Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaving Google has actively improved my life

pseudosingleton.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 273 posts

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#141

Post by cogman10 »

danny_codes wrote: post #73
WarmWash wrote: post #37

The problem isn't Google. The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free". In 30 years, no one has figured this out. So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments. And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another syst…

The options are ads, pay, or public funding. Public funding is obviously the best option in many cases. For example, non-profit basic internet services

I think the pay solution could potentially work. The biggest issue is the decentralized nature of the internet. If I could setup an account which gives me access to everything ad free, but deducts what the page would earn in advertisement (say something like $0.001 for a visit) and most of the internet which does a pay wall participated in this scheme, then I'd do it. I'd happily put in $10 to such an account and recharge it when I start finding the internet being locked away.

You'd want such a platform to be relatively open to allow anyone to participate, but you'd also have to be pretty aggressive at policing as bad actors would be all over the place trying to artificially drain an account. Maybe it's something that could be built into the browser? You could get a "X would like to charge you for a visit" which you could approve or deny and you could configure to always approve.

Transaction fees would be a beast.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#142

Post by arthurjj »

I was thrown by

> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.

> Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad

It's weird to see this without any context or justification or comparison to other industries. As if it's so self evidently true that the author never considered the reader might dismiss his wider point when coming across it with no explanation

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#143

Post by wavemode »

realprimoh wrote: post #52

This being on the front page of hacker news is embarassing. Low substance post that is misleading if anything - I was hoping for a career reflection. Not a low-quality "pat on the back" post of no value

Your comment is of even less value than the article. The fact that you find this subject matter uninteresting, is also uninteresting. Clearly other people feel differently.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#144

Post by al_borland »

Aurornis wrote: post #7

> After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches I've had DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for years and I couldn't disagree with this more. DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes. Their de…

I had a similar experience with DDG. I felt like I had to add “!g” to everything, which doesn’t actually move one away from Google, it just creates friction.

Kagi, however, has been a different experience for me. I haven’t felt the need to go to Google at all. If I can’t find it with Kagi, I’m confident I won’t find it with Google either. There have also been several times where I was on an outage call with a double dozen people all looking for answers to some issue. Everyone was coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find something that solved the issue pretty quickly with Kagi.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#145

Post by nashashmi »

He lost me at paying for services. Sure, me in my 40s can afford to pay for a good 200$ worth of services, but when I was starting out in high school and college, I could not even fathom paying for anything. And that was the time I was doing real work in my life, not like now.

I don't know what this allergy to features are. You can disable the features. It is not hard. I remember when they used to force conversation feature down everyone's throats. Some oldies hated it, but when they got used to it they appreciated it. Now they have an off feature.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#146

Post by Gooblebrai »

simon666 wrote: post #127
WarmWash wrote: post #37

The problem isn't Google. The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free". In 30 years, no one has figured this out. So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments. And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another syst…

> So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments. I'm assuming you mean exclusive disjunction here, but in reality it's something closer to a conjunction, if not occasionally an inclusive disjunction. So many subscription services also have ads and if they don't, they eventually do. The problem isn't that people want things for free; hell, we all pay for access to the internet already…

> we all pay for access to the internet already

That will cover the physical infrastructure of your Internet provider. But there are a lot of websites and software on the internet that require either ads or payment to survive. Free usually means "surviving with somebody else's money aka investors"

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#147

Post by paffdragon »

Aurornis wrote: post #7

> After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches I've had DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for years and I couldn't disagree with this more. DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes. Their de…

I also ditched Google years ago for DuckDuckGo, but its not without problems for sure. Often times still full of obviously fake sites in results, that I try to report them. Many times it just returns nothing where Google still manages to give results. And I still have to scroll through their ads when I am on a machine without an adblocker (like Firefox Focus/Klar on Android). But I still rather use them than Google, if I don't find something it is usually not the end of the world and I just move on. Recently, I switched all my browsers to their noai site, on some I still have the lite version, I think.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#148

Post by nunez »

Couldn't agree more. Kagi for search, Fastmail for e-mail, Apple Maps for navigation (though I rely on Google Maps for reviews). Once a realistic not-Office 365 alternative for docs and spreadsheets appears, I'm going to bail on Drive too.

I've used Fastmail for a year now and haven't missed Gmail for a second. It even natively supports iOS push notifications for Mail, something Google refuses to implement.

Same with Kagi. I love having control over my search results, and custom bangs is life.

Post reply on HN