@androcat@toot.cat @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud The issue is not even that the people are awful. The issue is that the organizational incentives are not aligned with what the users want (and, with Gmail, you can argue you're the product, not the user, although I'm still not sure what data they harvest from Gmail). I saw this happen over and over again when working in B2C/C2C oriented companies. The next quarter must be made, and nobody got better ideas than "optimize ad placements", and there you go. Everybody hated it but such was the way the machine that sent you your paycheck worked. (You can say 'well, these people chose to work there' and that's true to some extent, which is why I don't work in that industry anymore. But I don't have kids to put through college, etc, so won't judge. Unless you work for Meta, then you _are_ awful :-))