Gmail Proves That Some People Hate Smart Suggestions (techcrunch.com) 181
Citing a number of complaints following Google's Gmail makeover, TechCrunch's Romain Dillet makes the case for why some users don't want smart suggestions in the email service: There's a reason why Gmail lets you disable all the smart features. Some users don't want smart categories, important emails first and smart reply suggestions. Arguably, the only smart feature everyone needs is the spam filter. A pure chronological feed of your email messages is incredibly valuable as well. That's why many Instagram users are still asking for a chronological feed. Sure, algorithmic feeds can lead to more engagement and improved productivity. Maybe Google conducted some tests and concluded that you end up answering more emails if you let Gmail do its thing. But you may want to judge the value of each email without an algorithmic ranking.
VCs could spot the next big thing without any bias. Journalists could pay attention to young and scrappy startups as much as the new electric scooter startup in San Francisco. Universities could give a grant to students with unconventional applications. The HR department of your company could look at all applications without following Google's order.
VCs could spot the next big thing without any bias. Journalists could pay attention to young and scrappy startups as much as the new electric scooter startup in San Francisco. Universities could give a grant to students with unconventional applications. The HR department of your company could look at all applications without following Google's order.
Facebook too (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't used FB in years, but when I used it, I found it extremely annoying with how it would try to be smart about how to order my timeline, rather than just putting things in chronological order.
I think such a system would be especially bad with email, because there's a lot of emails I get that are important, but all the necessary details are in the subject. Thus, I never actually open them, which would lead such a system to incorrectly believe that such emails are not important to me.
Re: (Score:1)
Especially when the algorithmic timeline was also being used to force people to pay them for their posts to become visible to friends and/or people following them.
The real horror of "smart" timelines (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't used FB in years, but when I used it, I found it extremely annoying with how it would try to be smart about how to order my timeline,
Oh it still does that.
The worst part about that for me is that what it considers smart now, changes from second to second It seems.
In in effect what would happen is I would see two interesting things on my timeline, click one to read it, go back and... timeline is totally different, no way to find the other thing I wanted to visit.
So frustrating.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I haven't used FB in years, but when I used it, I found it extremely annoying with how it would try to be smart about how to order my timeline,
Oh it still does that.
Uhhh... Did you not know that you can easily change this?
To change:
Click on the three dots "..." next to "News Feed" and select "Most Recent" instead of "Top Stories."
Re: The real horror of "smart" timelines (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, and Facebook remembers literally everything about you for decades, but it magically can't remember that you selected Chronological Order... You have to reselect it. Every. Fucking. Day.
Sorry, but you can eat shit with your smug condescending remarks.
Re: (Score:1)
No Shit. This.
Great, but why not default (Score:3)
Uhhh... Did you not know that you can easily change this?
Why should I? Why should I have looked a the three dots next to news feed instead of one of the MANY icons at the top including account config where presumably all configuration would be located?
It is nice to know that and I thank you for pointing it out, but why on earth is that not the default behavior? That is one of the least discoverable settings I've seen in a long time...
Re:Great, but why not default (Score:4, Informative)
It also doesn’t get remembered and it’s been broken for a few months now. It doesn’t really show most recent despite what it claims.
Re: (Score:1)
Because Facebook isn't designed for you, someone who wants to read every inane post in chronological order. It's designed for people who don't dedicate that much time to Facebook and perceive it as low quality because of all the dreck between interesting stuff.
Re:The real horror of "smart" timelines (Score:5, Informative)
Except that option doesn’t really work and usually limits you to a handful of posts before it claims it has nothing else to show you to force you back to the algorithmic timeline bullshit. .
Re: (Score:1)
I haven't used FB in years, but when I used it, I found it extremely annoying with how it would try to be smart about how to order my timeline,
Oh it still does that.
Uhhh... Did you not know that you can easily change this?
To change:
Click on the three dots "..." next to "News Feed" and select "Most Recent" instead of "Top Stories."
Anyone who modded this smug reply at +3 has somehow not realized that it does not in fact work: Facebook repeatedly reverts back to "Top Stories" every time you log back in, or sometimes just from refreshing the damn page.
Re: The real horror of "smart" timelines (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. I just use sort-by-time, I have no need of this artificial stupidity crap. Then I do not use Gmail or Farcebook at all.
predictable smart (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that predictable behaviour is more convenient than smart. Case in point: the bash-completion package, it knows which arguments to a command are subcommands rather than filenames, and what filenames you don't care enough. It's right 95% of the time. But it's that 5% that's infuriating: a subcommand that was added only recently, a .tar.zst file not recognized as a tarball (zstd is awesome!), assuming that you want btrfs fi def only directories but not files (VM images anyone?), mysteriously skipping directories with a @ in name, etc.
Re: (Score:3)
Mod parent up. This is crucial for any productive activity. Predictable behavior is important. Configurable predictable behavior is even better, but we skip "configurable" if we must choose.
Smart help is only helpful if it is really smart, that is - sentient, i.e. another person.
Because if a person does something you don't like you tell them, and they understand what you said, and they remember and they are effectively infinitely flexible and adaptable.
Attributes that none of FB's algorithms possess.
Re: (Score:3)
I find that predictable behaviour is more convenient than smart.
Yep. Few things annoy me more than people trying to second-guess me (and often getting it wrong). It's even more annoying when software tries to do it (and never gets it right).
Re:Facebook too (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
It is horrible, and the worst thing is that you never find something back because the search engine is useless.
Can't count the times when i said - oh, but this was on fb/g+/twitter - to never find it back again.
Re: (Score:1)
With regarding to news they should be chronological, how on Earth anybody might think otherwise is a total mystery. I had to gave up all the "smart" news aggregators even though they had nice features of selecting my own sources - they simply are the opposite of smart. I kept seeing the same news for weeks, just be
Re: Facebook too (Score:2)
There is no good real email client anymore.
The formerly good ones were all made slow. It's like people developinh those don't even have a billion emails and don't know how to make things scale.
Re: (Score:2)
See : https://notmuchmail.org/ [notmuchmail.org]
It can have various types of interfaces.
Re: (Score:2)
Eudora's source code has recently been made open-source. I'm SINCERELY hoping that somebody will re-release it.
Eudora was the best over-all email program ever written.
Re:Facebook too (Score:5, Funny)
You're bragging about not using Web mail, but you're using POP3? ;-)
Are you also stuck with the imposed Important folder, or is that just an IMAP thing?
I'm thinking about getting rid of GMail in any event--ads showing up in my browser for things allegedly related to whatever I've just mentioned in an email is really starting to creep me out.
And the fact that I get ads for mail-order brides whenever I mention China or Thailand in an email is seriously annoying. (This isn't uncommon, seeing as I've relatives in the former, and friends in the latter.) I *think* my wife realises that I most definitely am NOT looking for a replacement, but it's still annoying as hell.
Re: (Score:2)
If you want to get that mail off of their server and on to your own box, there's nothing wrong with POP3. (Not that I expect google will every really let go of your email...)
IMAP is a solution to problems I don't care about-- accessing mail from one workstation is fine by me.
Re: (Score:1)
pop3? You're kidding, right? Do you read every entry in a catalog when you're looking for a drill or do you turn to the tool section? Pop3 is really inefficient. Use imaps. At least use pop3s.
Re: (Score:2)
I tried that a couple years back, but every time I'd fire up Mutt...it would take forever trying to download every freaking email on the server each time (at the time was near 65K or so I think)....
I could never figure out the configuration to keep track locally what it had and just download the "new" ones....
Re: Facebook too (Score:1)
A while back Gmail announced it was going to rewrite the tracking images. https://blog.mailchimp.com/how... [mailchimp.com]
You keep using that word... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Smart". I don't think you understand what it means.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course they know exactly what it means. It means that when they used it, it had an effect in their focus groups that led to greater sales/usage.
Whether it had any such results when actually fielded is a different question.
Re:You keep using that word... (Score:4, Interesting)
'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'
Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
Re: (Score:1)
And now we know why he "fell" off that fucking wall.
my priority vs yours (Score:2, Interesting)
Google may want to optimize for engagement or whatever, but I don't.
I want to see the videos I want to see, and then I want to go do something else.
Google wants you to keep watching videos, clicking emails, or whatever else all day.
This is why they keep suggesting random videos I don't want to watch.
Just because I watch one trump video doesn't mean I want to spend all day watching rachel madcow, jon oliver, and stephen colbert ranting and raving about him.
Re: (Score:3)
spend all day watching rachel madcow, jon oliver, and stephen colbert ranting and raving about him.
That's before the most recent algorithm shift. Now it would just be Trump videos and only if you're lucky would they be from multiple accounts/changes. The YouTube algorithm as a discovery tool is nearly totally dead.
Smart people want dumb products (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Dumb pipe ISPs too.
Re: (Score:2)
They mean dumb in the sense of speech. You can look, but don't touch.
Re: (Score:2)
You know why some TVs have a dedicated Netflix button? Because that's what customers want - a TV that shows Netflix.
30 years ago if you had tried to sell a TV that didn't get half the most popular channels it wouldn't have sold well. These days if you try to sell a TV that doesn't have Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and YouTube it won't sell very well.
Also, if you really really want a dumb TV, just buy a smart TV and don't connect it to your network. I guarantee that will be cheaper than buying some specialist
Re: (Score:2)
Mine has the Netflix button and also one for Amazon video and where I live there's no question to what service is more popular.
It's also true that many people will find those buttons handy though.
Re: (Score:2)
High-end consumer TVs also have a ton of "smarts" around making the picture look "better". There's no simple switch to turn all that stuff off, either. High-end consumer audio got to the point where it's now a selling point to have a simple "make it dumb" button - I won't buy a receiver without it. TVs need to catch up.
Of course "HDR" is such a mess of competing standards that there isn't even an obvious way to send an accurate, full color gamut, HDR signal over an HDMI cable, so it may be a while.
They are not smart suggestions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
The modern version of that is: if it aint broke try another UX paradigm.
Re: (Score:1)
Very, very hard, even for a lot of engineers (from the "mediocre" faction, admittedly). You need to be actually smart to see you cannot really do better. Most people do not qualify here. Just look at the utter crap that MS thinks is "innovative". Look at the stupidity in the Linux sphere with systemd, and quite a few kernel "improvements" (at least they usually keep the old, reliable and well-tested stuff around), the morons that these days maintain Emacs, etc. The list is endless.
Re: (Score:2)
kernel "improvements" (at least they usually keep the old, reliable and well-tested stuff around), the morons that these days maintain Emacs
Just curious - what are the bad "improvements" in kernel, and moronic developments in Emacs ?
Re: (Score:2)
I use the smart suggestions occasionally, when I just need to acknowledge something or give a simple affirmative/negative response. Especially on mobile it saves some annoying typing.
Honestly, I don't understand why people are so offended about the little suggestion bubbles that take up a tiny amount of space, are easily ignored and are occasionally useful. Why does their mere existence annoy people, when they have no effect on usability?
Re: (Score:2)
I may be getting old but I think some time ago social networks' interests lined better with users'. Same with Windows: It used to be just an OS. Now it has a start menu filled with apps and advertismets in the freaking OS.
Gmail proves that people hate being spied on (Score:5, Insightful)
Gmail proves that people hate being spied on. These same people do not hate Google until something draws their attention to the fact that they are being spied on. Face it folks, Microsoft is no longer the biggest threat to your digitial rights. Now, Google, Apple and Facebook are, and of those, Google is the worst threat even if not the most visible violator.
Re:Gmail proves that people hate being spied on (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not all. It shows advertisements for other MS products right in the OS. It comes with dozens of crapware programs that get reinstalled during updates. Updates are practically forced too. What's to stop the government from making them use their telemetry file reading ability with a NSL?
Now add in the fact this is the dominant operating system, and required for some newer hardware, so avoiding it is much, much more of an inconvenience than avoiding Google. Anyone claiming MS isn't the worst offender for invading privacy is deluded or shilling.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I absolutely abhor Microsoft because of what they did with Windows 10. It made me not buy an Xbox console just because they make them. And they have the gall to claim they're now better since they embrace open source and so and so (you should really read the Nadella PR when they acquired Github) . In the end they're just like the old Microsoft or even worse.
Re: (Score:2)
Face it folks, Microsoft is no longer the biggest threat to your digitial rights.
except that windows spies on you, and there is no reason to believe MS doesn't spy on you with their web based services (bing, linkedin, hotmail, (soon) github(?), ...)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong - Necrosoft still sucks and they abuse/spy on/invade their customers as hard as they can short only of paying out another large suit, but other big tech thugs are actually worse now, because they possess the means of harming their customers more severely.
Re: (Score:2)
Gmail hasn't been using email content for advertising since last year. They still do the same kind of filtering that all email services do - spam, malware, phishing, illegal images.
Are there any free email services that don't do any processing of message content at all? Certainly no large ones that I know of.
Re: Gmail proves that people hate being spied on (Score:4, Insightful)
blah blah sniff butt hurt blan blah
Microsoft is still evil, they just aren't as effective at it now as the other big tech thugs.
Artificial Stupidity (Score:3)
While the world waits for real AI, there is a lot of AS (artificial stupidity). Systems that are too dumb to do what their designers want and instead are just annoying. Email helper apps tend to be like that. I hate when my phone email app tells me that it thinks its found an appointment and pops up a window to enter it. Its just annoying, wastes time and interrupts what I am doing.
The original was the copy machine that after a jam would insist that you "remove the original" without the ability to sense that there was no original sheet on the copier.
Re:Artificial Stupidity (Score:4, Interesting)
The original was the copy machine that after a jam would insist that you "remove the original" without the ability to sense that there was no original sheet on the copier.
Second-guessing systems go back further than this. Elevators that would automatically go to the ground floor unless you pushed a button, jukeboxes with a mechanical memory that would pick the song-before-the-last (thus if no-one inserted a coin and made a choice, they would be stuck alternating between two irritating songs, wearing the records out), but the oldest are likely bibles, where the page width varied slightly by design, so by rifling you would more often end up at popular passages.
Re: (Score:2)
This has nothing to do with "second-guessing". Most elevator rides go from ground floor to a level, or from a level to ground floor. Therefore, the most efficient place for the elevator to home to is ground level. If you don't tell the elevator to do something else, that's where it goes (exceptions for if there are many elevators in a bank). But note, if someone above you calls for the elevator, even though you didn't hi
Re: (Score:2)
Even more to the point - an elevator doesn't "know" someone is in it if you don't press a button. It isn't trying to "guess" what you want, it isn't aware there are any passengers.
This is wrong. Most elevators have for a long time now been equipped with pressure sensors in the floors.
Re: (Score:2)
All this 'smart' is really just a slighly refined 'Clippy'. Clippy was thick as pig shit because it was only triggered on you writing "Dear" at the top of a document. Pretty much any 'smart' that you see today is better than that, but not by a lot - it's still 'pattern matching' and can only infer intent based on the few words it has to go on.
"intent" is what's missing in all of this - if my intent is to file things a certain way, then that's what I want - it's easy for humans to do this, and yet very hard
Smart my arse! (Score:3)
Gmail tags every damn email with 'Update' except they're typically not, it's just obsessed and can't leave my email alone, it's got to stick some stupid tag on it. Nothing smart about it.
I get emails I tag with 'gift' they're all very similar, does gmail do me a favour and tag the very similar emails with 'gift'? No, because it's not in the slightest bit smart.
Re: (Score:2)
In fact, they even keep putting legitimate emails in Spam folder! After a couple incidents missing important work emails due to Gmail's aggressive spam filtering (it must've been designed by people who didn't understand the giant costs of false positives, compared to tiny cost of false negatives), I disabled Gmail spam filter and I am not re-enabling it until I have seen that Google understood priorities of people whose work depends on being able to receive every legit email.
P.S. Quite obviously, I'm opting
Re: (Score:2)
So. Much. This.
The problem isn't that I dislike "smart suggestions" - it's that Gmail's suggestions aren't smart at all. (Ditto for their news reader - I've been thumbing down sports and entertainment stories for months, and they still keep showing up by the raftload.)
Everyone moved away from this (Score:1)
Everyone moved away from this probably a decade ago. You generally can't sort things from big companies these days. Everything from Netflix to Amazon. Old mp3 players had better sorting abilities for the most part--you could sort by any field in the metadata. The new design is a bad customer experience, but not bad enough to make people give up the content, and it lets them monetize "sort" order for optimal ROI.
Also... (Score:2)
Gmail Proves That Some People Hate Smart Suggestions
Gmail also proves that Gmail can't make smart suggestions. I like Gmail, but it routinely labels complete shit mail that i send to trash immediately without even opening as "important," and that's stuff after the spam filter weeds out the even more shit mail.
AI cannot anticipate (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not AI, they just scan the text with some Javascript that looks for keywords. It actually works reasonably well, e.g. when someone asks if a particular time and date is okay it suggests "yeah, that's fine" or "no, how about the day after?"
The idea is to save you time with canned responses to common subjects, not to really understand you in any way.
Inbox does try to figure out which emails are "important", but only by looking at which contacts and threads you often read and reply too. Just some statisti
Re: (Score:2)
Even real people can never give me sane suggestions, because directly or not, they feel their needs are the same or more important than mine. If the intent is to either sell me a product or satisfy their own ego, adding technology won't make things better for me.
So, yeah... AI can get stuffed.
I just don't use Gmail (Score:2)
In addition to not wanting any more of my life in Google's hands than they already possess, I just always thought the UI of their webmail was worse than average - and that's saying a lot when the best webmail interfaces are merely sucky instead of terrible.
Arguably, the only smart feature everyone needs is the spam filter.
Nope, don't need that either. It's valuable to some extent on my throwaway email addresses, where I might get a dozen or two spam emails in a week. But I simply don't get spam on my primary email address, and I never run spam filters on it. I've been care
Re: (Score:2)
In addition to not wanting any more of my life in Google's hands than they already possess,
Ya know, 10 years ago I'd have agreed with you. But now the details of my daily existence have moved to text messages. The majority of the email I get now are either A) library telling me a book is ready/overdue; B) Marketing I filter and never see; or C) people I haven't heard from in years and typically am glad I haven't heard from them in years.
Thus far, simple enough to turn off (Score:2)
Took one look at their idea of "smart" a long time ago, then configured it again to have normal, reverse chronological.
If they ever make that too difficult, may have to look at painful transition away ...
Taking it further... (Score:2)
... anyone else here using gmail in Simple HTML view?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't use HTML in email at all and I read HTML crapmail only when I have to.
Define smart, then see if I want it (Score:1)
The article mentions 'algorithmic'. Marketeers label that as 'smart', and yes, the word can be a convenient short hand for something that automates certain kinds of work. But, like so many terms, it gets bandied around and misinterpreted, causing confusion.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. "Smart" means "some dumb automation included" and "AI" means "non-intelligent statistical classification in use".
Same reason I don't want ... (Score:3)
... a goddam clock on my washing machine.
It's been 10-15 years but (Score:3)
I have no idea what Smart Suggestions are and don't really care, I haven't used the gmail web interface since the last time I got a new laptop and had to set it up.
Re: (Score:2)
What's the difference? Where do folders fit in?
I'm curious because the way I think about UX and such is very different from (almost) everyone else, and I don't understand the distinction that upset you. Nor do I understand how your workflow would be different between them.
Re: (Score:2)
It is not smart (Score:2)
Youtube is a prime example. "Oh, you watched one cat movie? Guess we can spam you with cat movies now". I'm clicking the "not interested" button very frequently and youtube does not seem to understand why. As an example: every clip for subject X I see I'm not interested in to see in my recommended list. If I want tosee X, I'll look for it. Yet, it keeps showing me clips with subject X. No! Go away
Inbox control (Score:3)
I have 12 items in my inbox, all of them are items I need to address at some point. Every email has been read.
All prior emails have either been deleted or moved to other folders. Not all are read, but all have been taken care of.
I don't need Google telling me what to do with my emails or suggesting canned replies. The spam filter is helpful, but I could survive without that too because I use another email address I rarely monitor to sign up for anything on the internet.
Taking appropriate precautions about where one uses their email and maintaining a little self-discipline goes a long way.
It's like a self-driving car. I don't need a self-driving car. But, I do appreciate some of the features they are developing and as long as I can choose which ones I want to use and when I'm OK with that.
I think having your software or car do too much for you contributes to the dumbing down of society. Just like depending on GPS impacts one's ability to navigate without it.
Ways Forward (Score:1)
To make "smart suggestions" features more useful, lift the hood on the algorithm, name the content clusters that users appear to be interested in (likely requires human assistance) and allow users to edit the weights. There's no need for a funky graphical interface. Put up a 3 column table with cluster name, up
Some Smart, Some "Smart"(TM) (Score:2)
Gmail is good. Ugly, but good. I personally use automatic Primary/Social/Promotions/Update/Forums tags as well as the SPAM filter, but that's about it. They work 99.9% of the time for me and that's plenty good enough. I read Primary first, then off to Update, Forums, Promotions, and then Social. I delete almost all my file/tag my Update emails (digital receipts, etc.), I read Forum updates, delete currently irrelevant Promotions and skim the ones relevant to me right now, and skim Social. For me, it's conve
This is an old argument, and I know how it ends. (Score:2)
I remember back in the 80s criticism of the software-as-agent philosophy from people who came from a software-as-tool background. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive approaches, but it's hard to do both at the same time.
"Intelligent" software doesn't really understand users as much as the designers think it does. When it guesses right it might be OK, but when it guesses wrong it forces the user to struggle. Software that tries to be intelligent also tends to be abusive of user focus, trying to gra
Gmail's categories are useless (Score:1)
Tech has Topped Out (Score:1)
There are very few, if any, new ideas coming out of Silicon Valley anymore. Tech companies need to invent solutions to non-existent problems in order to pretend to be relevant.
Just think about the whole 'disruptor' mindset. Are any of these ideas truly disruptive, or is it just trendy, hipster bullshit?
Re: (Score:2)
You really can't do any better than "If you're not rich, you must be a bad person"? Really?
Re: (Score:1)
I guess you think you're smarter with that 4th grade education?
Re: (Score:1)
What do Billionaires have to do with Trump?
Have we even seen his accounts yet?