Why are Google and Facebook in the same jail? What breach of privacy is Google guilty of?
The ad network?
How? All the info about me is with Google and no 3rd party knows my private info.
What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
41–50 of 324 posts
Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
#42Here’s a question: How do we adopt a replacement and avoid creating an identical situation in 10 years? I wonder how many people donate to/pay for/enable ads on DuckDuckGo, for example.
Incentives have to be aligned. Open protocols at a minimum.
Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
#43The article talks mostly about e-mail and search, but you know what's still the best social network on the interwebs? E-mail. When I dumped social media two years ago, I gave my "friends" my e-mail address. Now, instead of getting an endless stream of reposted political image captions and photos of people's lunches I get messages about the things that are actually worth seeing: news about family, friends, life events…
Run your own! https://runyourown.social/ Federated social media could be the solution.
Solution to what problem?
Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
#44Why are Google and Facebook in the same jail? What breach of privacy is Google guilty of?
Historically speaking, Google is the one who innovates ground-breaking privacy-violating technology, and Facebook copies them a year or two later with much less tact.
Name the privacy violating technology. How and please be specific. I can give examples of FB violating user privacy. Cambridge Analytica.
Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
#45Why must i use facebook?
A search engine, ok, but facebook?
Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
#46I'm actually building an alternative to Facebook for people fed up with Facebook and just want to stay in touch with people and not much more. I would go as far as calling it a glorified address book with some extra features for having up-to-date contact details for everyone that has granted you the privilege of having them and a very cut down version of the feed. Which brings me to the question of monetisation. I do…
FWIW, I'll almost certainly never use another social network that's not open source, or at the very least built on simple open protocols. Best of luck.
I respect the stance, and it's not an avenue that I've ruled out, but it's not a priority for me for the moment. Especially with the primary concerns that I'm addressing at first is the destructive incentive structure constructed by ad and data supported social networks.
Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
#47DuckDuckGo is really changing my world. It’s like I’m seeing a whole other internet I was missing before with Google search results. I get much more relevant answers and less SEO targeted garbage that says all the right words usually while saying nothing at all. I was skeptical, but I encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t before.
I'm at about 90% Duck these days, and 10% Google. But I'm not sure it's because Duck got better, or because Google got worse.
Google's results just seem less and less useful for the kinds of searches I do.
A recent example: There was a news event near where I live earlier this week. It made national headlines briefly. Yesterday I wanted to know if there was anything new about it. So I hit the duck with my search query and it showed newspaper web sites that had updated the story about three hours before, and some TV web sites that had stories from the previous night.
I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything, so I did the same search in Google. Big G's results were all at least three days old, and most were re-posts of re-posts of re-posts published on random web sites on the other side of the planet.
So, I continue to use the duck. And I've learned a lesson that I really shouldn't second-guess myself and think that maybe Google, with its trillion dollars to spend, isn't any better after all.
Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I was skeptical, but I encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t before. I have - I found the results far less useful than Google's, the whole experience far more frustrating and it noticeably slowed down my work.
I find it's a mixed bag -- sometimes DDG is better, sometimes Google is. It kind of reminds me of the old days pre-Google-dominance when you'd try Alta Vista and then Lycos or Excite if you didn't get what you were looking for. Cynically, I wonder if Google has gotten to the point where they realize that serving the absolute most relevant results means they sell less ads. Of course, I don't think anyone is ordered no…
I agree entirely with how you described the search experience. I would often try three or four ways to get a website I wanted back in the day. I am finding myself learning what search engines I like more for specific types of searches. Some times that means google, some times DDG, and who knows throw Bing int here.
Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
#49I'm actually building an alternative to Facebook for people fed up with Facebook and just want to stay in touch with people and not much more. I would go as far as calling it a glorified address book with some extra features for having up-to-date contact details for everyone that has granted you the privilege of having them and a very cut down version of the feed. Which brings me to the question of monetisation. I do…
Monetization is a perverse incentive. I'm willing to run my own services, maybe pay someone to host for me, but I don't want a company with an incentive to maximize eyeball time.
Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
#50I'm actually building an alternative to Facebook for people fed up with Facebook and just want to stay in touch with people and not much more. I would go as far as calling it a glorified address book with some extra features for having up-to-date contact details for everyone that has granted you the privilege of having them and a very cut down version of the feed. Which brings me to the question of monetisation. I do…
If all the images are paid-for you have the advantage of basically not having to worry about bandwidth. (Assuming you're not bloating the site with MBs of JS libraries.)
Unfortunately -- Facebook has trained people to expect this feature for free. Not sure there's a simple solution here. But maybe you could release the site unmonetized then work on a paid white-label version for private networks / corporate intranets / etc.?