Gmail wasn't even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still "Don't Be Evil" and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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The main advantage of Gmail at the time was honestly that they did away with tiny mailbox sizes and attachment limits.
The web UI was also vastly superior to Hotmail or Yahoo
And they blocked way more spam
Little did we know that it was them that was the real spam
The real spam was the friends we made along the way
Ain't that the dang truth! lol
Yes, it was 1GB so you never had to delete anything.
And their slogan was "search dont sort" googles search box was very advanced at the time compared to the free alternatives
I remember the counter too. The ever growing available capacity of my mailbox that was more space than I could ever use. Just open Gmail and watch that number grow
I was under the impression that Google was giving me email out the kindness of their own heart.
When Gmail first came out 20 years ago (as of yesterday), we all thought that. It was a new world and nobody was thinking about the long term ramifications. Before that point, there wasn't even such a thing as a Google account, Google was just a search engine that didn't operate all that differently than Duck Duck Go does today.
I don't even think that Google had a plan at that point in the game. Monetization was the obvious goal, but nobody really thought about what that would look like.
Since then, Google users' privacy has experienced death by a thousand cuts. If the terms you have to agree with today were known then, Gmail never would have succeeded.
With every new product and feature added to a Google account holder's toolbox over the past two decades, creeping normalization came with them, and here we are today...
Exactly. Same as is happening with privacy right now. Chip away bit by bit. Do it all at once and people will complain. But do it bit by bit and they won't know until it's too late.
Similarly to the story of the frog in the boiling water. Drop it in hot water and it'll jump out. Heat the water slowly and it'll boil to death.
But hey. At least we've got nothing to hide right? /S
Protonmail is today (or was a few years ago) what everyone thought Gmail was when it came out. I can still remember how excited I was to get an email accepting me into the Gmail beta. A crazy amount of space, no one knew how they did it.
I dont think anyone thought gmail was private. We literally just didn't think about it
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As a side note, here’s what Wikipedia says about the frog experiment:
“While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual,[2][3] according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.[4][5]”
Your point still stands, but you might want to consider switching to another metaphor next time.
Source: Boiling frog
Also you could feed two birds with one scone by choosing a less violent metaphor...
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You say that ironically, but in the early days of Google its motto was "Do No Evil" and it promoted non-intrusive advertising. There was this sense that Google was a company of engineers and that you could trust them.
(disclaimer: I didn't trust them.)
Google was a company of engineers that you could trust, however, like Boeing (which was another "Company of Engineers") they were slowly replaced by business execs who probably haven't written a line of code in their life (Save for maybe some VBA for some businessy excel spreadsheet)
This is why I love FOSS products. You get the advantage of using well engineered code, without the risk of that code falling into the hands of exploitive capitalists.
Permissively-licensed stuff (e.g. MIT, BSD) still has that risk. What you really want is copyleft (e.g. GPL) specifically, not just FOSS.
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Just imagine if they hadn't taken this approach. We might be paying for services and still not getting any privacy.
Good point, except that this, paying for services and still not getting any privacy, is a reality. But maybe your remark was ironic :)
Paying for services and still not getting any privacy is largely a result of the equally naive attitude that a paid product is superior to a free one.
In reality neither free nor paid is an indicator of quality and a lot of the time enforced regulations are the only thing that can really prevent a company or organization from putting its own self-interest over that of the customer whenever possible (even though some companies and organizations might do so even without being forced to).
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Spot on. There's no amount of money in the world that would make them not spy on your and use your data for ads and God knows what else.
The only sane alternative is FOSS.
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Within two years of Gmail going viral people were screaming from the tops of any soap box, tree and mountain You are the product!! but as these things always go, very few people paid attention.
Convenience is above all else
And not just a little bit of convenience. At that time, Hotmail had like 14 MB of space whereas Gmail had 1 GB. Before, you were constantly out of space, whereas Gmail users could keep on going without ever deleting anything.
Would you rather walk if you could have a personal uber driver with a Mercedes? Well, the driver is super creepy, but least the seats are soft. He will take you everywhere for free, but will also know everything about those rides and the conversations you had during them.
Yahoo was the competition as far as space is concerned. Even today, it offers a whopping 1 TB for email.
Remember when we would climb over 10 office desks to try to snatch an invite to this new "G mail" service with a whole Gig of space?
We were literally begging to have them steal all our personal correspondences, bank statements, etc
Even then, Hotmail, Y! Mail and your shitty ISP's shitty POP mailbox were reading the contents of your emails and selling adverts based on the contents. At least with GMail they gave us the dignity of a nice UI and adequate storage.
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Okay back in the Don't Be Evil days, the business model expressed that no human should ever see private data except its owner. Google's business clients could ask Google questions about data analyses involving cross sections of thousands of users, but couldn't ask about individuals. Also you could tell Google to send ads to car owners (though normal Google advertising channels) and they would, and report how many users saw your ads.
Then two things became a problem.
One was internal affairs. Not just Google techs stalking their exes but people stealing databases of names and selling them to information collection orgs. So if you were a debt collector, it was good to have a friend in Google.
Also the PATRIOT act, FBI, DHS, NSA and eventually all of US law enforcement. Judges let them look at the raw Google data, which Google actually resisted with a high-powered legal team, but eventually the judges let law enforcement have at, which is how we have reverse warrants fulfilled by Google today.
In the aughts, Google was supposed to figure out a technological solution, so that the police could tap at the computer or look at the (salted) data all they want and without end user keys which no-one could access, they'd be SOL.
But they did too little too late, and nowadays, enough info on one person could narrow then down to a single human being, which John Oliver demonstrated a couple of years ago by building info kits on everyone in the US Senate, including acts of fraud and illicit affairs.
It was a good idea, and still may be if it's started locked down like Crystal Palace, but Google can't do it anymore.
And to be fair, they were upfront about it...
The problem now is that 1) Google products turned from innovative to barely functional (with every improvement coming in a soon to be killed new app) and 2) they went from your data to show you ads to profiling people's fart strength
Now that I think of it, thesgiy e free products also differ from inflation ... You get to pay with even more of your privacy for an increasingly shittier product
I don't think paying will solve anything. Some genius will one day just think "but what if we just charged more. But what if we made our service worse so they pay more to restore it. But what if we just merge with even shittier people so they can do all this shitty stuff."
It's never enough, it will never be enough. It's self hosted and open source or barbarism.
Self-hosting was always the intent. Open source ended up being a bonus. People 30 years ago wouldn't understand why something like facebook would even need to exist. The internet is designed so literally everyone can have their own website.
It was never not creepy and wrong.
NEVER. Just because it's been two decades of people not thinking about it doesn't change that.
I remember, at that time, I was more worried about how admins in my local ISP spend their time than some far away company.
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People forget how expensive just basic email was until Gmail was released in 2004.
Free / included with every internet I had since 1999… when was it even moderately expensive?
Thereby tieing you to your ISP forever unless you were willing and able to keep changing your email address.
Never. Use. Your. ISP's Included. Email. Service.
My 20 year old Steam login uses a defunct ISP email from the dial up days. I changed the actual email associated with it for passwords etc. but my login is still “[email protected]”
But the point I was trying to make is email has always been free or included, in my experience. The fact Gmail was free was never the draw imo.
Yeah it has always been free for me too.
I think the major thing Gmail brought to the table was 1GB+ email storage when most free options at the time it was 1-5MB or so. I remember it being an insane increase in the available storage.
The problem is that if you run your own email server at home, you get blocked as a spammer these days. Today, to send emails you MUST use one of the big providers, or your email won't get delivered half of the times. One has no alternative but to use these free services.
Not if you set it up properly.
You can have your email hosted by Gmail or Outlook and still get flagged as spam if you don't complete the exact same set up requirements. (SPF, DKIM, etc)
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We were warned, too.
in 2017, Google finally caved. That year, the company announced that regular Gmail users’ emails would no longer be scanned for ad personalization (paid enterprise Gmail accounts already had this treatment).
Wut
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