What a useful feature.
Please could we have this implemented properly after April 1st !!!
*wheres my Mic drop icon ?
In an attempt to meet its perceived reputation of rolling out interesting and creative April Fool's day pranks, Google has pulled a feature added to Gmail this year after it quickly backfired. The Chocolate Factory rapidly pulled the “Mic Drop” feature it rolled out to Gmail in the early hours of 1 April after it caused “more …
In a business email environment an "auto-delete all future responses to this thread" would be very useful. It could nip in the bud all those spam inducing emails that say "well done" or "welcome a new member to the team". Or the very worst email of all "I'm taking a holiday doing what I enjoy and now I expect you to donate to my favourite charidee" and the 97 follow ups of "everyone look at me, I have donated."
"Welcome to the team" is small potatoes. At my place of work, the real winners are when someone sends a "Please remove me from this distribution list". To the entire list, and it's untold thousands of members. Then half of them reply, to the entire list, of course, "Please don't reply to the list" or "Remove me too!". That in turn generates a second wave of replies, and so on.
Google is too corporate and creepy to be funny anymore.
The same vibe you get watching 'The internship'.
Well, it is a natural result of their attitude towards non-paying users (they didn't dare do this to the paying customers), a total and utter lack of respect for their lives. I'm positive they won't be "feeling lucky" so much now.
It's also a logical progression of READING your email: starting to WRITE some of it. BTW, these are the same clowns that write the software for the self driving car, just in case you have managed to forget that.
Will there be consequences? Oh yes, for the users who got f*cked over by this "funny" idea, examples aplenty. Not for Google, of course.
Well, it is a natural result of their attitude towards non-paying users (they didn't dare do this to the paying customers), a total and utter lack of respect for their lives.
If the service is so poor to non-paying users, why don't the non-paying users take their lives elsewhere to consume a different free service?
I shouldn't be surprised anymore, but it is galling to me how much people will complain about something that's FREE.
If the service is so poor to non-paying users, why don't the non-paying users take their lives elsewhere to consume a different free service?
Because until now, Google had at least the decency to only READ the email, not to add things to it.
BTW, don't mistake my critical comments for that of an upset user - I actually READ Terms & Conditions, and has as such always avoided getting any Google service that would require me to agree to such terms. I also did a check on that misleadingly blank front page of their search engine - the printout of the analytical, user details sucking source code hiding behind it runs to THIRTY FIVE pages of A4, and that's printing reduced size..
On this April Fools day I hoped to find some truly wonderful jokes and what have you floating around on the internet (I *really* need cheering up...). Instead what did I find? This! A glowing testament to just how stupid some people actually are. To every single person who claims that this button ruined their life, I hope you spend the rest of your time on this planet with a permanent, 12 pints of Guinness and 3 double shots of whisky all drank in three hours sized, hangover. It is the least you deserve for depriving those of us with (1) working eyes (2) hand eye co-ordination and (3) and sense of bloody humour a great April Fools day joke. Morons.
P.S. I do not have a hangover.
Ah no, the paying customers were spared this "amusement", probably because payment begets better Terms & Conditions which would have allowed them to sue the idiots for a painful amount of money and produce an even more painful amount of unfriendly "we DO harm" type publicity.
It demonstrates with clarity what Google thinks of its non-paying customers, and it's not anything positive.
You say that, but people who habitually send + archive through muscle memory appear to have had a rather poor day. Seen reports of one person who responded to a request for a job interview acci-clicking the mic drop (previously send and archive) button, and one from a funeral director to a client who had just had a bereavement, too, earlier in the twitter chain thing (there's a link to the product forums with more)
I'd imagine whatever 'zany' wonk came up with this idea isn't terribly experienced in how users work.
Or that adding 'hilarious' features to core functionality of a platform that is expected to work day in, day out by business and private users alike probably isn't the finest of ideas.
Steven R
> and one from a funeral director to a client who had just had a bereavement
That was a made-up example by the twitter poster, not a real example. He even clarified it later in the thread:
>> I thought it was super apparent, but just in case—I made this GIF as a cautionary tale/worst-case example. Not real.
> Or that adding 'hilarious' features to core functionality of a platform that is expected to work day in, day out by business and private users alike probably isn't the finest of ideas.
Google do things like this fairly often, but this one is particularly suspect as it has some pretty big non-cosmetic effects and has replaced an existing button rather than adding a new one. If, as reported, it also affected users that did not press the "drop the mic" button, it was terrible.
For what it's worth, Google Apps accounts for businesses (i.e. paying customers) did not have this feature added.
Gah, well, that's what I get for scrolling up the thread, and not too far down.
Still, quite a few other examples of it causing problems, and yeah, I saw reports of it going on just plain 'send', not just 'send and mic drop' emails too.
Cheers for clarifying. Upvote :-)
Steven R
Their last april fools fail was when they offered the 100-year old mode in Youtube, which rendered a video in sepia tones, with a jaunty piano soundtrack.
Amusing enough when the video was lighthearted, you can imagine how disrespectful it looked when a tragic or otherwise sad video was used as the source.
The filter was soon withdrawn, though there are still some "Internet of 1911" videos that they left on, things like keyboard cat etc. popular memes at the time...
"what does it mean?
the phrase 'mic drop' I mean."
when someone is on stage and they have their say, if they do not want any come back on what they said, they physically hold the mic at shoulder height and arm's length and drop it on the floor... if the mic doesn't get broken so no one else can go ripping back at the dropper, then they're already generally gone so that it doesn't matter anyway...
"drop the mic" is a rough equivalent of the 80s "talk to the hand"... in other words, i've said my say now you can shut up because i don't want to hear your's... i've got the last word in...
does that help?
yes, what Waldo Kitty said. For example...
Why do companies like Microsoft, Google feel they must prove that they're "real kool"? I don't want to meet you socially. In fact, I don't much care if you live or die. I just use your stuff. I don't want an email service that corrupts messages when you feel like it, because "Hey, it's fun!". I don't want you to entertain me by changing the login screen image every time I turn on the PC. I don't need a new set of images, conventions and sounds on every issue of your OS. I have work to do.
What's next? Might a Google car say "Hey, I know you wanted to go to Seattle, but we thought the Everglades are so nice this time of year. Hehe!". It's not cool: it's just stupid.
More likely a google car would say" I know you wanted to go to Aldi where the food's cheaper / better but Tesco pay for the ads so sod off and get that 2 for 1 offer I've been pestering you with the whole way. AND I've just spaffed your details AND this journey to Tesco, so expect to be getting lots of coupons for nothing you want, even if you pay cash. Punk"
".. and I just locked the doors and I'll play their ads for the entire journey there, at full volume because I know you were looking at hearing aids earlier this week. I've added a detour to the route because I know how long the ads are and we're paid to play them in full.
In case traffic isn't as bad as usual I'll just circle the block a few times until the ads have finished after which I'll park and unlock. Enjoy your journey."
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I once replaced the PASS and FAIL banners on a production line tester with YIPPEE and WHOOPS thinking that everyone would be mightily amused. I got in at 10am on the 1st to find that the operators had taken one look at it and had sat in the coffee area pretending to not understand what was going on - from 6am.
After that spanking I restricted myself to remotely switching on the vacuum solenoids as they were walking by, much less traceable.
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Wow, everybody's just hating on the chocolate factory.
I mean, there are legitimate reasons, sure, but bitching and moaning over this?
Okay, they royally cocked-up an April Fools' jape, but if it had worked properly - say, being an added button instead of replacing one some users habitually used, forcing a pop-up that wouldn't go away for like, 10-15 seconds to ensure the user had read it when it was pushed and told what the "feature" did and made them confirm they REALLY WANTED TO DROP THE MICROPHONE, then it would've been okay. Also, you know, not sending the mic-drop to regular reply/reply+archive recipients.
[e] By the way, the very best mic-drop I've seen in recent memory? The President had a good one, but Neal DeGrasse Tyson shining the light on B.o.B.'s assholery takes the cake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHBZkek8OSU