alt Hacker NewsGmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
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The rush to AI everything has really showcased the epic stupidity of tech leadership.
Personally, as a gmail user of about 2 decades, this is the first I've heard of this particular issue, probably because for some years I don't even read past the word "smart" before disabling whatever feature du jour is being pushed in my face.
I'm just now migrating away from gmail for a different kind of inanity[1] all the same.
> I focus the message box to draft a reply, but there’s already one there. It was also generated by the language model. I delete it, replacing it with my own.
The really, really scary thing is how uncommon this approach is. I think.
My assumption is that most people roll with automated pre-written reply. Maybe tweaking a few things here and there, but ultimately preferring the all-too-convenient trade-off of the robots having written something close enough to what they wanted to say, using "better" words. Even when what they would have written themselves would have had some personality, even if it was their own flawed human one.
For the record, I am 100% with you on your approach (on the odd occasion that I must use gmail).
BTW, one more thing where Google thinks I'm stupid:
Increasingly, it tries to tie your phone number to your accounts. Fair enough, problems with fake accounts and all that, I don't like it but I understand it.
However, the prompt is invariably "Let us verify it's you. Please enter your phone number:" or something along those lines. With that, you don't verify that it's me. You just verify that someone has a phone number. It's for your protection, not for my protection. Don't patronise me.
Overly aggrieved style of writing. There's some prompts in Gmail to use AI. These are supposedly indictments of the author's writing or intellect? Anyway, the setting is in General and then Cmd-F "smart" and turn everything off.
That's weird. I use Gmail regularly and did not experience anything like that; it works just the way it did for the past 10+ years. And auto categorization still works just fine, and no AI summarizing my email or trying to write my drafts. I wonder what difference we have in settings.
Also, not to be disrespectful to the OP, but seems quite an... overblown reaction. To each their own, though.
I'm amazed at how many folks on this forum see the Web UI as intrinsically tied to the service. As someone else rightly said, e-mail = IMAP + SMTP. That is true of Gmail as well.
Frankly, I've always hated the Gmail web UI, so I never use it. Not in the 22 years I've had a Gmail account.
IMHO, Superhuman gets a ton right... A Superhuman clone (maybe in VIM or Emacs) would be ideal if you don't want the AI features or the $40/month fee. Don't even need to change your mail address, since it connects to Gmail.
> Afterward, I go to compose a new message. A colorful animation steals my focus for a second highlighting a new “help me write” button. I ignore it and move on to filling in the recipients and subject line.
Does it do this animation every time you try to compose a new message, or is it just the first time you are given the button?
(I couldn't simply look at my own gmail to see, because I tried that but mine does not have it. I'm guessing it is either something they are gradually rolling out or it is something only for people who are paying for Google services).
It looks like you are writing an email. Would you like some help with that?
Seems somewhat familiar from somewhere…
I got a new Samsung phone a few months ago (my last phone was showing signs of dying soon, and I'd promised to never touch Xiaomi again). It took a while to convince the two competing sets of GenAI features (Gemini and Bixby, and related features) that if I wanted their help I'd come calling, and until then they should sod off and leave me to do things myself.
I often think about leaving gmail, but it's not clear what the better option out there is, that doesn't create a bunch of pain in terms of not having good replacements for the rest of the ecosystem.
I focus the message body area and underneath my cursor appears
the message “Press / for Help me write”.
I had been using Chrome for just Gmail, because of Gmail's sabotagey hostility toward Firefox. On my 10+ machines I swapped Chrome for Bromium, ungoogled Chromium, Brave and a couple of others I don't recall.
Very happy to have mostly de-Googled, I don't miss the AI-forward product decisions. I only use Google now for occasional searches and interacting with other Google users (e.g. Docs).
I only ever use Gmail's backend. I've been using it for years with Mail.app on both Mac and iOS. Every time I load the web interface I'm appalled.
Not that Mail.app is amazing. It sometimes corrupts its sqlite db (I have 300k+ emails dating back to the late 90s). But it's still way better than the dreadful web interface that only seems to get worse and slower.
Is Fast Mail having human support? Suppose I forget my password or suppose fastmail somehow bans my account then is there a readily available human on the other end whom I can message or talk to. Recently on HN someone posted about a school which lost its 10 years of Google apps data and account with no possible recourse.
Please Google let me buy my email and move it to my own service without any restrictions and I will be thankful. I am now in too deep to move away, from my govt licenses to banks to everything else.
Switching away from Gmail isn't possible for me, but I will keep trying, I won't give up but hopefully I would never have to realize how big a mistake this was.
I feel like I might end up on the streets if gmail goes away. Hyperbolic but it's insane how true that feels.
I've been on the very cheap Zoho mail for awhile and it's done everything I want it to do including meetings.
I find it odd how so many tech involved people here use gmail - are privacy concerns not a concern for them?
I moved to mailbox.org years ago. Pay a few pounds a year for private email with webtools and drive and don't have google snooping my emails and sending me targeted ads.
I feel the same about auto completion in antigravity
Making a 10 min email/work doc used to take far longer than 10 mins. Now it takes far less. This breaks the built-in guard against wasting people’s time.
I wonder if a minor UI change might help a bit: make it normal to show “approx 15 min read” in the email/whatever interface.
Just some sort of “this is the baseline amount of work you’re asking of the recipient.”
This is the header bar I see every day in Gmail <https://imgur.com/a/QCUP43o>. The color behind the Google logo is incorrect. I can name about 50 similar UI issues. Google's lack of attention to detail is almost impressive.
Yeah none of this is helpful. Even writing in Google docs is inundated with AI in your face features I don't need 99% of the time.
I don't mind the "make this clearer" suggestions in email writing, sometimes that does help me. As long as it stays out of my way like a spell checker, and is optional /opt in.
Also here to say I've been a happy Fastmail user for like 7 years after moving away from gmail (or Google Business or whatever they used to call it) and it's been AWESOME.
A. Disable the Gemini suggestions if you don’t want it (I did so).
B. If one’s using a free mail service for 16 years, and then came to not liking its recent development, in which world shitting on it in public is the right and necessary thing to do?
C. In which world someone switching mail provider is a top front page news item?
D. If the case in B is not free, then this means the OP was heavier user than my teenage daughter. Thus consumed more of it.
So everyone is using the web UI? I'm still using a mail client (Thunderbird) connecting to my mail accounts through the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). Today I feel old.
I have a friend with dyslexia and he has always agonised over writing email. At work he would often get me to check important emails for him.
Using AI allows him to feel a lot more confident in what he is writing, particularly when I suggested he tell the LLM tone (friendly and professional) he was wanting.
The key point here is not that they think you’re stupid but that they refuse to let you say no.
One of the Google founders (Sergei I think) read the book “nudge” and fell in love with it. What Google product managers fail to realize is that a hard nudge is called a shove. And removing the ability to say no is theft of consent. They continue to do it because it works and there’s nobody left there with enough courage to stop them.
As someone who hosts their own email, I dislike Gmail as much as anyone. But your issue is this:
> I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI.
gmail is the best and worst email system on earth
they really don't know how to integrate AI into it at all, and honestly I think a part of that comes down to a little bit of column a and column b. Where column a is that they are constrained by privacy and column b is they are constrained by complete politics driven work cycles that don't allow them to rethink or rework things at all or try things out.
I'm pretty sure to do a single change it requires 50 coordination calls with like 5 different executive levels 8 kpi alignment meetings 6 product managers in varying different rooms 3 different user group studies and finally after all that you might be able to ship something but it's nothing close to what you or the user originally wanted.
such is the way of "startups"
One of the most frustrating parts about Google's approach to AI in general is their project manager-y directive from on-high, that any Google product needs to adopt all Google's AI tools, wherever possible, and will be ranked on how deeply the integration goes.
In the margins: the user.
Gmail has become unbearably slow over the past year.
What used to be instantaneous (like, opening an email) now takes seconds.
Google, what happened to you?
Google has always been like this. I remember a presentation from the Google Cloud Platform team a decade ago when they smugly asserted that they'd take care of "the hard stuff" while I, their business customer, focused on ... the easy stuff?
Why not just use Gmail via imap and a email client of your choice?
A gmail expat, I've been over at posteo for about a decade. Couldn't imagine a reason to go back for my personal account.
I've used gmail for corpo email since, but I don't have a choice there.
I don't know. I used to feel this way about IDE autocompletes/suggestions. Now they are widely used, and it doesn't necessarily seem hostile. It's not that hard to imagine the same thing could happen here.
> “Tab to improve”. What I’ve written so far isn’t up to Gmail’s standards, it seems.
I find this infuriating. I have my own voice, my own writing style, and I deliberately use some "bad" writing tropes for effect. For any non-trivial amount of writing (read: anything with actual paragraphs), I'm liable to spend as much time editing as I am writing out the first draft, to make sure my writing conveys the message I want it to.
"Tab to improve" is, effectively, "tab to delete my own personality".
I still use gmail, and so far only a few spam messages have gone through. They really built a solid system, but the web ui is just not a good experience, so thank god for thunderbird too.
I don’t understand. Do the people generating ‘content’ with LLMs themselves enjoy pissing away their own time ingesting the output they’re asking an LLM to produce?
For all the amazing creative work carefully (or not) crafted by humans directly, you’d rather have the derived token sausage?
Writing with intent to deceive a human, and otherwise generating ‘art’ with models is the laziest application thereof, and I’d argue it’s unethical. If you generate something and present it to me as your own work, worthy of direct human consumption and thus, my finite human heartbeats, I instantly have a problem with you.
Email in perfuckingticular: if your actual reply is “yep, meet you there!” And you ask the LLM to expand it and bloat it in some way, what’s the justification?
> but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful
It sounds like they use plenty of software so they must be incredibly lucky, picky, or both.
I don't receive any of those prompts in Gmail. Perhaps because I said no when that popup for "integrate Gemini into Gmail" happened months ago?
I think AI should not have the access to our Gmails its private
Instead of promoting LLMs to write emails and then using LLMs to summarize emails, we could just write succinctly to each other.
Thinking that Gmail thinks anything about you is giving them too much credit. The only reason for any of this is the desperation to juice their AI usage metrics.
While Google Workspace for personal use is a sometimes a very painful product, at least it makes it easy to turn many of these useless Gemini features off.
The message they're trying to send is not "we think you're stupid" so much as "we know you hate this, let us make it easier."
The problem is that they don't offer a way for you to say "no, thank you, I'll write my own emails", because they are dumping so much money into this thing and if people don't want to use it they can't justify feeding the token machine.
You can turn a lot of this stuff off by having a Google Cloud account and using their "business-class" product, which gives you the power to turn off these features (most of them, anyway) for your "employees". I'm already doing that because I use Google for a bunch of stuff, but if I wasn't, I might switch away from Gmail as well.
use IMAP and your fav. e-mail client. Gmail's UI has sucked for ages. Totally unusable for pro users.
Nothing changed for me. I do not really recognize this tab suggestion and besides that, i do not see anything has changed.
The advantages Gmail had when it arrived on the scene just don’t exist anymore.
We have to remember that when Gmail was released, email providers were stingy on storage and decent web mail was unheard of.
Now, if you run over to a paid alternative like FastMail you’ll actually have a faster/better webmail experience.
I also think everyone should use email on their own domain so that it’s easy to kick your provider to the curb if they go downhill. As long as you own the domain you can do whatever you want.
Gmail has been pure shit for the past years. I started because it did not have spam, now I get endless spam on a daily basis like they're trying to kick me out on purpose
I want to do the same, but how does one migrate to a different E-mail provider? The current email address is in use in uncountable places, how will all of that change?