61–70 of 197 posts
For me the degoogling sticking point is that I have a custom domain (registered through Google domains) that i use for both for my email addresses and my small personal home page. It would be nice to find a host that offers both hosting and email through a custom domain too.
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I've personally been watching YouTube less and less. The ads are insane. I would normally spend more time watching videos but it's become so disruptive I think most of us can agree that many videos are unnecessarily long (as it's incentivized by the creator for ad revenue), so there's far more fluff in it. With the rise of LLMs, etc for getting knowledge fast , I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't…
Don't everyone on HN use ublock origin? I haven't seen an ad in years.
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I find it crazy that someone will say "I still consume it more than any other type of video media" but somehow just paying for it isn't an option. You can pay to make YT ads go away. And the payments go to the video creators (eventually).
Flex the steelmaning and incentivize me to buy YouTube Premium when adblocking gives me the same functionality and I own the process to block. I'm happy to watch an occasional ad. Maybe 2 minutes for every day, curated and high quality advertisements relevant to everyone. No, I will not pay with my data. No, I will not accept interruption in flow, within or between videos. Interrupting during a video means adblocking…
The only thing irreplaceable for me is Youtube. Even if it's gotten worse as a platform over time, I still consume it more than any other type of video media and there are no good alternatives for much of the content that I enjoy watching.
I find it crazy that someone will say "I still consume it more than any other type of video media" but somehow just paying for it isn't an option. You can pay to make YT ads go away. And the payments go to the video creators (eventually).
I also think YouTube has gotten worse over time and I'd be happy to find a workable replacement despite being a long time YouTube Premium subscriber. I do use SponsorBlock though as I found supporting creators directly while paying YouTube for serving the content left still getting sponsorship ads as a bit ridiculous. It's a good product, just often intentionally shy of being great in interest of metrics
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I find it crazy that someone will say "I still consume it more than any other type of video media" but somehow just paying for it isn't an option. You can pay to make YT ads go away. And the payments go to the video creators (eventually).
You can’t pay YouTube to remove in-video ads that the video creators put in. For that you need SponsorBlock anyway, so might as well use a 3p client that supports blocking both kinds of ads, without giving money to Google to continue building ad surveillance software.
How do you expect all this content to be made without any sort of money? You’re basically leeching off the rest of us, in this case, IMO.
I hate ads, but right now that’s the only ticket, or paying for premium. Perhaps that will change, I hope.
> OpenStreetMap-based apps like Organic Maps are great and I frequently use them, but I find myself using the Google Maps website a lot, for tasks like searching for restaurants to getting an estimate of how long my commute is going to take. Agreed, as someone who walks almost everywhere, Organic Maps is great on GrapheneOS. The only things I use Google Maps for are more rare: (1) see what hours a store is open, whic…
Personally, (2) and (3) are the ones that keep me on Google Maps, along with the real killer feature for me which is that I can just search "good {coffee,food,whatever} near me" and get a list of pretty good recommendations.
The only thing irreplaceable for me is Youtube. Even if it's gotten worse as a platform over time, I still consume it more than any other type of video media and there are no good alternatives for much of the content that I enjoy watching.
I've personally been watching YouTube less and less. The ads are insane. I would normally spend more time watching videos but it's become so disruptive I think most of us can agree that many videos are unnecessarily long (as it's incentivized by the creator for ad revenue), so there's far more fluff in it. With the rise of LLMs, etc for getting knowledge fast , I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't…
The ads are indeed insane. They break YouTube in practice. YouTube, in its wisdom, much like a mobster in the protection racket, offers you an out: pay for Premium. I ended up doing this because YT is one of the things I use the most. The alternative was having Firefox with uBlock Origin on every mobile device in my household, I suppose, but this wasn't feasible.
YouTube Premium took the win :(
> I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph
Depends on what you're watching. I always disliked, say, programming tutorials in video form -- give me text, to read and understand at my own pace. Many video tutorials are unnecessarily longwinded and always go at the wrong pace for me, either too fast or too slow.
But I watch tons of videos about other topics where video is the right form. I watch hobby tutorials, I watch videos about cinema/art, etc, and I feel video is the right format for me.
> OpenStreetMap-based apps like Organic Maps are great and I frequently use them, but I find myself using the Google Maps website a lot, for tasks like searching for restaurants to getting an estimate of how long my commute is going to take. Agreed, as someone who walks almost everywhere, Organic Maps is great on GrapheneOS. The only things I use Google Maps for are more rare: (1) see what hours a store is open, whic…
Also switched to Organic Maps, but still use Google Maps for finding businesses/hours. Organic Maps is nice, but searching for directions is awful (at least in my South Florida area). Typing in any address tends to return results that only show the name of the street, and they're all identical. E.g. just a bunch of "Southwest 123rd Street, Florida", no house number or anything useful to distinguish them. Often times I'm forced to use Google Maps. This is currently the hardest Google service to quit for me.
I went from DDG to Kagi, and stuck with Kagi because of the superior results. Luckily I got in early, and have an early adopter plan. It's a shame they can't offer better pricing though because it really is a superior service. Recently I've had some privacy concerns that have made me a bit skeptical of Kagi, but it's hard for me to go back to DDG or even Google now. It's just that good.
For files I use Nextcloud exclusively. While it is slow and bloated as hell, I like it because I share the instance with family members, and it's easier for non-techie people to use it. It's also possible to mount it as a network drive using WebDAV so you can skip the bloated web interface. It works very well for me on KDE Dolphin.
For email I use ProtonMail with custom domain too. They're overpriced and overrated, but it's too much work for me to switch at this point, and their app isn't that bad. I would recommend FastMail to anyone looking for a new email provider though.
For YouTube, I use FreeTube. It's basically just a custom front end l. No ads, no spyware. Sure, I deprive creators of ad revenue, but that's a good thing. The less money they make on YouTube, the more likely they are to post on different services. I haven't heard of Nebula before, so I'll definitely be checking that out.
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You can’t pay YouTube to remove in-video ads that the video creators put in. For that you need SponsorBlock anyway, so might as well use a 3p client that supports blocking both kinds of ads, without giving money to Google to continue building ad surveillance software.
I don’t mind ads in the videos for creators I enjoy, it pays their bills. There’s a difference between those and YouTube’s ads which the creators don’t get a big percentage of. I can easily fast forward those ads if I want to, anyways. How do you expect all this content to be made without any sort of money? You’re basically leeching off the rest of us, in this case, IMO. I hate ads, but right now that’s the only tick…
Ads are cancer and should be excised at every opportunity. Ad companies should be destroyed. Ad tech workers should be blackballed. Shilling is shameful.