De-googling, so far • Hacker News Board

Re: De-googling, so far

#81

Post by jorams » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:34 PM UTC

schaefer wrote: post #18

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.

That's an odd sticking point. Domain registrars that don't do all those things are an exception. For the vast, vast majority of them the primary things they do aside from registering domains is offering email and hosting.

Re: De-googling, so far

#82

Post by zamadatix » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:36 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #54

guyzero wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've never found defaulting to paying for services I consume in need of steelmaning but I suppose it ultimately comes down to how much you care about that sort of thing than the particular reasoning in the end. The biggest reason I won't pay for content is because it's harder to consume that way. E.g. actual Blu-Rays are often impossible to legally play the way you want on the devices you want, especially in comparison to a pirated mkv. YouTube Premium is extremely easy to pay for though, even for the whole family and all my devices. Solutions like uBlock Origin (which I use on many other sites) are actually harder and more fragmented in approach if I want to cover all the same usecases so, in the continued spirit of steelmaning each side, why should I seek to "pirate it" (for lack of a better term) instead?

By the same logic I use SponsorBlock when I can because despite paying the creator and paying YouTube the hardcoded sponsors are still present (plus it has uses outside skipping just ads anyways).

Re: De-googling, so far

#83

Post by jsnell » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:38 PM UTC

ok_dad wrote: post #65

sneak wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The creators get the majority of the ad revenue from YouTube's ads (it's a 55/45 split).

Re: De-googling, so far

#84

Post by assimpleaspossi » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:39 PM UTC

extr wrote: post #77

For me the point of de-googling is not to literally stop using every single Google service but to disengage enough that your entire online identity isn't tied to Google such that losing your account would be catastrophic. For example, I still have a gmail account I use for lots of random things, but critical bank/financial accounts go directly to a separate fastmail address (where I am confident I could get a human t…

What happens if fastmail goes belly up?

Re: De-googling, so far

#85

Post by stalfosknight » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:40 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #16

Why is this hard? Since I quit offering a Chrome plug-in, my last connection to a Google account is gone. I should cancel my Google account, if and when I find the password. I post videos on Hardlimit, which uses PeerTube. I don't care about "discovery"; they're to illustrate blog postings elsewhere. So all I need is hosting and playout, which Peertube does just fine. (Peertube handles playout by mooching bandwidth o…

It's not hard but many don't want to let go of YouTube or Gmail for some reason.

Re: De-googling, so far

#86

Post by er0k » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:42 PM UTC

Is there any good alternative to google voice? It's the only google service I haven't been able to replace yet.

Re: De-googling, so far

#87

Post by SassyBird » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:42 PM UTC

derlvative wrote: post #4

I liked duckduckgo a couple years ago before it started insisting on showing results in the language associated to my IP address. Since then I've liked brave a lot better.

I’ve been getting weird results for a while: somewhere around the end of the first page of results or beginning of the second I get results which have nothing to do with my queries. Instead they look as if someone entered geoip result for my ip address as text of the query. Maybe those are some LLM experiments and that’s part of the prompt now?

Re: De-googling, so far

#88

Post by mfiro » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:43 PM UTC

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #84

extr wrote: post #77

For me the point of de-googling is not to literally stop using every single Google service but to disengage enough that your entire online identity isn't tied to Google such that losing your account would be catastrophic. For example, I still have a gmail account I use for lots of random things, but critical bank/financial accounts go directly to a separate fastmail address (where I am confident I could get a human t…

What happens if fastmail goes belly up?

If you use it with domain you own, you can just point it to another email provider.

Re: De-googling, so far

#89

Post by varun_ch » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:47 PM UTC

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #84

extr wrote: post #77

For me the point of de-googling is not to literally stop using every single Google service but to disengage enough that your entire online identity isn't tied to Google such that losing your account would be catastrophic. For example, I still have a gmail account I use for lots of random things, but critical bank/financial accounts go directly to a separate fastmail address (where I am confident I could get a human t…

What happens if fastmail goes belly up?

If you own your domain and make regular data exports/backups, nothing.

Re: De-googling, so far

#90

Post by riddley » Fri, May 31, 2024, 8:49 PM UTC

guyzero wrote: post #37

least wrote: post #5

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).

If only that were true!

Like the OP I consume a ton of YouTube and despite my misgivings about Google, I was a long time subscriber to the YouTube/music combo deal until they started showing ads despite my subscription.

It would happen a few times a week, and if I'm being charitable I could chalk it up to a deployment error, but it happened too many times for me to not get the impression that no one at YouTube gives a shit about subscribers.