I’ve done a decent job de-googling my life. YouTube is the only real holdout. That’s mainly because I’m too cheap to pay for Spotify. I guess I should get around to remedying that.
De-googling, so far
91–100 of 197 posts
Re: De-googling, so far
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Phones and TVs.
Re: De-googling, so far
#93I would really love to run GrapheneOS (or some other Android OS that can prevent a lot of Google's built-in spying), but broken Android Auto, Google Pay, and a bunch of other things would be a complete showstopper for me.
It makes me really sad that I've come to rely on a bunch of things that just aren't available at all through open software.
Re: De-googling, so far
#94Earlier 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).
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.
Do you walk out of a movie once someone drinks a Coke on screen? This seems like a level of ideological devotion that makes doing anything pretty difficult.
Re: De-googling, so far
#95> 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…
For what it's worth, both Apple Maps and Bing Maps now have street-view like features, at least in my neck of the woods (Canada).
I guess that's fine for diversifying the big corporate overlords you rely on, which I'll agree is an improvement over relying on Google for everything. But still, I wish there were open alternatives.
Re: De-googling, so far
#96> I think Nebula.tv is promising, and a bunch of creators I like upload their videos on it. I do have a Nebula account but rarely end up using it, since most videos get uploaded to YouTube as well, and when I open Nebula, I find myself having already watched all the interesting videos on YouTube. I've just gotten in the habit of opening up Nebula first and only then switching to YouTube when there's nothing new there…
Nebula drives me insane. I want so much to like it, but the TV app is so terrible. You can follow creators, but it won't show you when they release a new video. Did you have to pause a video and go away for a bit? Well too bad. Unless you search the name or use their bookmark feature, you can't get back to it. There's no way to tell it that it's suggestions aren't interesting. If the thing they've put a huge banner across your screen about is a podcast and not a video, clicking it does nothing. No error, no nothing (again on the TV app.)
Re: De-googling, so far
#97For 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…
Simple. Google is in the business of collecting and monetizing my data and removing my privacy. I want them to have as little access to my life as possible.
Re: De-googling, so far
#98Moving E-mail is the easiest part on this journey. For me the biggest reason, was the risk of being locked out of my E-mail accounts and reaching no (human) support.
What I found the most difficult was the search engine. Although Google search has become worse, it's still far better than Duckduckgo in my opinion. I've found DDG very inaccurate for non-English queries.
Re: De-googling, so far
#99Although this author seems pretty reasonable with regards to actual privacy (preferring self-hosted software), I find the popular echo chamber of "avoid Google, they steal your data" quite misguided. Yes, Google accumulates data and does stuff with it. But Google also has rigorous processes to lock down data and access to it, unlike virtually any small-to-medium cloud software provider. I've heard crazy stories like…
Don't forget any large hoard of data is ripe for government abuse. It might not be a cold caller but a police department parallel constructing you into a crime conviction using faulty GPS data.
Re: De-googling, so far
#100Moving E-mail is the easiest part on this journey. For me the biggest reason, was the risk of being locked out of my E-mail accounts and reaching no (human) support. What I found the most difficult was the search engine. Although Google search has become worse, it's still far better than Duckduckgo in my opinion. I've found DDG very inaccurate for non-English queries.
kagi.com
you're welcome :)