Comment on Google's mail system helpfully classified this notice of a class action settlement AGAINST GOOGLE as spam

bigkahuna1986@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• krashmo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Sometimes they do it because the emails are legitimate and annoying. Or maybe they just want to pretend they didn’t see it. You know how I know that :)

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  • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    They do it because users’ brains are like those of the lizard or planarium. They want to “punish” the email they just got because it annoyed them, and so they press whatever button will give them the closest equivalent of “punching” the email to try to make it stop.

    Marking the email minutes from the weekly team meeting as “spam” doesn’t make it stop, and creates other problems sometimes, but that’s not the level they are operating on when they do it. (There is some accidental sense in which marking something as spam makes Google marginally more likely to put similar stuff into your “spam” folder in the future, but that’s pure coincidence as far as why they’re doing it.) They just want to hit.

    It’s actually exactly the same reason some Lemmy users call anything or anyone they don’t like “transphobia” or “zionism.” They don’t actually mean that that person supports the state of Israel in a literal sense. They’re just doing it because they can’t physically hit the person speaking, and that’s the closest analogue available to punish them and try to shut them up.

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