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Gmail Proves That Some People Hate Smart Suggestions (techcrunch.com)
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.
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.
"Smart". I don't think you understand what it means.
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.
Dumb mail, dumb tvs and dumb software. There is a probably a billion dollars to be made from dumbware.
If it ain't broke don't fix it. How hard is this to understand?
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
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.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
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.
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.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
People hate smart suggestions because AI isn't really there yet. AI can determine what some Silicon Valley developer thinks is important, but what it needs to do is anticipate what the USER thinks is important. I suspect it will be a long time until AI can actually understand how any human things and what any human needs. After all, it isn't even aware of what it is, how is is supposed to understand what the user is?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I guess you think you're smarter with that 4th grade education?
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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 careful with my email address, and I do everything I can to make sure that spammers don't inconvenience me even to the extent of having to dig through a spam folder to find the stuff that doesn't belong there.
My biggest problem with Gmail is that some of my friends us it. That's at least as much of a liability as having friends who use Facebook. And I feel the same way about Gmail as I do about Facebook - I wish it would just die.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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 ...
... anyone else here using gmail in Simple HTML view?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
... a goddam clock on my washing machine.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
gmail did not support filtering into categories, instead they wanted me to use tags. Tags flat out do not fit my workflow, so I setup Thunderbird to grab my gmail mail to my laptop and sort the damned mail like $diety(and the spam gods) decreed.
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.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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).
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You really can't do any better than "If you're not rich, you must be a bad person"? Really?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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! Show me other things!
Or it shows me clips A-L in de recommended, I'm not interested in any so I reload the page and it shows me at least 4 clips of the previous page. No! If I wanted to watch them, I would have. Don't show them again!
Google's algorithms are positively moronic.
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.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
As a complete chronological list of messages is valuable, an expert system could suggest probable importance via slightly emphasized font size, boldness, or more emphatic item background colour.
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 to three links to examples the user watched / liked, and a slider for actual interest, preset at presumed value. Cluster name is a link to all examples: clicking it is not in itself an expression of interest.
// DevsVult: The Machines Will It
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 convenient.
But that's all I want. I don't like anyone messing with this order because what efficient for me is routine. Had I started out with more "smart" features, I may have been able to get used to it, but this is communication. Mass communication with the need to process multiple discussions in very short amount of time. Don't try to figure out how my brain works. I've spent over 30 years figuring it out and I've got it dialed in right where it's useful.
Also, "Smart replies" read as "quips" and obviously canned. Reminding me that I received an email 2 days ago? I don't need to be reminded that there aren't enough hours in the day to complete all correspondence. Sorting the read-order of my emails by purported levels of importance? Sounds like an opportunity to game the algorithm and artificially elevate one's emails.
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 grab attention when it thinks the user should do something. People may like the idea of software that relieves their mental burden by thinking for them, but when confronted with what software can actually do they're invariably less pleased.
The reason vendors keep flogging this idea of "smart" interfaces is that most software is not designed for the user's benefit. If a system is smart, it can have its own preferences and agenda. This is most clear today in the design of things like iTunes or Netflix, which don't look at all like what you'd do if you simply wanted to make the system responsive the user's desires. These interfaces are designed to steer the user towards content the vendor favors.
It doesn't matter how badly people initially react to a "smart" interface; if you can stick it out they'll come to accept it, and that gives you the opportunity to shape their behavior.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. Those are virtually meaningless to me. I use the tedious filter setup to sort my email into categories that are meaningful to me (doctor, work, events). I am still irked by the recent changes in their Calendar which forces start- and end-time into items, thereby basically forcing everything to have a duration of more than hour if I want to be able to read my caption for the event.
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?