iamacyborg

Being discoverable is one thing, having your content stolen wholesale is another

Just look at Corning’s lifetime chart

I definitely see it going that way from a marketing perspective if you want what you send/produce to be machine readable and actually used in intermediated surfaces like email and web search.

> Are there any VCs looking to give away a few billion dollars to disrupt the ossified, wasteful, poor customer experience taxi app market?

Waymo are rolling out, slowly. No one'll be in a real position to compete against them.

One could take an equally uncharitable approach to what engineers and product teams do.

If we had visibility, we would know what doesn't work and we would stop sending it. Almost like there are aligned interests there rather than a purely adversarial relationship.

Yeah, that's true about the allow, and for sure marketing and product teams are deploying misleading consent priming which doesn't fully explain to the user what they're actually allowing in the first place, or setting baselines that are too permissive vs what the user is expecting.

> I'm happy that devices and ecosystems are moving in the direction of triaging and filtering sender content, as power needs to lie in the user's holistic

I don't disagree necessarily, but I see it as them putting themselves in a position to act as a toll collector, which has already happened with email and web search and is only getting worse with the introduction of LLM's into both of those things.

It's a bummer this article ended up doing much better than my email one, as I think that might better position the problem in a lot of user's minds and highlight just how much surveillance is sitting on top of those free inboxes.

Do you think that logic holds true for web search as well? Because this is happening there in a much stronger way too.

If you really like Song X and Song X happens to be on a popular spotify playlist with a bunch of stuff you’re not into, you’ll start getting recommended all that other stuff on last.fm, no?

Agreed but I don’t find the framing of labelling marketers as spammers particularly accurate or useful.

What’s fun is all that “intervening” infrastructure they’ve introduced also doubles up as a big surveillance network.

SMS will go exactly the same direction as push as far as being intermediated.

Not everything needs to be summarised

If you’re in gmail there’s literally already an interface to easily unsubscribe from stuff, it’s under “Manage subscriptions”. Yahoo similarly have a “subscriptions hub”

I’d recommend following your own train of thought, why is big tech so hell bent on intermediating the experience between their users and everyone else? They’ve done it for email, web search, mobile experiences, advertising, etc.

You want to use any of those things, you’ll have to pay their toll booth, figuratively or literally.

I live in the UK where we actually have sane regulations around this stuff, I realise laws are different and folks in the US in particular don’t have much protection from spam.

I realise that CANSPAM as a law in the US is titled appropriately but I live in the UK where declarative opt-in is a must apart from a couple “soft” opt-in scenarios.

People. Opt. In.

Stop conflating your preferences with other people’s.

Don’t forget the engineers and product folks who build these systems.

Instagram run their notifications via an auction mechanism (which I suppose makes sense for an advertising company that likely built a lot of RTB systems).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04835

> The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back.

There’s also substantially more filtering happening in the inbox which is mostly useful from a user perspective.

Yahoo literally wrote a paper more than a decade ago showing how they can model predictive causal chains for emails they expect you to receive, as an example.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694

Hundreds of thousands of people declaratively opt into receiving marketing with informed consent on a daily basis. Just because you don’t does not mean other people are like you.

Remember when Android used to let notification senders hijack turning your screen on, Snapchat used that one a lot.

I largely do the same, and keep my phone on dnd mode.

It’s a through line from an article I posted last week about the similar situation in email, which has a lot more depth as inbox providers have substantially more published papers and patents showing their intermediation.

https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/what-google-yahoo-...

The next post will be highlighting the difference between the actual state of the art techniques being deployed by large tech co’s (LinkedIn and Pinterest, for example) vs what’s available via commercial marketing providers and how most marketers don’t even make the most of the tools they pay for.

> The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced.

Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.

> The will need to get the numbers up, but I'm hoping them being independent again is a good sign.

The problem will be recovering from algorithmic poisoning from folks just scrobbling from spotify

And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.

Makes sense, Google definitely have a lot more experience in that space with gmail than Apple do.

A fairly uncharitable read, I’d argue it states that the platform is acting on the platform’s interest, not the user’s.

Huh that’s interesting, do you have any further context on that? I’ve not worked on a product with anywhere near that scale before so monitoring has always been whatever I can get from commercial push platforms

That would be nice. I wouldn’t be surprised, as on-phone models get more capable, if we don’t see them start to build an “inbox” like we see with email where you can then start seeing much more heavy processing happening.