Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life • Hacker News Board

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#111

Post by npsomaratna » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:46 PM UTC

jaynetics wrote: post #99

nickelpro wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a history of Google de-activating accounts arbitrarily? I agree this would be a huge problem, but I'd be similarly devastated if my ISP stopped doing business with me, or any other email provider if I wasn't on gmail. True, if Google deactivated my account I'd lose a little bit more than just gmail, but any company I do business with arbitrarily cutting me off would be on the same magnitude of problematic. T…

> Is there a history of Google de-activating accounts arbitrarily? Yes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+%22google%2...

Example:

https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/11487570?hl=en

"I uploaded a YouTube video, which was a normal video in my eyes.. that got removed for inappropriate content and got my account disabled. Now my access to the gmail address is blocked"

Being banned from Youtube because you violated their TOS is one thing. Losing access to Gmail at the same time, because everything is linked to the same Google account? That's excessive.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#112

Post by texasbigdata » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #17

I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…

Stupid question but why not just forward if all your other activity is off of google? Do you believe the gmail data capture is high enough that your otherwise complete migration would be compromised?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#113

Post by nickelpro » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

XCSme wrote: post #98

nickelpro wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a history of Google de-activating accounts arbitrarily? I agree this would be a huge problem, but I'd be similarly devastated if my ISP stopped doing business with me, or any other email provider if I wasn't on gmail. True, if Google deactivated my account I'd lose a little bit more than just gmail, but any company I do business with arbitrarily cutting me off would be on the same magnitude of problematic. T…

I remember seeing a few cases of Google account de-activation every year. Not sure how often it happens, but it does happen. I personally use Gmail and really like it, I don't expect to have any problems with them, but I do know that my account being deleted at some point for no reason is a real possibility. I think that email is a bigger problem as it's the main connection between you and all the other services you…

I totally agree with this point, it absolutely does happen. It's just every time I investigate a given incident further it is either: A) A clear ToS violation where Google is completely in the right with the suspension B) An engineering error that is fixed in a day or two.

Which puts Google in the same camp as every other tech company I do business with, and every other email provider for that matter. Moreover, given the hundreds of millions if not billions of gmail users and only handful of suspension stories, I'm probably less likely to face suspension on Gmail than other platforms.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#114

Post by birdyrooster » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #17

I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…

I needed way longer than a day to get all of the accounts I created over the years with my gmail. I found I had to check my gmail for over a year until I was confident that I wasn’t missing any accounts.

Still use YouTube and Google search. They have no (decent) competition still.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#115

Post by gonehome » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

texasbigdata wrote: post #112

gonehome wrote: post #17

I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…

Stupid question but why not just forward if all your other activity is off of google? Do you believe the gmail data capture is high enough that your otherwise complete migration would be compromised?

Totally reasonable question.

I haven’t deleted the old account yet and do have it importing right now (that’s a good strategy for catching any straggling accounts or friends you haven’t given your new email too).

I don’t have a good answer beyond some weird sense of aesthetic tidiness. I have a dash of wanting to compulsively organize things, so having the old account bothers me irrationally.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#116

Post by wintermutestwin » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

sosborn wrote: post #73

aitchnyu wrote: post #67

I never considered a Gmail alternative since Gmail has primary/social/promotion/updates tabs and proper threading of replies and almost perfect spam protection. What services do the above things as good?

I’m with you on the SPAM protection, but I find the tabs and threading to be god awful.

Love the tabs, but the threading is such a PITA thanks to their convoluted interface. Every time I want to selectively reply and change the subject line, I have do do a minor research project to figure it out.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#117

Post by ehsankia » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

DavideNL wrote: post #44

dnr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An entire day! I wish it were that easy. My password manager says I have 331 accounts using my gmail address. I figure it'll take me a year to move everything if I spend a couple hours a week. I categorized them into tiers based on importance and still ended up with 63 in the top "important or regularly use" tier and 59 in the next "will probably use again" tier. The lower tiers, I'll probably not even bother with.

Same here, but I simply forwarded ALL incomming e-mail from my old Gmail to my new email address. That way, i did not have to change all website accounts at once. So I slowly updated a lot of less important accounts/websites to my new email address over the period of 1+ year.

The incremental approach is always the better solution imo. For email, for password managers, for any big migration. People always put off saying it'd be a lot of work, but if you start at any given time, within 1-2 year you'll be fully migrated.

This is what I did for password manager, I migrated each website on a per-use basis. Every time I used a website with a manual password, I replaced it with a generated password. This automatically prioritizes more important websites, which you tend to use more often.

For email, similarly, you migrate to the new email, and you give people the new one gradually too. Eventually anything that's left over will be spam, and that'll actually be your "less-important" secondary address you can give to websites you don't care about.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#118

Post by texasbigdata » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #89

submeta wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? I seem to remember HN's readership is occasionally hostile to Dropbox. Myself, I use it but the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox... (I haven't reached that point, though)

Conceptually, using what the SEO community feels google does every time google does an algorithm change that muddles SEM / organic after a revenue drop (source: mozcom 2019), you would have to assume they would keep marginally pushing incremental borders to ameliorate any drop or “lower than wall street expected growth” in ad revenue. So the OPs approach to fully migrate is consistent with that world view.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#119

Post by dnr » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

actuator wrote: post #63

gonehome wrote: post #17

I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…

I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance. I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance.…

I concur with the other comments that Fastmail is actually better than Gmail these days: the web UI is much faster and nicer, the Android app is not perfect but pretty decent, filtering and customization options are better.

My only potential concerns are: spam (I still get most email to my gmail address and imported by fastmail, which filter out spam on the gmail side, so I don't have a good sense of their own spam filter), and overall security (their own production security as well as resistance to account takeovers, etc.)

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#120

Post by texasbigdata » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

hellofunk wrote: post #92

gonehome wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing. In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people. I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve…

> Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Gmail has actually gotten super slow to me, I'm not sure what the problem is. Their site loads slowly, navigating around it is slow, the whole UX is slow. It didn't used to be that way. I've considered migrating for that reason alone, let alone any opinion I have of the company.

This is how superhuman mail came about. Silly paid solution to a UX problem, but would recommend as a practical workaround if gmail is a major bottleneck to your day job productivity