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That’s refreshing to see in a world of ever increasing enshittification. Wish more companies move in this direction.
Yeah, kinda makes you wonder as to why proton is adding A.I. features though.
I think it might be because AI (aka LLMs) is genuinely useful when used properly.
I use AI all the time to write emails. I give the LLM the email thread along with instructions like “I can’t make it Tuesday ask if they can do Wednesday at 2pm”
The AI will write out an email that’s polite and relevant in context. Totally worth it.
I think the problem is people/companies trying to shove LLMs where they don’t make sense.
I am not a fan of this. I see it all the time at work and it’s very obvious when someone has chatGPT write an email for them (it’s always such a sterile and yet overcomplicated writing style). If it’s a direct email to me, I tend to feel insulted that they couldn’t be bothered to write those 4 paragraphs themselves - it would have taken them 2 mins. There is a definite human disconnect going on in society at the moment, and its worrying.
I agree. I actually think it’s a net negative as well for friendships. As in the case of OP, I would rather get an original email from the sender saying they couldn’t make it, so let’s meet the next day, but instead I have to read thru several paragraphs of boilerplate and AI crap instead, which wastes my time, and I know the sender did it, so I’m mad at them for being impersonal. At some point, we’re just going to have people’s AI responding to each other without any person actually reading it.
We’re only doing this because every company doesn’t want to be left behind so they go all in. It feels like Ian Malcolm said it best in Jurassic Park
“Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should”
In bureaucratic situations, you’re expected to have a bunch of polite boilerplate. Or at least that’s how my dad keeps telling me to write emails.
Which it seems you’re missing the point of.
what does this mean lol
I can understand that. I don’t actually use chatGPT to be fair. I use a locally run open source LLM. This all being said I do think it’s important to fine tune any LLM you use to match your writing style. Else you end up with chatGPT generic style writing.
I would argue that not fine tuning a LLM to match tone and style counts as either misuse or hobbyist use.
I use a locally run open source LLM.
How? GPT4All + Llama or something else? I just started dipping my toe in locally run open source LLM.
not fine tuning a LLM to match tone and style counts as either misuse or hobbyist use
You’ve hit the nail on the head with this one. I think the other commenters are right, that a lot of people will misuse the tool, but nonetheless it is an issue with the users, not the tool itself.
My main workstation runs Linux and I use Llama.cpp. I used it with mistral’s latest largest model but I have used others in the past.
I appreciate your thoughts here. Lemmy I think, in general, has an indistinguishing anti LLM bias.
Agreed. People are so bad at writing that they struggle to put a few sentences together for an email. Even their prompts lack clear instructions /message. It’s astounding when you think about it for a minute.
Why not just write “I can’t make it Tuesday, can you do Wednesday at 2pm?”
Otherwise we just end up in this world.
You’re not wrong but at least my emails will be taken seriously by some 60 year old company exec that’s still mad his secretary stopped printing his emails for him.
You’re trying to please a boomer that’s still angry that email exists in the first place.
In some cases literally yes. But at least for me I have to meet my customers where they are. If I try to force them to do things my way they just don’t use my services.
Then just write that.
I don’t understand why we’re having AIs verboseify simple information?
Why do many word if few word do trick.
How long until we start using LLMs to summarize messages over-verbalized by LLMs?
And offloading the accounting for context WILL bite you in the ass. If you can’t remember what a discussion was about and what needs considering, you’re no longer doing the thinking.
Because in my experience some business clients feel offended or upset that you aren’t being formal with them. American businesses seem to care less I noticed but outside of the USA (particularly in Germany) I noticed that formality serves better. Also the LLM uses the thread history to add context. Stuff like “I know we agreed on meeting on Tuesday at last meeting but unfortunately I can’t do that…” this stuff matters to clients.
I don’t offload because I don’t remember. I offload because it saves me time. Of course I read what is written before I send it out.
Being formal and considerate does not require being that much more verbose.
Do you really save time running messages through an LLM vs just writing them as you think of what to say?
It’s the equivalent of when I got assigned papers with minimum word counts as a kid. Despite the fact that the prompt doesn’t warrant 5000 words and it would take massive deviation off of the prompt to get anywhere close to it, people have this weird impression that more words shows more “care” than just communicating clearly. I struggled a lot with a lot of assignments (to the point of not turning some in) because all the filler they’d need to reach the word counts hurt my soul lol.
(I do tend to prefer 500+ page books, but it’s because the authors I engage with the most use that space to build out better plots or develop better characters or whatever. It’s not padded out.)
Is it?
I once told a teacher I’d write ten times the number of required words as long as I could pick a subject that actually warranted it. And I followed through.
The rare times I got prompts that were actually good, I would run out of paper on which to express everything I wanted expressed. (Yes, I’ve done writing assignments writing by hand.)
Outside academia no-one is enforcing a word-count. Which means you can just write good prose. Using a lot of words to say very little, is not good prose.
Unless you’re dealing with people that don’t actually read what you write and instead just look at net weight of the word-salad you threw at them, the content of the text is what matters.
Who takes offence at only a single paragraph, if it addresses their every concern and insecurity, and they are left feeling seen as they reach the final word?
Only people who don’t actually read things, or have no reading comprehension, needing the same thing said three time in different ways in one message.
Also, teachers are typically smart enough to probably themselves understand the word-count problem. Which is why I was able to make deals with many of my teachers to change the assignments given such that writing something good was actually possible.
Hence why it’s not the same. The people you are talking about aren’t worth the effort of dealing with. A writing teacher that gives you high marks for saying nothing with a lot of words, is not a good writing teacher.
The LLM responses are more verbose but not a crazy amount so. It’s mostly adding polite social padding that some people appreciate.
As for time totally. It’s faster to write “can’t go to meeting, suggest rescheduling it for Thursday.” And proofread than to write a full boomer style letter.
I feel like we might write at very different WPMs. For me, proofreading and fixing AI slop takes longer than just writing things myself.
And another difference might be that to me and everyone I work with, writing in full on “boomer” is considered an insulting waste of everyone’s time.
Which it is.
Abs Japan. Oh my.
Non-profit doesn’t mean that no one makes money. But it does mean they pay less taxes. If the C suite is full of funders, you can pay them in bonuses.
https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages-of-1-million-or-more
It does mean that there are no shareholders and you have to be “limited in powers”.
This was a disappointing realisation about "Open"AI.
They have two divisions and only one is “open”
Maybe to keep pace with trends, and be able to put a check in that box amongst competitors
I’m happy to see this announcement. However, just transitioning to a non-profit does not make an organization good. They can still be greedy and take advantage of their user base. That being said, it seems Proton’s mission statement resonates with a non-profit type structure. When you are accountable to the shareholders, they become the priority.
“don’t let perfect get in the way of good” or whatever that saying is. One step at a time, yeah?
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
Bad, also, is the enemy of good…
I think maybe good walked into the wrong damn neighborhood.
Generally you’d want to strive for perfection, but not go crazy over it and mantain a balance in all things, risk vs. benefit, that sort of thing, hence the saying
If I remember right, OpenAi started with this model too, and they do lots of shady stuff. Not that this is the plan for Proton, but I completely agree that simply creating a nonprofit that owns the for profit brand doesn’t guarantee good behavior.
Yes Mozilla is a good example. They’re run like any other Silicon Valley company and spend more in C-suite develop their damn product.
Bad example. There are plenty of non-profit FOSS services that do well and serve the community.
This is what made me finally completely switch my email and docs to proton. I’m so close to being able to delete my google account now.
Well this and the docs live collaboration feature they recently added.
Switched mail and I’ll switch VPN once my old sub expires.
Ya know, you may have just helped me finally make the full switch. Thank you
I thought it’ll take many more years until the acquired Standard Notes
90 a year though? That’s taking the piss. Notesnook has all their features and more for 49.99 And that’s on top of Proton’s main fee. That’s one option I won’t be taking.
Is this the standalone annual price? I see 120$/y for all of proton’s premium products
That 90 for Standard Notes is on top of the plan you are on. 90 per year for somethings that is available elsewhere for half that is a non starter for me. I’m on unlimited now, not putting another 90 onto it.
Oh I wasn’t advocating for getting anything else besides proton unlimited. There’s only Docs now but I’m guessing more products will get integrated soon
I wish it worked in the (iOS) app or had its own. A browser only experience isn’t good enough for me to use it.
Cool. I switched to Tuta because it fits my use case better (2 domains, one for my personal email and one for everything else). I don’t need any of the bells and whistles Proton has, and I also don’t want to pay extra to get more domains. The Tuta app kinda sucks, but it gets the job done. I’m hoping my wife and kids will be interested in private email, but they don’t seem to care, and I don’t think they’d like the tradeoffs.
Now, if Proton revises their tiers, I might be interested. Give me something like the Tuta tiers, and I’ll probably switch to it. I prefer the UX of Proton, but $10/month is a bit steep for me, especially since I’m not going to use the other stuff they’re bundling in (I use Bitwarden for PW manager, have my own NAS, and I prefer Mullvad over Proton for VPN).
That said, it’s super cool that they’re going non-profit. When that’s done, I’ll give it another look.
They also have mail-only tier at 4.99.
Yup, but only one custom domain. I really want at least two domains, one with tons of aliases for various accounts, and the other for personal communications. I could use a proton.me address for it, but then it becomes a huge pain to switch to another service should I need to.
Does that include the IMAP bridge and multiple addresses?
I don’t know, you’ll have to check yourself. Multiple addresses yes, though, 10 of them.
Problem with Tuta for me is its too closed off.
Proton at least offers an IMAP bridge, Tuta utterly refuses to let you use your email outside their apps, which makes it more of a messaging app. And the fact there’s no way to export everything easily or even forward messages rubs me the wrong way. I tried them and have been using them for about 2 years but I’d definitely love to get away from it.
I’m tired of these walled gardens. I don’t give a damn how secure it is, if I can’t leave it with my shit, then no thanks.
Yeah, it’s annoying, but I honestly don’t use any email clients anyway. So whether I use the Tuta or Proton app/website is essentially the same for me.
But you can export your email (select all then click “Download”), but unfortunately forwarding isn’t a thing. That does put a bit of a wrinkle into my longer-term use of it, so if Proton can become price-competitive for my use-case (and no, I’m not paying $10/month for email), I’ll probably switch. But since I can export them in some way, it’s not a deal breaker.
You say you use Bitwarden. Is that self hosted by any chance? If so, how do you handle the potential for an outage or server failure, where you’d presumably need some of the passwords to fix the problem in the first place.
The Bitwarden client has all the data cached, so the server can be down and you still get access to the passwords (same for internet connection).
Thanks for the reply! That makes sense. I’m still weary of the client somehow losing the cache while the server is down (two holes in the Swiss cheese lining up) but that is overly paranoid I know that
You should definitely be! I take backups every 6h for my self hosted vaultwarden (easier to manage and to backup, but not official, YMMV). You can also restore each backup automatically and have a “second service” you can run elsewhere (a standby basically), which will also ensure the backup works fine.
I have been running bit/vaultwarden now for I think 6 years, for my whole family and I have never needed to do anything, despite having had a few hiccups with the server.
Don’t take my word for it, but the clients (browser plugin, desktop app, mobile app) are designed to keep data locally I think. So the term cache might be misleading here because it suggests some temporary storage used just to save web requests, with a relatively quick expiration. In this case I think the plugin etc. can work potentially indefinitely without server - something to double-check, but I believe it’s the design.
Yes, I figured the word “cache” was used loosely in this case. But you know, the server is down and/or irrecoverable for a while, and then one’s phone gets swiped. Not inconceivable. So I think I’ll follow some of the advice here about a backup service or password stash
I also self host vault warden, it’s pretty straight forward. Like the other person said, it caches locally.
Thanks!
The local cache solves this problem mainly. Mine also replicates to one of my other servers occasionally.
How do you set up local caching? For non-phones?
Edit: TIL there are windows, Mac, and Linux apps for it. Sheesh.
Yep, the browser extensions also have an encrypted cache, although it is less consistent imo. I’ve had times where my server was down and the extension just completely logged out then couldn’t authenticate so I couldn’t access the cache.
There is a setting now (in all types of client I think) to log out when you close down the browser. Your comment makes me realize that I probably want to NOT set that on at least one machine. I set that on the machines that are out and about.
Also TIL about the browser extensions!
Mine isn’t currently, but I’m working on it. The main complexity is that my wife and I share some passwords, and I want to make sure I do it properly so that transition is as smooth as possible. Vaultwarden is what you’d use to self-host.
But as others have said, I’m really not worried about it. Passwords are cached locally and only touch the server when syncing to the server. I want to self-host to protect against breaches, not because I’m worried about connectivity loss.
You can always backup your passwords (there’s an export feature) if you’re worried about it. I haven’t done it, but I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to have a KeePass backup or something that you update manually every so often.
Are you me? Lol I feel the same about tuta, yet I such with them. I am waiting for my wife to care for her privacy and switch to a family bundle with tuta.
Got my own NAS and a Bit warden server for PW. I changed Mullvad over AirVPN once they stopped supporting port forwarding, though.
Yup, confirmed, I am you.
The Tuta app kinda sucks, especially for searching, but I do that rarely enough that it’s fine. It did annoy me a bit when I was traveling in Canada and needed to find my confirmation code for something (had to connect to their wifi, wait for emails to download, search, etc), but it got the job done. I love that I can just add another person to my plan for another €3 or whatever. I’m going to try to get my kids interested even if my wife isn’t, and it’s nice that I can just add a little at a time. With Proton, that would jump up to $15 for two users, $24 for my family (three kids). That’s a lot more than Tuta, which is just €3/user/month, so my entire family would be €15/month ($17/month), and I don’t need to get everyone on all at once (i would probably only add one or two at first).
So Tuta meets my basic needs, is priced very competitively, and the client is FOSS. I’m actually excited about some upcoming updates (looks like having the subject in the notification just landed, but hasn’t hit F-Droid yet), and I love how their roadmap is very open.
That said, I do miss the UX of Proton. I just don’t think that’s worth more for fewer features I actually use. Hopefully that changes.
Removed by mod
Your response makes it sound like you’re responding some kind of rage-rant. But from my reading, the post you responded to basically just lists a few things they like and dislike - clearly given as personal opinions. So your response reads as unprovoked hostility.
?
I think Proton is a cool project, I’m just a little disappointed at their pricing tiers. It’s probably fine for a lot of people, and hopefully becoming a non-profit encourages them to improve the value at each tier.
I actually used to pay for Proton when I was consulting. I think it’s a fantastic service, but now that it’s not really a business expense, I find it’s a little to expensive. So I have my business domain, my personal email domain, and a “junk email” domain all at Tuta, and I like that setup. But it’s not worth $10/month for me, it’s worth about $3-4/month, so I use Tuta. Privacy is really important to me, but price is also important, and Tuta checks both boxes.
I know I’m an outlier, just giving my 2c that Proton is a good service, and I hope they adjust their pricing with their new non-profit model.
FWIW Proton does offer a mail only plan that’s $5/month, 4 if you go for yearly
Right, but it only supports 1 custom domain. With Tuta, I get 3 for €3.60, €3 if I pay yearly. I could probably make it work, but why pay more for something that I’d have to make concessions for? If they supported more email addresses, I might just use their proton.me domain or whatever (I like separate email addresses for different services, so I can quarantine a breach; so I’ll do
<name>-<type of service>@<domain>), and only having 10 is a little limiting.I know I have specific and kind of weird requirements, but Tuta is currently doing a better job of providing what I want at a price I’m happy with.
Gotcha, that’s totally fair. Thanks for elaborating!
Your requirements are totally fair tbh.
That said, I think you can use aliases for the use-case you have, you don’t need full addresses. Proton supports “+ aliases” as well, so
name+service@domainworks, and most importantly they support catch-all addresses if you have your own domain. I now use actual aliases (the ones from simplelogin), which I generate on the fly, but if you can usewhatever@domainand it will be redirected to your configured address. You don’t even need to create this beforehand, so many times I was around and had to give an email address for some reason and I just made up an address on the fly. As long as you use your domain, the catch-all will get the email.So the 10 addresses only include actual addresses, the ones you can write from. You can have as many as you want to receive emails (which is generally the use case for signing up to services, right?). Just a FYI in case tuta supports the same and you are making more effort than needed!
Yeah, I already do something like
<name>-<category>@<domain>, and I’ll probably end up changing<category>to include a+for each account of that type. For example, all banking apps go to<name>-banking, which maakes it really easy to move emails automatically into folders. If I get an email from a bank without that-bankingpart, it’s spam. I do this with various categories (bills, shopping, etc). I have something close to 10 email addresses right now, and I’ll probably add more in the future.But basically, I have three domains:
- personal contacts -
me@family-domain- I only give this out to family and friends - work contacts -
me@work-domain- printed on business cards and any services related to my side business - everything else - all of those categories above; if this gets full of spam, I’ll just get a new domain, move my accounts over, and then let the domain expire
So far it’s working pretty well. To get that same setup w/ Proton, I’d need to pay $10/month, whereas it’s just $3-4 w/ Tuta. I’d be okay with combining the personal and everything else, but I really want to keep my work stuff on the same account (low volume, but high priority).
Interesting! That’s very close to this blog post I read long time ago (unfortunately medium.com link)! Are you actually sending emails from those addresses? Like if you need to drop an email to your bank, do you use the banking one or your personal (or something else)?
Fwiw, I do something similar. I use a mix of domain aliases without address (e.g. made-up-on-the-fly@domain.com) and actual aliases. Since I have proton family (and the same when I used ultimate) I have unlimited hide-my-email aliases, so I have it integrated with my password manager, and I generate a random password and email for everything I sign up now. These though are receive-only addresses. In fact, with this technique I probably use 3-4 addresses in total, but I have probably 30 domain addresses that go to the catch-all one.
Spam on these addresses are basically non-existing and you can still create folders based on recipient without having a full address (e.g. bank1@domain.com, bank2@domain.com). You can make folder categorization based on recipient regex and this way you also have the “stop bothering me” option: if some email gets into the wrong hands, you can create a spam rule for that dedicated address. However, my approach is that all of these are used just to receive emails, to send I have just a handful of actual addresses or -if really needed- I can create on-the-fly an address from a catch-all one, send the email and then disable it again (so it doesn’t count towards the limit, but I still get inbound email to the catch-all).
Nice setup anyway!
- personal contacts -
Did you respond to the wrong message?
what’s with the hostility?
Looks like some are fortune telling and seeing enshitification.
Not all companies go to shit. Valve is an example
I’m sorry I took this username before you got it. Clearly you deserve it more with posts like that.
Wtf
Touch grass.
This is definitely great news and refreshing to see from a company, but this came out two months ago.
Published on June 17, 2024
Edit: it looks like Proton just recently sent an email about this to their ProtonMail subscribers which is likely why this got posted just now.
Good. Profit and privacy are mutually exclusive in this industry.
Proton is still a for-profit company and has shareholders who expect to to make money. The change is that the largest shareholder of the for-profit company is now a separate non-profit organization. It is still a positive move, but not entirely what the marketing makes it seem.
You mean record breaking profit and privacy. Edit: actually I bet drug cartels probably do both, at least some (\s)
I would imagine any privacy measures cartels take are seen as overhead more than anything else
That’s roughly the opposite of what the article says.
Of course it is good news, and I’m an happy Proton customer since over an year, but this Proton blog post dates back 2 months now…
They just pushed an email announcement out, which is probably where OP heard about it.
And that makes it irrelevant because…? I’m a subscriber and I wasn’t aware of this until this post…
They literally sent the email out within the last 36 hours. My work account got it this morning, and my personal last night.
The email was more of a summary of past changes.
The actual donation of shares to the Proton Foundation was a little while ago, and anyone directly subscribed to the Proton Blog probably already saw it (myself included), so seeing it show up again as if it was new news probably just felt a bit jarring to some people.
Good for them, I love being able to play Windows games on Linux.
They’re unrelated to Valve’s Proton
To be honest that’s what I thought the post was about until I read this, so thanks.
y’know, just in case
c/whoosh
Switched from gmail to Protonmail and Outlook to Tuta.io and love it! Companies that put privacy and the individual first.
How is spam filtering compared to gmail.
Afraid to switch as gmail spam filtering is excellent
I’ve been using Protonmail as my primary address for a few years now. I’m yet to have a single spam email make it to my inbox. In comparison, I use my gmail less and I’ve had a few blatant crypto scams make it to my inbox.
I’m not saying for certain that it’s better than Gmail’s, but that’s my experience so far.
I’ve been using proton for a few months now with a yearly Mail Plus subscription and I have yet to receive an actual spam e-mail. Your experience might be different than mine since I take precautions not to invite spam in the first place, but even then, Proton looks to be doing an excellent job
Honestly I’ve not experienced any on either of them!
Just wanted to point out that it does not change anything from privacy and security perspective about their products.
Also they are still operating as a normal company internally (they still offer their vpn through a third party provider and they still work to achieve the highest income from their products).
I switched to Proton Mail in 2019, and recently started switching to their VPN service to use port forwarding. Glad to see Proton is putting their money where their mouth is.
I’ve been too critical of them in the early days and will admit that many of the issues that plagued their VPN service years ago have now been fixed.
If so, will they re-think tiers? Or maybe they could give the option for users to choose what they need exactly and what they’re willing to pay? (i.e current Proton plan that costs 8-12€ per month is too much for me, but I would gladly pay like 5€ monthly for little storage, VPN and few email aliases)
Edit: Proton has REMOVED the P2P tick from the VPN on this plan since I took the screenshots below. That sucks.
I would gladly pay like 5€ monthly for little storage, VPN and few email aliases)
Includes VPN with P2P and streaming, Drive with 15GB, Proton Pass, etc.
I don’t think this plan supports P2P. You’re still on the free plan with the VPN.
Edit: Looks like I was wrong. I remember needing to switch to a better plan to get the P2P but I guess I was wrong.
Edit 2: There is some inconsistent information on the Proton site regarding what is included in each plan and this seems to be the source of our confusion in this thread.
Edit: Proton has REMOVED the P2P tick from the VPN on this plan since I took the screenshot below. That sucks.
Here is a link: https://proton.me/mail/pricing#compare-plans
I have asked. You only get VPN Free: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/112988334950564963
This is correct
Update: I have used Mail Plus since before Proton VPN was a thing, and have never been able to P2P download–Proton should make this clearer
Edit: Proton has REMOVED the P2P from the VPN tick on this plan since I took the screenshots. That sucks.
That is incorrect. Here is a link: https://proton.me/mail/pricing#compare-plans
Yo I see you on your link that you are right. I stand corrected. Maybe. This link says something different and so I’m not actually sure what’s correct. Let me know what you think. It seems like there’s some conflicting information
Interesting. That’s a support article so is less likely to be up-to-date than the pricing page, but that being said I’m on Unlimited and don’t know what the Plus plan provides with certainty.
Yeah you must be right with that pricing page. I think it’s also unclear what is offered in terms of VPN when you actually try to purchase the Mail plus plan. At any rate, lots of ways for people to be confused about what plan includes what.
Is this for Mail Plus or Proton Unlimited? I pay for Mail Plus, and have continually gotten the “P2P is blocked” page whenever I try to redownload the Ubuntu 22.04 ISO–maybe I should complain
Although looking at the VPN section, it does appear that the Free and Mail Plus plans have the same checkboxes, so perhaps I am reading it correctly
The column with the ticks is for Plus not for Free, so yes you should definitely complain to support.
Now this is fascinating–I’m seeing no ticks in Plus! Maybe it varies by country (located in Canada, but I think I pay in USD)
Didn’t they get shit recently for AI and crypto related decisions ? Did they backtrack on that ?
Even if they did, so what? We should not then recognise positive decisions?
If we don’t allow companies and people to make any mistakes, for fear of being forever scorned, then we’ll end up with either unprogressive risk averse companies that cannot compete against their peers, or a host of good companies that go bankrupt from the slightest misstep.
Personally I’m glad companies such as proton exist, and are prepared to take risks, as they are currently our best hope against the likes of Google and Meta.
They did not. This is another marketing play
How is this related to what the previous person said? Do you understand what “enshittification” is? Proton Wallet is an entirely separate application while the AI feature in Proton Mail is completely optional. Neither of these decisions have impacted the user experience of Proton customers.
Do you understand what enshittification is? It’s a slow descent over a long period. You add optional, privacy-respecting AI now, and over time, (like a decade,) it becomes more shitty until eventually all your data is opted in to centralized data harvesting or wherever.
I’m an Unlimited paid Proton user, and these new trend worry me too. Enshittification is a slow process. I watched Google turn from “Do no evil” to what they are today, and I’m too tired to want to watch the same entire process happen again to Proton.
Shouldn’t we worry of enshittification when we are on the verge of, or on the descending side of trajectory?
So far they added features in a way that keeps respecting users rights, without changing their business model (which is 90% of the reason why companies enshittify BTW). Just because these products have something in common with products of companies who enshittified doesn’t mean the same applies here.
You add optional, privacy-respecting AI now, and over time, (like a decade,) it becomes more shitty until eventually all your data is opted in to centralized data harvesting or wherever.
Except their entire brand is built on privacy, so this master conspiracy you seem to think exists makes absolutely zero business sense. Google has never cared about user privacy, nor was that ever a reason people used Google’s services, so I’m not sure why you think that is a relevant comparison. It’s not.
Google’s entire brand was built on amazing search, and now their search is awful.
Enshittification isn’t a conspiracy and it’s not a nefarious end-goal, it’s just a descent into shittiness. Proton continuing to sideline Linux (still no Drive support, other apps are second-class, etc) is a great example.
If they were truly focused on the goal of promoting privacy, they would be wanting to prioritise the option for people to leave Windows and Mac for Linux. Instead, it seems like their goal is becoming “Offer all the things that are hot in the market right now.”
Google’s entire brand was built on amazing search
And how was that search funded? Google took in large amounts of money from venture capitalists in the 90s and transitioned to an advertising-based model as early as 2000. You’re incredibly naive if Google’s “descent into shittiness” came as a surprise; it was always going to happen as the company looked for ways to generate a return for investors on its free product.
Meanwhile, Proton is a company that generates almost all of its revenues from selling its services to consumers for a fee and has no venture capitalist investors. As consumers are its primary source of revenue, any attempt to undermine the reason those consumers pay for its services (privacy) is going to have a significant and negative impact on the financial viability of the business.
Please think before you rage post. Your attempts to compare these two companies are hysterical and inane.
Please think before you rage post. Your attempts to compare these two companies are hysterical and inane.
🙄 I think you need to take a deep breath and count to 5 if you think there was any rage or hysteria in my very mild comment.
Suggesting Proton is undertaking a “descent into shittiness” comparable to that of Google because it hasn’t made a Linux application for one of its many services is very hysterical. As is suggesting Proton is “not truly focused on privacy” because it has applications available for Windows and macOS. There is nothing “mild” about either of those delusional claims.
That’s some big slippery slope fallacy. Privacy respecting AI was a highly requested feature, whether you wanted it or not.
Them adding an AI mail assistant that is completely private has nothing to do with them eventually not protecting user privacy. These things have nothing to do with each other.
AI is not inherently a privacy invading tool, its just that the majority of services offering it are free, hence them profiting off data.
Is this going to be the same kind of non-profit as OpenAI? With a mission to improve the world? Yeah, let’s see how that goes. Another Proton marketing play on their set track to enshittification.
OpenAI is now for-profit since they got funded by Microsoft.
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…what?
