This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Deliberate vandalism of the commons needs to actually be made illegal. This would include the entire field of "search engine optimization" which is simply a misnomer made of weasel words, which actually mean they'll hide the results you want behind an ever increasing amount of plain old grifter-ass crap sold by the same three old assholes who bought everything and think that means it's actually theirs, even as they dilute the concept of ownership for the rest of us.
The whole idea needs to die.
While I agree with everything said, using Google to find out how many episodes your own podcast has just seems a bit lazy. Bookmark the page, and next time you want to do your admin work you can follow the bookmarks and be done with it. Easy fix.
Also, use DDG
Been using DuckDuckGo for a long time but I recently trialed Kagi and have been quite impressed! It's not free but hopefully it keeps the enshittification away for a bit longer.
In a similar vein, I was trying to find something on Facebook (yeah, I know, but it was a funny work thing) today and went to use the search function to look for the FB page in question (searched the exact name) and if you just hit enter the new AI assumes you're asking it a question. It's FB! It's not a search engine! Why is it trying to give me a phone number for the police department I'm looking up to see their insane post?! I want to see the page! The page with the name I searched! On the app I searched in! Now you have to click a separate button that specifies you're looking to search through FB.... In the FB app!
This AI crap is already k.i.l.l.i.n.g. me.
I can't escape this hell
So many times I've tried
But I'm still caged inside
Somebody get me through this nightmare
I can't control myself
three days doors grace down or something
here's my new favorite helen keller quote, courtesy of Google ai, haha
Hoping to phase Google products out of my life. I think the challenge will be YouTube. Hopefully Rumble becomes more popular and has as good if not better features than YouTube.
Is rumble not chock full of extremist content? I’ve only ever seen one demographic push rumble (and odysee).
I was on Odysee for a while but I got tired of the antisemitism. Every video had a comment explaining why the holocaust was a fraud and how Jewish people are slimy criminals.
Maybe? I created a Rumble account sometime last year, I tried using it a bit.. it was okay. I tried finding some of my favorite content creators, found a handful then just stopped using Rumble. I've used it when it's content that YouTube would normally block.
Google is required to send you a CSV of your YouTube subscriptions upon request.
If you have an Android phone, once you have said CSV file, you can upload it into the Newpipe Application and voila, watch YouTube without visiting YouTube (or supporting the creators, but that's an aside to this topic). Sadly I know of no way of doing something similar on iPhone.
On desktop/tablet, you can always use Invidious. This is especially useful when combined with the tool yt-dlp and sponsorblock. If you use an RSS reader, you can "subscribe" to YouTube channels that way, and use redirection extensions to redirect you from YouTube to invidious, after that you can use yt-dlp with a sponsor block flag to download the video directly to your desktop, and watch it in whatever quality you want, with subtitles if you want, and have all mentions of sponsors cut out, and of course, no ads.
Obviously, this is too much work for most, but this is what I do to not visit YouTube while still watching their content, which is simply more plentiful and, IMHO, higher quality than what you find on other platforms (save for possibly Nebula).
Rumble is just a bunch of Nazis from what I've seen, so fuck them and their shitty platform.
Personally love Piped and the LibreTube app. I'm using the smnz.de instance for steaming and adminforge.de for authentication. Been super stable over the last few months. AFAIK Piped acts as a proxy between you and the yt servers so they have no chance to gather data about you. Not sure invidious works the same.
Dood.. thanks for posting this. I've got some researching to do.
Props to Sponsorblock
Hells to the yeah
Spread the word - the more sponsorblockers the better!
You can ditch YouTube,
without actually ditching YouTube content,
through a privacy respecting alternative frontend:
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/#youtube
My favorite ones:
Nice! Thank you!!
Why do you need two apps on each platform to replace one? I would love to switch over things but this makes it sound so much more complicated than it probably is
For me it’s gmail. I’ve disconnected from everything else, but I have WAY TOO MANY things connected to and through my gmail account.
Just start. I made another email a few years ago and just started using it for new accounts, moving others over when I thought of it...
Slowly but surely my Gmail has become a ghost town that receives mostly just spam, and the odd password reset link for accounts I haven't bothered updating.
Sure it's not a 100% but it's a lot, and it's a little bit less of myself getting to google
If it's any comfort I've spent about a year getting away from Gmail and I can report it is in fact doable.
Finding another email service and using a domain of my own with it was the easy part. The hard part was painstakingly replacing my address everywhere I was using it with new addresses.
Way more doable than YouTube, which I don't foresee being replicated any time soon.
Facts. GMail took me about 4 months or so, just incrementally logging in and checking every service and subscription I have attached to GMail, logging into that account and changing the email address to my new email address. It's a tedious task but worth it. Google is far too intrusive, imo.
You can also forward emails from your old Gmail to your new email as a bridge to ensure you don't miss anything.
I would not forward anything from GMail to another email provider. Google is intrusive. They have no reason to know anything about my new email address. But I'm overreacting and that's okay.
Just use an alias, it's anyway a good idea to find a provider that lets you create unique aliases for each account.
Damn now I want to make a third, super-secret email address that I re-forward to. Darn that blasted nosey goog
This is how I do it. I may never stop actually having that gmail account in use due to the number of accounts tied to it, but I at least can use other services going forward without losing tons of stuff.
I've been there, now it's been over two years where I'm pretty much Gmail free. It's hard but it's worth it.
During Covid, I did some digital cleaning. It took me around a month (from couple of minutes, up to few hours each day) to clean up my gmail inbox. I had a gmail label where I placed all the emails received from any site where I created an account. I went one by one to each of them and either changed the login (to a non gmail address), or deleted an account (if I wasn't using it anymore).
Now I use another email provider, and i pay for it. I use gmail for situations/accounts where i suspect that my email address could be spammed. Right now, my whole google space usage is around 50 mb. I stopped using google drive, I don't use google search, I still use YouTube and pay to have no ads - because I just like YouTube.
It's possible to disconnect oneself from Google services as much as one wants. Still, I continue to use an android phone (I like iOS, but it's still too limited in comparison to Android).
Its pretty easy to just redirect Gmail‘s messages to a new account. Some providers even allow you to import previous emails. My switch to Protonmail was incredibly smooth.
