The reasoning sounds sane (users marking mails as spam when it is difficult to find the 'unsubscribe' link). But I cannot believe there is no ulterior motive. If users unsubscribe from businesses' mailing lists, it decreases the value of such lists and increases the value of GMail ads.
So, I wonder if this isn't just a move to make an advertisement channel, from which Google extracts no revenue, less effective.
Whie Google makes their money from advertising, that doesn't mean literally every action they make is for the purposes of furthering their advertising directly.
Consider this - the two reasons I originally signed up with Gmail were because of the large mailbox (a feature) and the much more capable spam filtering (a feature). At the time I owned my own domains and had my own choice of web mailboxes on my own site, but there was VALUE to me to pipe all of my mail through Gmail to benefit from these features and then check it there.
One problem I have seen lately is the volume or automated mailings from websites that I gave my email address to _years_ ago has been increasing, and if you ever gave consent for one newsletter in 2005 it feels like you're now subscribed to their weekly update, their monthly update, special deals, hot news items, personalised suggestions, and notifications and you can only seem to unsubscribe from one _mailing_ at a time. You simply can't keep up unsubscribing from all of the people abusing your consent out there. This is a problem with Gmail addresses and non-Gmails alike today.
To me is sounds like Gmail is aware of the problem and trying to solve it in a creative way -> Ubsubscribe using your mailbox, not using their settings :) To me it sounds like another feature that will keep people coming back and choosing Gmail over other mailboxes, and if that's the case then they make more money from ads in the long run :D
"Whie Google makes their money from advertising, that doesn't mean literally every action they make is for the purposes of furthering their advertising directly.
"
Don't be silly. This is hacker news. People are even cynical about self driving cars ("Now they can show ads while you drive!").
For example, I'm pretty sure the hacker news view of Calico is: "Google execs got together in a room and were talking, and realized they had a problem - people keep dying, and they can't show ads to dead people. They needed options, hence they formed a company to fight aging"
Maybe that's not cynical enough, maybe it's "Google is looking for the ultimate incentive to join G+. For every G+ post you make, they extend your life by a month".
In any case, Google essentially can't win.
Past a certain point, you do enough stuff that some people don't like it. While you can focus on the user, and slow down how long it takes, you can't please people forever, and once they become cynical, they tend to stay that way.
Honestly, it's no so much cynicism as it is skepticism. By the stage in the game, we have more than enough cause to abandon the image of a softer, gentler capitalism that we thought tech companies were going to be in the late 90s to early aughts and look at then with the same critical lens we shine on other immense, oligarchic organizations.
I really love Twitch Plays Pokémon, because to my mind it illustrates so well both the beauty and the peril of any sufficiently large corpus of humans. Although at any given point in time it is moving at random, over bigger time scales it is clearly moving with some kind of intentionality. We can't say what Red is doing any given instant in time, but over the past 10 days it is clearly bent on progressing through all the goals in the game.
Anyhow, Google is an advertising company. It moves ads. That is the life blood of the organization. Most big decisions are made directly by the executive team, whose intent you can ascertain directly, but lots of smaller decisions are made by thousands of other people lower on the chain.
Clearly, over the long term, Google is going to optimize towards showing you more and better ads, and I think this move is oriented in that direction. As a rule of thumb, I think Google has a tendency to punish or discourage all forms of non Google advertising.
On the plus side, this right now is clearly a net win for consumers. Sometimes things aren't as crappy as they seem.
"Clearly, over the long term, Google is going to optimize towards showing you more and better ads, and I think this move is oriented in that direction."
This is the part i don't get.
Let's ignore this specific case for a second (so this is more of a lament, than a direct response to your argument about this specific case): In general, believing everything is tied to ads shows a distinct lack of imagination on the part of HN people, who by and large i've found to be pretty imaginative.
For example, Google has been working on diversification for years, among other things, so why would one assume everything is tied to ads?
To be frank: Does everyone really believe Larry and the executive team are that dumb? That they can't come up with any business strategies that don't involve ads?
>For example, Google has been working on diversification for years, among other things, so why would one assume everything is tied to ads?
OK, well, broadly speaking, Google like all organizations wants to grow. The best source of growth is increasing revenue stream. Advertising, in turn, was 96% of their revenue in ~2012^1.
They're going to try to find other revenue streams. But advertising is clearly not going anywhere.
We're still figuring out how advertising is going to keep working. And honestly, advertising is huge money and is what is driving the fierce battle over mobile at the moment. Here we have what is possibly the last great expansion of fresh eyeballs, and it is crucial for the existing companies to figure out how to serve them ads. Hence Android and the WhatsApp purchase.
So. If you have a feature that in any way can improve upon 96% of their business, that glove will probably fit.
I mean, I doubt Google Cars is seriously so they can show commuters more ads. They have a deep capacity for machine learning, and they bought Boston Dynamics; I'm sure we'll see lots more Google automation in the coming years.
Maybe that's not cynical enough, maybe it's "Google is looking for the ultimate incentive to join G+. For every G+ post you make, they extend your life by a month".
:)
Don't be silly. This is hacker news.
I am not cynical. I have always wondered why they haven't been more aggressive with respect to such lists. They are potential competition. And, while it would be unethical to filter such mailings, it is in their and in the user's interest to make it easy to unsubscribe from such lists. For users, so that they don't have to go through some annoying steps to unsubscribe, for them to improve their spam filter and to increase the value of GMail ads.
By the way, let's not pretend that many of their choices are made to maximise ad revenue, since that is currently their main source of income. And I think it's perfectly fine. The vast majority wants free services and ads are a good way to monetise them. If you don't want ads and/or data mining, there are good alternatives for a few dollars a month.
I think the expectation is that any business that operates as a for-profit business is making the vast majority of its decisions to further its #1 goal: profitability. Ideally they can make decisions that further brand affinity or overall loyalty, which should help long-term revenue, but at the end of the day a company is typically beholden to its shareholders and Google is no exception.
I suspect the motivation is about better spam detection.
Right now, users getting mail they don't want are faced with a) a familiar, easy to find "mark as spam" button and b) a hard to find unsubscribe link.
This is guaranteed to generate a lot of false spam reports. Is this report of spam actually spam? Or is it just a person who just wants off something they actually signed up for?
An easy way to get a better signal is to make unsubscribing as easy as reporting spam.
This is not about spam. This is about newsletters that users subscribed to, e.g. because they were interested in a product.
Now, such newsletters are very viable: often you subscribe to them when purchasing a product or getting a freebie. For many users (i.e. my parents) it is very hard to find out how to unsubscribe from them.
Currently, such newsletters are very effective. Sending them doesn't cost you much (from MailChimp to DIY) and you retain a lot of users, since they find it hard to unsubscribe (or don't bother). It doesn't really matter that Google adds advertisements besides such e-mail, because if I had a list, I have already slipped my advertisement into a user's mailbox for free.
Making it easy to unsubscribe from such mailings makes them less effective: it will become harder to retain a communication channel to potential customers, since more of them will unsubscribe. So, Google Ads become more attractive as an advertisement tool, evenmore because users cannot unsubscribe them (short of using an ad blocker).
I guess it depends on your definition of "newsletters that users subscribed to." I have never voluntarily allowed a company to add me to their mailing lists for any reason. I always carefully check or uncheck the appropriate checkboxes so that I don't get added to mailing lists. Yet I've ended up on literally hundreds of mailing lists over the years. Luckily, for these types of cases, where I bought something from a legit company, they honor their unsubscribes. But really, why was I subscribed without my consent in the first place?
What's worse is some places will re-add you to their lists every time you buy from them again. (I'm looking at you Moviefone.com!) I already unsubscribed. Why the @$#% are you re-subscribing me? It's not effective at all. It makes me never want to use your service again, which is what I've done with Moviefone.
Disconnecting businesses from their users seems like it might be part of Facebook's & Google's strategy. Promotional tab in Gmail, feed curation in Facebook, personalised search (thinning organic traffic), etc. What better way to boost the performance of an advertising business? It's also usually welcomed by consumers. Quite clever, really.
So, I wonder if this isn't just a move to make an advertisement channel, from which Google extracts no revenue, less effective.