Ugh. I just signed up for another year in July.
I don’t need my email to be exciting or edgy or whatever CEOs think I should pay extra for. It’s fucking mail. You literally have ONE job, but apparently that’s not enough “growth” for high-energy tech bros.
The stupid part is that I hardly use email anymore. It’s all signup and login confirmations daily notifications from my self-hosted server backups, unskippable Amazon purchase, shipping, and delivery notifications, and notifications from various banking and payment platforms. Probably 2% or less is actual correspondence. The vast majority of it gets deleted without ever opening it.
Adding AI services and features is just an excuse to charge more money.
Crap, time to drop Proton and find an alternative.
The full article (for those who don’t have a paid 404 Media subscription) can be read at https://web.archive.org/web/20261029143048/https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/.
Keywords (for those searching): bypass paywall, archive copy
i’m just so goddamn pissed off. i am too overwhelmed with life and health stuff to have to worry about what my email client is up to. i dont have many switchovers left in me, boss
You fight the fights you can, and you make peace with the fights you can’t. This is a marathon, you have to maintain yourself to keep running - that’s human nature and okay. We all can’t make 100% optimal and good choices. Do what you can, educate yourself and others, grow; but also rest, enjoy, and don’t let things wear on you if you can help it.
Everyone needs a break. There’s always another chance to cancel, later.
Anyway, I canceled an extra time today, in your honor. (It seemed like their cancelation server was overwhelmed - I was getting timeouts. Naturally I reloaded each page a few times to be sure, because fuck everything about this.)
This was enough for me to jump ship, after some research fastmail seems to meet my needs. Sure its not a perfect replacement but im willing to miss out on some features to avoid funding this kind of behaviour. Voted with my wallet
What a sorry excuse of a human. Fuck that guy.
Oh fucking hell…
I gave him the benefit of the doubt with his trump “support” comments… but this is clear as day, asshole behaviour…
Been a protonmail customer for over 10 years… not sure where to move next
Same, that good will has evaporated though as he’s continued to demonstrate poor decision-making and social skills. Bad traits for a business leader.
I have a lifetime Simplelogin account because I love that service… It’s now part of proton (as they bought it), so I think I’m stuck.
I’m in the same boat. If all my email aliases get stolen though it’s not a huge loss for me. Now their password manager (which I also have a lifetime subscription for) is something I’m going look into a self-hosted solution. Although the only self hosted part would be syncing some file they lives locally on my machine.
I’ve been having a great experience with vaultwarden
Some choice quotes:
“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.
I think it’s important to use the term “AI psychosis” until it becomes mainstream. There’s power in simplifying, in two words, the mental illness that has spread to nearly every major-company CEO and C-suite MBA hump. And until it becomes a meme, until they know the general public sees them and knows they are blindly confident in something they don’t understand, that we know they are conning themselves and us, they won’t spare a moment of introspection to reconsider.
“Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”
Let’s unpack this. The programmers are concerned about Proton’s push for security, and they push back on objectively unmaintainable AI code - to say nothing of Yen’s bullying to push to live before it’s even tested - and this is Yen’s response. In essence: Security does not matter more than the perception of speed.
This is demonstrably idiotic, because security issues are the “truth” being undermined here, and when someone hacks or compromises key parts of your service, that will be far more damaging some CEO-naval-gazing version of “look how fast we are.”
In all, the many quotes from engineers really do the job convincing that this guy is not just a bad CEO, but a bad person. I’m sure to Board members or billionaires, this type of psychopathy and lack of empathy looks like a feature and not a bug. This probably won’t change that, but every moment spent holding up a mirror helps.
Be careful though, just like “Trump Derangement Syndrome” got swapped from meaning people crazed for Trump to meaning crazed against Trump… AI psychosis could be twisted by the media (tech bro owned) into “people who dislike AI are crazy.”
i apologize, not to throw shade at you because I fully agree with the comment, but
let's unpack thisis a bit of a trigger phrase along the lines ofsit with that a minuteornot just x, but yYup, totally. AI outputs also killed my confidence using hyphens mid-sentence (but I still do it because it’s just how I think). But thanks, I’ll actually make a note to stop using that AI-hijacked phrasing…
Load bearing comment.
You’re right to push back on this.
This leadership mentality doesn’t look good for the future of Proton.
They want to appear that they are about security but seems they are more in boat with Microsoft, now and into the future, of AI does all the work.
Holy shit, I’ve already been blackpilled on AI and have fully accepted that it’s never going away, but firing people over their opinions of AI and then demanding their employees adpot AI into their workflows is unhinged. Guess I’ll deproton and use Mailbox.org instead because holy shit
I switched to Mullvad and Tuta yesterday. Still working on moving password managers. I’ve let some things slide in the past but Yen has turned into such a big asshole. Proton deserves a better CEO.
Isnt the founder of mullvad just as much of an asshole funding far right politics etc ? Not meant as a criticism of you, I’m in the same boat trying to move my stuff and its so fucking frustrating that so many of these companies are either led by psychopaths or being enshittified in other ways. I guess I’m looking more and more at self hosting shit again, but that also scares me a bit for stuff like email and password managers and hardware prices are insane… But either way I’m definitely spreading everything out to different companies this time… Not looking forward to changing my login email on every single website again after just having moved it to proton about 2 years ago…
So far I’ve come up with:
Email: Tuta seems okay
PW-Manager: Found no good service yet, self hosting Vaultwarden seems like an option but I read some concerning things about changing company structures at Bitwarde wich it depends on that implies them possibly moving away from FOSS
VPN: Dont know honestly
Calendar: Im with murena from /e/os seems fine for now
Cloud Storage: Dont really need this, as i have everything on my server but i need a better backup strategy for that server and my god harddisk prices are crazy…
Holy shit, well that slipped through my research. Time to checkout IVPN, maybe?
I switched to IVPN. So far so good.
Literally a Nazbol, a joke ideology indistinguishable from just being a Nazi in red. Being a true believer makes him a Nazi and pushing Nazis as spoilers makes him, guess what, a Nazi.
It’d be one thing if he got pushed out afterwards but the reality is Mullvad’s founders support ethnic cleansing, and as much as I don’t like Yen I don’t think the timing of their compliments can attach that sin to them, provably.
proton is the absolute bottom of the barrel of privaxy washing
Canceled subscription after the political statements, but have been putting off moving away from their free tier. Time to buy a domain and go fastmail or mailbox I guess
Wow this is super shitty. I hope they can unionize. Dude seems to be cras h ing the ship on purpose.
they need to get rid of that ceo and the cto in fucking mediately
Any CEO+ putting AI before people should be outed ASAP. Fuck this guy And AI apologists too.
AI psychosis
