here’s my new favorite helen keller quote, courtesy of Google ai, haha
From the article …
but that I have to wait for all the crap I don’t want in the first place.
It comes down to Google telling us what it thinks we’d want, vs giving us what we actually ask for, and the time wasted doing so.
That, and probably punishing people who use ad blockers.
in this situation the search engine DuckDuckGo is better than Google because it has an opt-in for a.i.
https://duckduckgo.com/
Then Bing it is. I switched on my daily machine and DDG has been ok. Still a lot of sponsored shit I don’t need, but better than getting a solid lie from Google
Actually true. They hooked me in the golden era of rewards points and I’ll be damned if it isn’t way better than Google now. Bing image search is especially great. Even their copilot thing (RIP Cortana) is useful.
I tried to switch my primary search engine on Firefox to DDG yesterday when I heard the news. 3 searches later, I switched back. I don’t like Google, but damned if I’m not used to it.
If you use ddg you can redirect any search to google by adding a space ans !g to the end of the search term.
Annoyingly, but works on the cases where google does better.
Lots of other places too (13.5k of them), they’re called ‘!bangs’. !w Wikipedia !r spezit etc.
Full list here https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
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.
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.
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.
You can also forward emails from your old Gmail to your new email as a bridge to ensure you don’t miss anything.
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.
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
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).
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.
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:
- Desktop: Invidious + Piped
- Android: Newpipe + Tubular
Is rumble not chock full of extremist content? I’ve only ever seen one demographic push rumble (and odysee).
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.
