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people all of a sudden start signing up for newsletters

I don't know that people are actually signing up, but the news organizations have big motivation for wanting this be adopted. There are, at least, two reasons for doing this. The first is news companies (especially print based) are switching from subscription based monetization to purely ads based. They are desperately trying to get back to a degree of repeat viewing / consistent readership like in the old days, where they could reach a specific group of people regularly. They want some consistent baseline of readership that also matches the viewpoints and political leaning of their news. This keeps the turmoil and complaining down, since they are showing the news from the angle their readership wants to hear, and provides a baseline of views and thus ad revenue they can count on. In this day and age things are driven by viral sharing, which they have zero control over, and news brokers like Google News that use one representative article for a topic, and whichever news organization that is gets the traffic. No business wants their traffic coming from 3rd parties they have absolutely no control over.

The second is Facebook. Facebook Pages were meant to address this kind of thing, at least within the Facebook walled garden. You could set up a page and post content to it. People like your content, so they like and follow your page. Then they see your content regularly. The problem is Facebook has totally screwed over that concept and thus the content publishers. I have pages with thousands of likes. I can post to the page, and that post will be seen by 20 people. Out of several thousand. People that specifically opted into and liked and followed that page. Facebook turned its back on content publishers a few years ago in their algorithms, and have made the matter worse by threatening to move ALL content from pages off of the user's main news stream (unless the publisher pays to have the post shown to the user). See this article. That is scaring the crap out of content publishers whose readership migrated into Facebook and then began consuming their content there. They are preemptively trying to migrate back into a technology that gives them direct access to their readership again.

So, the newsletter / subscription thing (which uses relatively new HTML Push technology, which is why this is a "new" thing we're seeing) is not actually a bad idea, because it allows the news organizations to, for free (on both ends - theirs and the reader's) reach a consistent readership again, without having to rely on third parties like Facebook or Google News or random viral sharing to reach their audience.

They've been around long enough, there's so many lacking features.

Where is multi-channel audio for a start?
Why can't end users help contribute to subtitles?
Why isn't there multiple subtitle track options?
When will they offer multi-video streams? (diff camera angles for example on some videos)
When can there be chaptering added to videos?

That's off the top of my head in about 30 seconds. I regularly think of fairly decent features they could / should add to the platform.

This is google, they're utterly huge, I'd say they now put out, probably the most amount of video of any business on earth. Why is the platform not improving?

Their UI people just fiddle and break and ruin shit (google news) or they terminate perfectly good services. https://www.wordstream.com/blo...

They have stuffed up chat / sms / web based chat options for nearly 10 years now, failing to copy things they should copy, re-making t hings that didn't need to be remade, etc. Their chat platform is insanely incredibly mind boggingly short shortsightedly ridiculously bad! (I recall when Google chat was THE way to chat with most pals)

These guys sit on their laurels for things they should be fixing and they break things they should be leaving alone.

Honestly just... ugh. Please can someone come along and compete?

More useful: Linking to an actual article.

Yes.

http://www.wordstream.com/arti...

Not sure is this is already super well known, but only 1 word is actually used for verification. In this example you could type "thrand " and pass it. The verification word always looks similar in font/size to 'thrand'. Oh, and the other word I believe is a scan from a book and if you *do* type it in, it will help the digital scan of the book actually pin point what word it is.

Sorry, but I fail to see how this is so different from all those other messy "graphing" methodologies and so-called analytical tools that have laboriously forced themselves into my workspace only to writhe around awhile and die because they have overly-specialized utility, and waste more screen space than Outlook 2013 i.e. mindmaps, flowcharts, music maps, radar graphs, bubble diagrams, et al, not to mention the hundreds of failed graphical programming languages.

Call me skeptical, but I think it will end up in the Google Graveyard Of Flops.

I think Google just paid the $500 million because it's chump change to them

Not so much that, as that industry isn't where the money is: Where google makes its money