This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Hopefully DeGoogleing will go a bit like the cable "Cord Cutters" did in terms of headlines over time:
Of course, streaming is worse than cable now... so lets learn from that.
"streaming is worse than cable now" is it though?
I stream for weeks on end without a single ad, watching only what I want. I go to an older person's house and I hear the same friggin commercial jingles, the same canned studio laughter, and shows that are designed for the stupidest common denominator.
I grew up in the era of Saturday morning cartoons. My brain was liquidified on cereal commercials. I won't allow cable into my house under any circumstances.
But I do agree that we should learn from too easily replacing the working with the next big thing without any regulations on how the next big thing is allowed to operate
I stream for weeks on end without a single ad
But that's now changing. The bottom tiers of many (most?) streaming apps include ads, and it's not a stretch to think that they'll include ads on the higher tiers eventually, or just increase prices until people downgrade to ad-supported tiers. Yeah, you can use an ad-blocker, but you could also use a DVR for cable that also filters out ads.
I'm bailing on both and just buying physical media again. I hope that doesn't die out, but I'm done with paying for subscriptions. We don't watch a ton, so I'm probably going to save money this way.
I wish we had a streaming equivalent of a DVR, then I might actually want streaming again.
"streaming is worse than cable now"
Ironically, pirating has never been easier lol
Its worse in that to see the content I want I need MULTIPLE subscriptions that add up to more than cables cost ...or I can sail the high seas once more. I've cancellled everything except amazon because I save enough on shipping to justify it (mostly heavy items)
We demand infinite growth. Why? Because shareholders want to buy shares and sell them later for more.
Do anything it takes to make that transaction happen, cut people's jobs en masse, whatever.
Forever.
Stock holders demand infinite growth. If the management doesn't make money, they put in place new management. A company is only worth the value of the next stock buyback or dividend. It's baked into the structure of corporations, especially publicly-owned corporations.
Stock holders can sue the company if there's a loss, too. That shouldn't be a thing, but here we are.
Whoever passed that bullshit is responsible for so much of what's wrong with our economy.
its a human flaw... insatiable greed.
we distilled this greed and removed all actual responsibility creating an entity, 'the stock market'. this well of irresponsible greed has reached a singularity.... a point of no return. we are all too dependent on this terrible thing and so it cant be removed.
the majority of us just get to suffer while being told 'theres no other way'
we cant have nice things because humans are just so fucking greedy and incapable of controlling that greed.
No, it’s a capitalist flaw. Capitalism is not an intrinsic trait of humanity. We can create systems that have effective self-regulation and appropriate feedback loops. It’s just that most countries, for one reason or another, haven’t really tried.
Despite the convenience of some of its tools, the hardcore tech set increasingly prefers tech companies like Signal or even Apple, which is currently running expensive TV ads about how other browsers (read: Google's Chrome) spy on you.
One important thing to be mentioned is that, while Apple is correct when highlighting that Chrome is a privacy nightmare, Apple and Google are cut from the same cloth and they're both user-hostile when it comes to privacy, monopoly enforcement, censorship, etc. Both deserve the hate that they get. (Alongside Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.)
They took down the Don't Be Evil sign.
Reminds me of a cannibal in the Deltora series who has the sign "LIVE NO EVIL" on the wall, when it's actually "LIVE ON EVIL" but mirrored.
Notice how Google Maps data hasn't been improving, and if anything getting worse?
I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned...then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play "go talk to the other parent I cant do anything" when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.
I worked for Google but Google didn't want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn't work for Google.
Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).
My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.
What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.
Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.
(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).
A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows... that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor.... except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time...
...and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?
I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to... totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out.. again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.
Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.
I hate Google.
You could also blame the idiots who had a chance to unionize but never did.
If you go back 5-10 years, everyone would say, "why do we need to unionize? Working in IT is great, we don't need to unionize!" And now see where we are today to realize how stupid of a mindset that was. I guess they don't buy insurance for the same reason.
I thought you had to be smart to work at Google, but seeing people take dumb positions like that made me realize that while they might have been brilliant engineers, they were definitely not very smart people.
(I'm not holding Google blameless here by the way - fuck them hard! But Google employees had the chance and wasted it, and this is what they left behind.)
How about "monopolizing the ad industry, going all in on manipulative engagement farming, and making billions off of destroying the internet they helped create, and possibly democracy"
I think the headline proves most people don't really understand how deeply Google has embedded themselves in, and farmed, well, everyone.
Google hasn't just monopolised the ad industry, but is holding the internet itself in its clutches.
They own and control one of the biggest operating systems on the market, giving them control over peoples devices. They own and control the biggest browser engine on the market, giving them control over the internet standards; they can implement whatever the heck they want and essentially force it as a web standard. They own and control the biggest search engine on the market, giving them control over what information people can see and access.
For a lot of people, Google controls practically the entire internet access chain, and that should terrify anyone who cares about a free and open internet.
that should terrify anyone who cares about a free and open internet.
We're way past that... right? They've already kinda destroyed the open web and are squeezing it for money.
For the 113th time: YES
Google stopped being cool ages ago and Chrome marked the moment they turned evil. They no longer had an incentive to just throw money at problems, they wanted to completely drive the web ecosystem and they did. They had a browser.
I've started to try and move away from Google as much as possible, which I knew would be difficult, but it's proving to be harder than I thought.
I can't do anything about my work stuff, because our company uses Google for email and cloud storage. I set up an account on Proton Mail for my personal email and file storage. I currently have an android phone, but I don't like iPhones so I don't really know what I want to do there. I switched back to Firefox after 15 years of using Chrome. I actually started using Bing search more. I'm looking into alternatives for the Chromecast that Google doesn't seem interested in supporting anyway, which might just end up being a small PC hooked up to the TV.
I'm just so tired of Google services either being shut down or slowly getting worse and worse until they're nearly unusable.
On the android front, if you don't mind using a pixel phone then Graphene OS would be worth checking out. It's a foss non rooted alternative to base android with a focus on privacy and security. The no root requirement means a good amount of apps like banking work properly on it. It vastly expands the app permission system and removes the special privileges to Google system apps, allowing you to remove it or limit them. It also supports sandboxing of the play store and multiple profiles so you can effectively quarantine Google requiring apps.
It's not as hard as you'd think. https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle - This has everything you need. Definitely use Firefox. Check out Nextcloud for personal cloud/documents replacement etc. Definitely try a small PC hooked to your TV and look in to plex. Don't use Google/Bing, stick with DuckDuckGo and if you need to, use !g or !b in your searched on ddg to get bing and google results. It's fun exploring all the alternatives in the list.
Nationalize google and turn it into a coop that is democratically controlled by worker and users. Lets us vote on their management and corporate priorities and policies.
To hell with the shareholders! They ruin everything!
I wish there were more coops. Shareholders are almost the entire reason for the mess we find ourselves in.
On August 5, 2024, Trump asked his supporters to stop using Google.
Did not know that. Well. Stopped clock, blind squirrel, etc.
Corporations: Hmm, we seem to have saturated our market. How do we make line keep go up?
Whats a good google maps alternative?
Ive had some success with OSM+ but only if I supply the end point myself. Otherwise it had a really hard time getting a place like Home Depot or a local university, etc....etc....
In terms of map data, as far as I know there's pretty much only OSM, Google Maps and Apple Maps (which is getting a beta browser version)*.
OSM map data is usually excellent, search can be very hit or miss though. You might want to try some of the apps that use OSM data like Organic Maps to see if you get better search results using that. Personally I use both Apple Maps and Organic Maps.
* I also know of Mapquest but it's lacking a lot of POIs and even ways from what I can see, at least in the two cities I've checked.
Maybe if you're in a big city, or maybe Europe. I recently moved back to the US from Asia and found OSM data to be really bad in the small city that I come from.
everyone with common sense and the ability to pay attention has hated google for over a decade.
All companies enshittify themselves eventually, and the fact that those that were trying to fight it within the company were still getting shit on from within and from outside the company only hastened its fall by just removing them as a deciding factor through sheer pressure. Google really isn't as dystopian as people put it as - for one, it's too incompetent at starting and sticking to new ventures.
As it continues falling and eventually the traditional competitors overtake it, I think it will become apparent what a truly dystopian megacorporation actually is before Google completely becomes anything remotely close to it - Microsoft would have reached that line if they had successfully been able to sneak in Recall. DuckDuckGo fell when Bing did, smoke and mirrors... Google is pretty bad right now, just not what I would call a dystopic megacorp.
All companies enshittify themselves eventually,
This isn't a foregone conclusion, just a number of things that are increasingly likely:
There's a moderately successful, but also reasonably modest company that went about 50 years without getting "enshitified". The founder was passionate about it, kept the company private, and held in until his 80s when he finally decided he really couldn't do it anymore. Then they went public and immediately the layoffs, price hikes, and cloudification commenced, as the flood gate of enshitification opened on his retirement.
All my homies hate Google
Yes. I hate advertising companies.
Google's motto in 2003: "Don't be evil."
They sure let that motto slide.
A lot of people still don't know.
Some people don't even know what Reddit is.
Now, Reddit is charging Google for priority access to its posts (article - only Google and Brave will show those results in the near future).
Perhaps Google will start charging money to use it also.
I don't use Google anymore except for Google maps in my car. :) I guess they can spy on where I'm driving. But no search history.
I'm all about that duck duck go yo
Wait until you learn of their role in the apartheid and genocide in Palestine
