMail for years because it had no advantages over Yahoo mail, and only mixed advantages over mail via IMAP.
Before Gmail, my old Hotmail account had a whopping 2MB of storage, and others were similarly small. Gmail was a few GB right from the start, forcing the rest to compete and offer more storage.
Yahoo was something like a whopping 10 or 15MB. Gmail debuting with 1GB of space was a nearly 1000 fold increase at the time.
Storage, yes, that’s the one thing I’d say GMail improved. Thankfully the rest of the industry was quick to implement the same things.
Otherwise… I mean, it took them a very long time to realize the whole “tag based” email management needed to be, if not removed, at least “hidden” and made to look more folder like. It was a confusing horrible mess, even to many of us who understood it.
I think people have a tendency to look upon whatever the current dominant platform is with rose tinted glasses because they compare what they have now, which has undergone dozens of changes, but as each was incremental they assume it didn’t change the fundamental original, to the prehistoric UIs of Hotmail in the 1990s. In reality, at the time of the introduction of GMail, they were all using roughly the same web technologies, and GMail was the one that looked cruder.
I don’t even like the UI today, but it’s a huge improvement on 2000s GMail.
Yahoo mail was garbage tier before Gmail forced them to redesign.
Honestly. You really had to go experience the horrors of free web based email before Gmail ever got existed to truly understand the full scope of what they accomplished.
I would have thought it obvious I did actually experience “free web based email before Gmail ever (…) existed” based upon my comment.
I created my Yahoo account in 1999.
It really wasn’t that bad, and moreover early GMail UIs were absolutely awful. I mean garbage. The UI was cluttered and messy, and Google were trying to enforce a completely different model of email management on everyone that made sense to programmers in an abstract way but not intuitively. I’m a developer, and I didn’t want it.
The only thing I saw that people liked about GMail when it first came out was the large amount of storage. And as I had never hit my Yahoo limit (which was something like 50Mb IIRC, but this was back before everyone was emailing pictures and files to each other), I didn’t see it as a great deal.
I seriously think you all are comparing 1996 Hotmail to 2020 GMail or something, because GMail was just not that big a deal. It definitely wasn’t an improvement in anything but storage over Yahoo Mail.
Making quality stuff for free does not mean they were not doing shady things in the background.
I have no plan to boycott Google or anything, but they were nwver benevolent and usage has always been a tradeoff of data tracking for convenience.