Mildly Infuriating

We can get it back, and the antitrust trials are a big part of actually doing it

https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?si=fQc-lIFzT-0hoeNv

The internet was better when it was Usenet and Gopher.

Yeah I'm feeling less like a participant, and more like a consumer on the "greater internet" (five big), compared to the early days when corporate presence was minimal, and not remotely slick or subtle. It was like dorky and obvious, and didn't seem remotely like a threat.

I miss the day when you could search YouTube for something like "JFK skyclub" and actually get video of the Skyclub at JFK. Today you'll get 15-minute videos that are 90% a guy talking about his thoughts on JFK, or Skyclub, or airlines, or whatever. If you're really lucky, some of them may feature a few seconds of actual footage of Skyclub.

It's not just Skyclub or travel videos. If I search for "repair mr coffee" I want to see a howto, not someone's SEO-optimized long winded lecture about whatever coffeemakers they're selling.

Whether we like the Atlantic or not, I feel like at some point if we want quality journalism we need to fund it.

Fair point. I don't mean to suggest that authors don't deserve to be paid for their work. And while the article discusses Google and Amazon's attempts to manipulate online behavior to drive up their profits, I remember a time when paywalls were a rare exception rather than the rule while reading articles online.

so that they can find new land or new ways to control this 4th space. Pretty sure that Meta was meant to be the next big market space.

I think Zuckerberg was expecting all of us to sit in a chair with VR headsets on all day and buy buy buy.

I personally feel like it's a total invasion of my privacy because it learns "me" and then tries to influence my every move a lot more intimately than cookies in a browser does.

Yah don't see a small player coming around anytime soon. People don't realise how uterlu massive these tech companies are.

Or disabling js. Most of you use ublock origin. Ublock has a setting to disable JavaScript and you can whitelist sites you want js

I strangely feel very conflicted over Google. I have a Pixel phone which supports the security hardened GrapheneOS.

Were it not for Google allowing their phones to be so easily rooted, I'd probably be with Apple, who have their own egregious privacy invading practices.

Google also left rss feeds available on Youtube, which essentially allowed me to easily move my subscriptions to my rss feeder instead of outright subscribing. Then, thanks to Invidious, I just use an extension to reroute any time I visit that channel/video.

Grant you, Google could easily remove these features that strangely enough allow for easy migration away from their platform, and I can definitely see a future where they do just that.

It just is such a strange thing for a company to have these built in aspects to their products that literally allow you to migrate away from their platform.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that this gives Google some sort of pass to do as they please. I haven't used Google search regularly in a very long time. I still use their email and calendar solely because my current job team uses it as one of their main scheduling tools, but would prefer if we used something like a NextCloud instance.

In short, I have done some things to get away from Google's suite of software and will continue to do so, but these strange loopholes, especially the interesting relationship Pixel/GrapheneOS has, make me wonder about how Google could still make certain products and remain a smaller, much more regulated, part of the Internet as a whole...