Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

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> Free service

Nothing is free. You just pay differently.

> Perfect deliverability

I have never lost an e-mail with my non-GMail accounts. GMail is not the only reliable service out there.

> never having to spell the part after "@"

Sad to think that this would be the reason for GMail's monopoly, but well...

> great spam filters

I don't get much spam with alternative services, not sure if there is a formal comparison somewhere?

> not having to "migrate" your address and emails anywhere else

And not being able to, ever. And once you get out of free space because for some reason your smartphone automatically syncs with Google Drive and you don't know how to remove stuff you don't need (and you certainly don't want to lose that picture you didn't know existed), then you can start paying 2$ a month to get more space and keep your peace of mind.

No really, the one reason I see for GMail is that it is well known (no need to think about what server you want) and it is free. The rest is basically lock-in.

Sigh.

No. I don’t pay. Take my data, it’s there. It’s free. Stop with this nonsense. When you pay your bills do you think they’re not selling your data? Right.

> Stop with this nonsense.

On the case for not collecting everything about everybody: what when we get a ChatGPT trained on that where one can go ask "how can I manipulate [person] to do [something]"? Or "give me material to blackmail people that are likely to pay me"? People believe that it is not insane to think about sending humanity into space, that quantum computers will be a thing and that technology can solve the climate crisis. Why would it be worse to think that data is power?

Then ignoring the argument above, they don't just "take your data" that is "there". They harvest it. It makes their websites heavier, which makes you pay for a better internet connection and better hardware for no other reason. It makes them create addictive services so that you lose half of your life swiping meaningless infinite pages. Or it polarizes discussions online, promoting fake news and whatever engages people (usually not constructively).

Please take a step back, and tell me what has changed in e-mails in the last 30 years that actually makes your life better. Something that would justify not being able to use e-mails today with a 30 years-old computer. We're talking about e-mails here, but just think about that for anything "free" that you are using today.

The software industry wastes a lot of resources into "taking your data", because it makes money. What if we actually reflected about what technology is, and how it can serve society? We do have pretty big problems to solve, would be nice if the best software engineers out there were paid to work on them, instead of getting 5x the salary to improve ads online.

Ok you ranted about data collection, but you failed to address the fact that every single company does it, including those that you’re paying for, like your bank and ISP.

Data collection exists whether you pay for a service or not. Since Google does not have my CC info, Gmail is 100% free of charge, regardless of how you define data collection.

> but you failed to address the fact that every single company does it, including those that you’re paying for, like your bank and ISP.

It is not the core business model of every single company.

And no, not every single company does it... For instance, if you don't want your ISP to track you, you can use a VPN. And the core business of a VPN service is to not track you. If they do and it gets known, their out of business.

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