I've not been really taking google seriously as a service but I've been continually taken by surprise at how even by my standards google is just getting so shit. Youtube of course is just unusable with their homepage because they keep breaking the recommendations algorithm and demonetising everybody they don't like. We've now got a situation where it's become a meme on the comments pages to laugh at the fact that people are all being brought to 5 year old videos that keep popping up instead of the homepage being at all coherent. The thing is though, a video platform I can sympathise with because I imagine there's quite a bit of complex stuff going on in the background that constantly has to be maintained partly because of all the crap that gets uploaded there as well with how big youtube is. What has taken me off guard though is how they're even slowly starting to break Gmail because not only have they started demanding phone numbers for new accounts which I barely noticed because I only really use Gmail for my normie and throwaway shit anyway but there's even weird bugs I'm noticing where when you try to leave the email client it just pops you back to the same page instead of exiting properly. It's pretty much made my choice for me on setting up protonmail accounts now, so much more convenient and they haven't really broken anything the way google keeps on doing. I'm surprised because let's be real, google is a massive company but you'd think with something so straightforward they'd make sure to just get people on it and fix it. At the same time though this is potentially some really good news because it means if they're not even worth it for throwaway accounts people are just going to give up and use something else because the convenience of the service is gone.