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 to help me if there was a serious account problem). I still use Google Docs suite, but "important" documents are stored locally as Word/Excel files. I still use Google Drive/Google Photos, but I make periodic backups to a local SSD + other online backup services (iCloud/OneDrive). Etc.
I don't understand why you would want to "ditch every Google product and service". Some of them are objectively pretty great, or inherently have low switching costs (like Google Maps).
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.
Day to day what does "monetizing my data and removing my privacy" actually mean to you? Are advertisers following you around town? Bothering you at work? Hounding you in the loo? Personally it seems like my data has been stolen from just about every company I've ever given it to EXCEPT for Google.
Just because this stalking happens invisibly in the guts of a Javascript file it doesn't make it any different than following me around every street I walk down and noting down everything I look at.
Here's the metaphor. Google offers free video cameras to any person who wants them. The cameras collect thousands of data points about every single person who enters their field of view. The cameras pick up every movement on the streets, in the shops. Every word uttered. They note all conversations and relationships. They send this data into a central database where every person gets a lifetime profile where they are uniquely identified and where all the aggregate data across all the free cameras in the world is collated and stored together.
Google now has a moment by moment timeline of everyone in the world, updating in real time.
Now, using this cache of information, anyone can bid for my attention in real time as I go about my life. While I'm at the bank (website). While I'm at the bar (website). While I'm at the grocery store (website). While I'm at the library (website). Around every corner is a digital billboard that's watching what my hands are doing, where my eyes are looking, what I'm saying. It knows my name, where I'm from, what I do, and who my family is, and it wants to sell me something.
This world is grotesque to me. It's about much more than data breaches.
I didn't even get into the government overreach capabilities such a dataset would enable, nay, tempt.
okay but you do realize they give you there products to use right. and you probably use them or at least use products that need them to function. thats the deal and i doubt anyone would rather it be for cash instead. i mean would you rather pay monthly for chrome or firefox? pay per google search. pay monthy for youtube. pay for android os. monthly for maps. hell google can stare at my naked ass all day for all i care id rather not pay for any of these things
I think anyone, given the choice, would rather pay for something with costs that are clear and up front, not buried in an evolving ToS that boils the frog.
You're welcome to make this Faustian bargain for yourself, but you don't get to make it for the rest of us, and neither does Google.
I understand the argument of “what’s the practical impact”
Practical impact is important to recognize but the concept of potential impact, otherwise known as risk, is most certainly valid; having the most intimate details of your identity stored outside of your own control can have profound risks for any bad actor especially when our methods of securing our identities haven’t kept up with the pace of it being collected.
>Day to day what does "monetizing my data and removing my privacy" actually mean to you? Are advertisers following you around town? Bothering you at work? Hounding you in the loo?
They are doing all of those things if you have your phone with you! Unless you manually go about disabling notifications, turning off gps access for all apps, etc.
They do all these things even if you don't. Even if you don't have a google account. The degree in which they do is higher if you do, but that doesn't remove it, it just lessens it.
And it is worth noting that even turning off your GPS, you can still be followed. The very nature of how cell service works requires the ability to locate you, even if not to the same precision level (as aforementioned).
There are of course trade-offs and this nature does not mean the tech is bad. But it does mean that we need to be aware of how it is used and how it can be abused. It is okay for mistakes to happen, but we need to fix them and resolve them, not ignore them or underplay them. My larger fear is that we live in a cluttered house and all these conversations end up being "well that piece of paper on the ground isn't that bad. That doesn't mean I'm messy." Because that is true. But there's a million instances of that and the accumulation is what creates the messy/cluttered house, not any singular piece of trash. If we can't see the forest from the trees, we're doomed. Because most of the problems that exist in our modern world are through these larger complex chains of coupled interactions. Where singular events are not that bad, but the system is.
If I'm taking a shit and open my phone. But also, sometimes at the urinal. I mean they put ads right in front of your face.
> Personally it seems like my data has been stolen from just about every company I've ever given it to EXCEPT for Google.
Google isn't in the business of selling ads, they are in the business of selling data. To make those ads more pervasive, targeted, and effective. A good ad goes unnoticed, it is often "native."
But to me, I just think about it this way. If some dude was following me around and writing down everything I do (maybe no the exact content of my words, but who I talk to, when, where I go, etc -- metadata), I'd be fucking pissed and call law enforcement for stalking. Now I don't understand why this is okay if the dude's name is Mark, Sundar, or Satya. I don't care that they're really good at hiding and that their note taking often goes unnoticed. I think it is creepy and immoral behavior.
And beyond that, I know what that data can do. Yes, it can be used to make a lot of useful things. I work in ML, data is POWERFUL. But a coin is a coin, and it can be spent on good things or bad things. Hell, there are even good ads. But the truth of the matter is that there are far too many abuses. More than I think is acceptable. I worry about growing abuse and the slow boiling of a frog[0]. The temperature (both metaphorical and literal) has risen all my life, I see no reason to think that it will cool down if we just continue business as usual. Each little instance of temperature rise may be small and not uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean that given enough time the temperature doesn't rise to a deadly point. I cannot stress this enough, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Evil is not (exclusively) created by evil men doing evil things. Evil is more often created by good men with good intentions. It is because the world is complex and because what we build and what we create takes on a life of its own, outside our hands, and outside what we imagined it could/would do. Ethan Zuckerman is not an evil man for creating something so universally hated, and he even created it with good intentions. But this is just the nature of the world and it means to be vigilant and careful. To be clear, it does not mean to stop progressing. But it does mean to be aware that the environment changes and that it is easy to get off track.
It's easy to point fingers at specific people, but I think it is more important to recognize the complexity of reality. Because if that isn't considered, you just create a vacuum for the same evil/abuse to rise again. And again, often by people who have no malintent. And that's the issue: the world is too fucking complex and we want it to be simple(er) and we will often try to bend over backwards to make it so, because we humans were not designed for this. But we are capable of processing it. So, will we?
They are in the business of uniquely identifying me and organizing vast real-time bidding wars for every moment of my attention. The winners of the bidding war are the ones whose ads I (would) see (if I didn't block this garbage aggressively).
It's also been well studied how so-called anonymized datasets can be de-anonymized in various ways and then all the historical data is de-anonymized.
What you once thought was benign and not noteworthy can easily be used against you as the times and attitudes of a society change. Many examples can be seen both in modern day "cancellations" as well as in the historical record like Nazis using census data to find people with undesirable characteristics and murdering them (with IBM's help).
This is not far fetched conspiracy theory paranoia bate. It is factual events from reality.
If a company has a contract with an entity who pays them money for their services, it is literally in their interest to do it.
I think we should applaud the people who take these steps.
These tech companies work with all the rest of the companies to use our own computers against us.
Most folks have normalized the data collection, the dark patterns and the faustian bargains that are now happening on a daily basis.
Treating them with ridicule is just not necessary. The folks who say no are really working for the rest of us.
I can give you a couple website that are intimately intertwined with google services:
- the california FTB website (califorina's IRS)
- the california DMV website (not only drivers licenses, but real id)
- kaiser permanente (health care)
Most normal people, or your kids, or your parents are required to use these sites (or it is very difficult not to use them). Why should they be tracked by advertisers? why should nobody complain?
for me its not about losing anything important or practicing safety with backups. i just dont want bloat and activity everywhere. too many connections too many extra features suggested or mandatory etc etc. i guess im a minimalist in that sense. just want cleaner faster everything even if its a bit more inconvenient.
MX record change and you’re off to the races. Tangentially, I’d also be interested in putting an acquisition together to acquire FastMail if ever in financial peril, in order for it to persist as a going concern and arguably, a public good (like Let’s Encrypt).
I can appreciate the hesitancy because you need an account, but Kagi is such a great search engine. Their incentives align much better with their actual users and because of that they support tons of customization/filtering options Google just can't (read: won't).
I tried Kagi once and never really felt like it was good enough to make me want to pay for it. Search is like air. Very important, but available everywhere for free. Pretty hard for me to justify adding another subscription to the already extant mountain.
Google is the air of a teeming metropolis in a developing country. Every breath is polluted with foreign substances that someone else out there. Your capacity suffers as each action is taxed by the aerosolized tar.
searX is mountain air. Pure, but cold and so so thin. You struggle to collect enough oxygen, waiting for the life-giving molecules to trickle in. A bracing adventure for most, a home for the hardy, adapted few.
DuckDuckGo is the air of a rich suburb. The pollution is manageable and pressure sufficient. You breathe freely, undistracted, content in the assumption that your essential need is satisfied. It is sufficient, comfortable, unremarkable, there.
Kagi is a seaside breeze, wafting the richness of a vibrant and alien ecosystem through your awareness. You may sense the oily tang of a nearby dockyard; it’s but one note in the harmony, fading behind the marine life, the ocean salts, the sizzling morsels of upshore boardwalk. You breathe deeply. Your awareness stretches, stitching scent to sound; your focus dances across the possibilities, musing which possibility to explore today. A corner of your mind resents the cost of your rented villa; another fantasizes about buying it, about making this place your home. Could I afford it…?
> Google is the air of a teeming metropolis in a developing country. Every breath is polluted with foreign substances that someone else out there. Your capacity suffers as each action is taxed by the aerosolized tar.
Is it though? To the extent that I need to pay for an alternative? I struggle to recall when I ever searched for something and went down to the second half of my screen. I do agree searching using the Google app on an Android phone is crazy, but who would subject themselves to that? On a browser with a proper ad blocker, I don't see how it is that horrible.
Do you have an example of a search where Google gives such an odious result, but another engine's is excellent?
Where's the town that's always trying to reinvent itself, with the layers of failure and renewal visible in the back alleys and unfinished remodels left behind in the last economic crisis? I want that search engine.
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.
The good news is that none of the content you care about is Google's. As soon as someone else provides a space for content creators to move to you can get rid of Youtube and never miss a single thing about it. Google has successfully pissed off enough youtubers that they're just waiting for the first chance to jump ship, just like we are as watchers.
In the meantime, try to give as little as you can to Google. Use Newpipe and youtube-dl so you never see an ad.
This generously assumes that the new provider won't take the same steps YouTube did. I feel like the only solution is to not care all that much about watching videos.
Nebula is such a streaming service. From what I understand, they are a subscription based company that has a profit share incentive for it's creators. Consequently, the creators skew toward educational-esque content.
Yeah but operating a service like YouTube is such a money pit (given on recent HN threads I've read). It seems like they've been mostly able to work because of their huge ad network, targeting, etc.
1) Hosting space/cpu/bandwidth. Video is one of the most intense data jobs out there, behind I suppose maybe AI and Big Data (if anyone is still doing that). You need Terabytes of drive space, petabytes of traffic, all the CDNs, processors capable of encoding inefficient video uploads to efficient video downloads.
2) Network effect. People need to actually want to come, so that people come.
3) Paying for all this - People don't like donating, don't like paying, but hard drives/servers/power banks are not free. So you either charge premiums or use ads.
I wish more people had been willing to pay for Youtube Pro, e.g. (I still do), they're (still) getting worse because the ad-supported version(s) are still the bulk of their income. And so the ad-supported version is messing up everything, being very aggressive, etc. You/I pay for Netflix, why wouldn't you pay for Youtube?
You can't influence the dynamic with capitalism at all when something is free. Sure, companies can "en-shittify", but at least for video this is fairly simple - when it costs too much/works too terribly on one video platform, you can move to the next one. 1) and 2) Make it harder to start a new paid platform, but not impossible - you can directly reflect the costs to your users. YT is just a black box at present...but would have been less so if Youtube Pro had been more popular (ads might have been easier to block, even).
That is so wild to me. I only consume media there if I am sent a link. Every time I have gone there I find content that is literally optimized to use up and waste as much of my time as possible under the incentive of maximizing viewer minutes. I wonder what it would be like to spend a day in your shoes.
> Every time I have gone there I find content that is literally optimized to use up and waste as much of my time as possible under the incentive of maximizing viewer minutes.
It's a feed, and it responds to your use. I click on longform educational content, I get lots of longform educational content. I find the act of opening clickbait videos in an incognito window along with judicious use of the "not interested" button has kept it quite usable.
> It's a feed, and it responds to your use. I click on longform educational content, I get lots of longform educational content.
Yup. You still get the occasional dud, but most of the feed is relevant in my case.
I once browsed YouTube without being logged in. Do not recommend. I wanted to gouge my eyes out. I imagine it's a similar experience to browsing the web without an adblocker.
Mindlessly consuming the video feed is not the only way to use YouTube. If you are looking for something in particular, it is very hard to beat. Besides, at that point, is it really any different than TV, or other streaming services?
> Every time I have gone there I find content that is literally optimized to use up and waste as much of my time as possible under the incentive of maximizing viewer minutes.
Depends on what you're watching.
I mean, everyone on YouTube is playing the algorithm game somewhat -- assuming they want to have their videos watched, and they do, or they wouldn't be there to begin with.
Having said that, I watch a ton of YouTube videos. Not randomly, like zapping through TV channels (do people still do that, by the way?). I watch videos from the dozens of channels I'm subscribed to, by authors I enjoy watching and about topics that are relevant to me. YouTube is unbeatable for this, because almost everyone is on YouTube, but few other video platforms are as universal.
And yes, I pay for YouTube Premium because ads absolutely break YouTube. Ads make everything worse. I'm still upset about the recent trend of authors placing "sponsor segments" embedded in their videos (looking at you, Squarespace -- you can go f*ck yourself); I wish paying for Premium automatically skipped these segments too, but oh well. At least some authors make self-deprecating jokes about their sponsored content.
> I'm still upset about the recent trend of authors placing "sponsor segments" embedded in their videos […] ; I wish paying for Premium automatically skipped these segments too, but oh well.
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).
I would pay for youtube if they provided an official API to download videos and stream videos in a client of my choice.
I prefer to watch youtube with a custom player (mpv+yt-dlp on desktop, newpipe on android). I do not want to watch youtube on the youtube website or official youtube android app. The custom clients I am using are unofficial. They reverse engineer youtube to make it work. They often break when youtube changes something.
Interestingly the comment you're responding and the article the comment is responding do not mention ads as the problem being solved by de-Googling.
I also think YouTube has gotten worse over time and I'd be happy to find a workable replacement despite being a long time YouTube Premium subscriber. I do use SponsorBlock though as I found supporting creators directly while paying YouTube for serving the content left still getting sponsorship ads as a bit ridiculous. It's a good product, just often intentionally shy of being great in interest of metrics
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 is justified.
Adding adverts to nonmonetized channels means adblocking is justified.
It's my time. Google isn't paying for the use of my eyeballs, and I actively don't purchase things I see advertised via YouTube. I'm not alone in this; most people don't buy for digital ads. They already nefariously steal my data at every opportunity.
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).
> 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)
Got it. So you are fine with adblocking; your take comes down to practicality.
Debate aside, I appreciate your thoughtful response.
Yeah definitely a bit of practicality but mostly the factor of having already paid everyone that would be getting paid yet the system not being built to adjust to that properly (YouTube only has one version of the video it'll serve and no knowing that I'm subscribed externally to the person either).
Excluding some other somewhat reasonable scenarios which break the mold in corner cases (like accessing the dozens of subscription news sites that get posted on HN with no way to actually pay for them properly except spending more time managing the subscriptions than actually reading article or two a day) my "I paid everyone for the content so I can consume it the way that works for me" stance and reasoning doesn't really apply when you intentionally skip the first step "I paid everyone for" out of disinterest in doing so.
The main reason (imo) would be if you wanted no ads on Mobile without a lot of hassle, and the ability to play audio from youtube with your phone screen off.
They by and large don't. Most creators on YouTube aren't even eligible to monetize, especially if they're making niche educational content.
Google just pockets all the revenue if you have fewer than 4,000 "public watch hours". If you put together an a concise 4-minute DIY video, an average view time will probably hover around 1 minute, and you will need 240k views to qualify. Most videos on YouTube get under 1k views.
There is a negligibly small percentage of content creators / content farmers who live in a symbiotic relationship with the platform and actually make good money, but let's not pretend you're patronizing the creators when you're paying for YouTube Premium.
> Google just pockets all the revenue if you have fewer than 4,000 "public watch hours". If you put together an a concise 4-minute DIY video, an average view time will probably hover around 1 minute, and you will need 240k views to qualify. Most videos on YouTube get under 1k views.
With less than 4k public watch hours your channel has barely made any money. It is accumulated for your videos for the entire channel, that isn't per video.
And no, youtube isn't making money on those videos, it costs them more to store etc and most of them aren't getting any ads anyway. Instead you get free video upload on youtube, normally you pay for that.
Youtube makes their money from the big creators that draws in a lot of views per video, there efficiency of scale lets them get over the profitability hump.
YouTube runs ads on all my videos, including the ones with fewer than 200 views. I'm not sure what you're getting at otherwise. The point I was making is that paying for YouTube does absolutely nothing to support the vast majority of content creators on the platform. All you're doing is paying Google, and a tiny slice of that supports a handful of celebrity content creators like Mr. Beast. Maybe it's a bargain that makes sense to some, but the parent was deriding the grandparent for not willing to pay.
I’m conflicted on this. I pay for YouTube premium - for background playing on my phone and for Ad-less on my TV.
I pay more for Netflix, and I use it a lot less.
So I’m airing on the side of agreeing, but I also think Googles tactics have been incredibly shoddy, and I can understand someone not wanting to support that.
Maybe they do pay for it? It's not obvious they don't. (edit: they mention they do pay for it below)
I would have written a similar comment and I pay for Premium. I don't use any other Google service at this point, but I do have an account just for YouTube (I dig into the privacy settings to disable all the things I can).
It wasn't really that hard if you use Apple for almost everything and Fastmail for mail.
I use DuckDuckGo for search and occasional search again on Google, but that's becoming less relevant over time with LLMs (and generally reddit or youtube is the best place to search anyway for most things).
I do pay for Youtube Premium precisely because it is something that I use basically every day. It's just kind of an opaque system where it's not really clear how much it is actually supporting video creators, how much of it is maintaining the service, and how much of it is lining Google's pockets.
I watch quite a bit of videos by creators with very lower viewership and sub counts and I suspect they're not seeing a penny.
Paying won't make Shorts go away. Nor will it remove the 8 other elements of the YouTube UI I have to block to make the site somewhat useable.
Also I believe the payouts are split entirely by watchtime. Three minutes of watching an original song with a high-quality music video is worth more to me than 8 hours of some game stream or rambling video essay I happened to have on in the background while doing chores, but if YTP values both equally per minute it'll basically send no money to the creators who I believe bring the most value to the platform. There's even a like/dislike system, but there's no indication that it matters for Premium money. Channel memberships and superchats don't even remove ads, so even if I did decide to sub on a per-channel basis, I'd still need an ad blocker.
How should they split the money then? By time seems the fairest way. How else should they judge the quality? That music video you mentioned is likely to get more views so more money overall. But if the gamer stream is getting more views and watch time why shouldn't it get more money?
That doesn't seem fair. If you produced something and everyone watched it and disliked it... well a) why did they watch it then and b) they won't watch your next thing... Or they will because they disapprove but cannot help themselves. Either way, your content drove the traffic regardless.
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 ticket, or paying for premium. Perhaps that will change, I hope.
I mind all ads. They rob you of your most precious and nonrenewable resource without consent.
Ads are cancer and should be excised at every opportunity. Ad companies should be destroyed. Ad tech workers should be blackballed. Shilling is shameful.
I’ll agree in some capacity that ads are a scourge today, but what’s your alternative? You can’t just burn down the world ave start fresh, there has to be a better way and a plan to transition. Those who would just burn the world down are not mature. This applies to just parts of the world, too, such as “advertising must burn” or “let Y country burn because of X problem” (paraphrasing).
I cannot agree on blackballing workers. That’s just another form of control we shouldn’t exercise. Imagine if someone blackballed you for your career doing whatever you do? They’re just trying to survive and earn a living. Maybe I’ll agree on shaming and calling out execs though.
It’s possible to survive doing things that aren’t shameful and destructive. If we don’t shame and blackball people for their freely taken adult decisions about how to spend their time and direct their effort, what can we shame or blackball people for?
It should be hazardous to your career to engage in certain types of business. Mass murder, advertising, spyware, spam, network abuse (DDoS), or conspiracy to commit same should always make people think twice about hiring you.
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.
Do you have any examples of a movie where someone spends a couple of minutes drinking Coke while talking about how delicious it is and why you should buy it?
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.
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 want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph. And when you add 30 second ads every 5 mins it makes it even less compelling
Sideloaded the latest and greatest YouTube++/uYou/uYouPlus/(currently uYouEnhanced) on my iPhone and re-sign it weekly with AltStore, Trollstore, or use a jailbroken equivalent on a device that managed to stay jailbroken.
There’s a few other new options I’ve seen through Reddit for web viewing, iOS content blockers, or hosting your own VPS invidious/piped instance with rotating ipv6 servers (not google/aws/digital ocean as they require using a web panel).
You can leave ads on for whitelisted creators sponsored advertising content also.
I don't want the ads, but I'd rather see the carefully curated list of creators I care about be able to get paid, and Youtube Music works for me. Youtube Premium is worth it.
The ads are indeed insane. They break YouTube in practice. YouTube, in its wisdom, much like a mobster in the protection racket, offers you an out: pay for Premium. I ended up doing this because YT is one of the things I use the most. The alternative was having Firefox with uBlock Origin on every mobile device in my household, I suppose, but this wasn't feasible.
YouTube Premium took the win :(
> I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph
Depends on what you're watching. I always disliked, say, programming tutorials in video form -- give me text, to read and understand at my own pace. Many video tutorials are unnecessarily longwinded and always go at the wrong pace for me, either too fast or too slow.
But I watch tons of videos about other topics where video is the right form. I watch hobby tutorials, I watch videos about cinema/art, etc, and I feel video is the right format for me.
It's harder to avoid bad quality videos that now you can't see downvotes.
As for the video being unnecessarily long - I have played with copying the transcript from the video into ChatGPT, but they tend to be too long for ChatGPT to handle.
More and more content creators are just embedding them directly into their videos. Either by just mentioning sponsor names in the flow of what they are talking about, or doing little sidebars where they talk about/promote their sponsors.
I don't mind these so much because they are easy to skip, but ad-blockers don't catch them.
This is also my preferred way of consuming YouTube. In addition to zero ads, you get instant seek, consistently high bitrate, ability to watch anywhere, and no autoplay for the kids to get sent down an addiction spiral.
> 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, which IIUC is being worked on by OSM; (2) planning a trip via public transit; (3) StreetView, which is really an awesome feature.
(1) in particular is something that you can easily contribute to fixing yourself. Organic Maps lets you edit store details from within the app.
Personally, (2) and (3) are the ones that keep me on Google Maps, along with the real killer feature for me which is that I can just search "good {coffee,food,whatever} near me" and get a list of pretty good recommendations.
Just about all of Apple's alternates to Google services are fine in my experience. I recently switched from Proton Mail to Apple Mail and have been satisfied saving a few bucks a month there. I don't know how to evaluate Apple's claims to privacy though.
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.
The impetus for my years long (i.e., lazy) effort to de-Google wasn't just about the privacy issues but that those seemed to stem from an utter lack of empathy for users overall.
In other words, it was recognizing an intolerable pattern of behavior, which seemed inevitable that it would cause me actual, material harm in some way eventually.
I was very much in the Google ecosystem and although privacy became an increasing concern, the final push for me was the horror stories who had their accounts suspended or were otherwise locked out with no recourse.
Does the collapse of all knowledge as we know it count as a material harm? Or is it a revolutionary opportunity to craft a new Knowledge Society independent and protected from the abuses of the old and failed knowledge order?
Although 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 people looking up their friends' health insurance details for fun, just because almost everyone in the engineering part of that company had access to the production database.
Plus, Google is so large that it constantly receives attention by public institutions, which makes it harder to pull off shady stuff without getting caught. If <random SME> sells your data to the highest bidder who will spam you with cold calls, no one's gonna bat an eye.
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.
Never though of it that way: With enough data, it's likely to find something that looks suspicious, for some definition thereof, even if just due to software errors. When looked at in isolation, this could convince people like real evidence.
OP and I are very similar lol. I bought a Pixel 7 Pro on eBay specifically so I could use Graphene (screw buying new; used is good for the planet and it doesn't give money to Google). So far, I have been loving it!
Also switched to Organic Maps, but still use Google Maps for finding businesses/hours. Organic Maps is nice, but searching for directions is awful (at least in my South Florida area). Typing in any address tends to return results that only show the name of the street, and they're all identical. E.g. just a bunch of "Southwest 123rd Street, Florida", no house number or anything useful to distinguish them. Often times I'm forced to use Google Maps. This is currently the hardest Google service to quit for me.
I went from DDG to Kagi, and stuck with Kagi because of the superior results. Luckily I got in early, and have an early adopter plan. It's a shame they can't offer better pricing though because it really is a superior service. Recently I've had some privacy concerns that have made me a bit skeptical of Kagi, but it's hard for me to go back to DDG or even Google now. It's just that good.
For files I use Nextcloud exclusively. While it is slow and bloated as hell, I like it because I share the instance with family members, and it's easier for non-techie people to use it. It's also possible to mount it as a network drive using WebDAV so you can skip the bloated web interface. It works very well for me on KDE Dolphin.
For email I use ProtonMail with custom domain too. They're overpriced and overrated, but it's too much work for me to switch at this point, and their app isn't that bad. I would recommend FastMail to anyone looking for a new email provider though.
For YouTube, I use FreeTube. It's basically just a custom front end l. No ads, no spyware. Sure, I deprive creators of ad revenue, but that's a good thing. The less money they make on YouTube, the more likely they are to post on different services. I haven't heard of Nebula before, so I'll definitely be checking that out.
> For email I use ProtonMail with custom domain too. They're overpriced and overrated, but it's too much work for me to switch at this point, and their app isn't that bad. I would recommend FastMail to anyone looking for a new email provider though.
I went the opposite route, but I feel like Proton is better geared to business use (the plans and included products just seem more attractive to me). And yeah the Swiss angle is mostly PR but eh, maybe that could be useful and it's one more thing. "Defense in depth," kinda.
When I switched I didn't really notice Proton being that much more expensive for my uses either.
> I was even able to take trips through Uber’s mobile website, which was a pleasant surprise. The location functionality did not work, but I believe that was due more to the browser than to Uber itself.
I'm delighted that this works now.
Of course companies like the proprietary-platform apps, in some ways. So it's great to see a tech company also embrace Web open standards as an option for users/customers.
This seems like an awful lot of work for little benefit. Although I use and pay for kagi, it's not to de-Google. It simply is a superior search engine which honors semi-advanced search filters better. However, when I want to search sholarly refernces, Google search reigns supreme.
I guess I'm just a rube, but it never occurred to me to demand much 'something' (all the stuff Google provides me) for 'nothing' (refusal to allow use of my annonomized data). Since I bother setting my cookie settings on all new websites, I don't really get bombarded with personalized advertising anymore. That's my middle ground. (I also pay for YouTube Premium, so I don't see the ads there).
> 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. Even if you do this only once every few days it's usually enough, because a lot of creators upload to Nebula a week before they do YouTube.
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.)
Sadly none of my 'creators' are on nebula; But one thing worth trying if you do want to avoid going to youtube -- just have some cronjobs running yt-dlp every few hours on each channel you're interested in on YouTube, served up with a little auto index httpd via Tailscale -- makes for a pretty nice experience.
(Seems to be limited to 1080p, but I don't really care about the quality of those videos tbh).
> my second issue with Kagi: privacy-wise, I simply don’t believe that a service that requires login and thus naturally associates all your activity with your identity is better than a service which can be used without a login.
I don't get this argument. Do you want to be protected from the services you use, or do you want a partnership based on trust? With aligned incentives, trust is easier. Without trust, not logging in won't save your privacy. Just pay the nice people money for the very nice service they provide, and let them build trust with you.
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.
Duckduckgo used to advertise that they were all about getting out of the filter bubble but they insist on throwing a bunch of irrelevant totally unrelated garbage in their search results based on my IP address. The service has really gone downhill and I can't even blame it on bing
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?
Nice write up. I've had a similar journey. I've been using Android auto on grapheneos without issues FYI. I did switch from nextcloud to Baikal as was using seafile for the file storage anyway. I gave up on protonmail and am using migadu with great effect. My plan was to eventually to switch to immich so perhaps a weekend evening project.
i 'de-googled' my life quite a bit a long time ago - switched to an android distribution with no G services (lineageOS), moved from gmail to tuta, switched search engines, and like mentioned here, the one i can't fully leave is youtube, for the moment.
i like odysee a lot as a platform, but it can't fully replace YT just yet for me, as a good deal of the channels i watch are still YT-only. i'd say my video-watching time is split maybe 80% yt, and 20% odysee at this point.
For me the point is not privacy, simply this war is lost.
The point for me is data availability, I do want to own my data. So for emails and service I do own my domain name, so I can change third parties services, if I use any (email) in a transparent manner for my correspondent. I own the domain, I own the mail address, my website URL etc, I have a "home address" on the net.
Similarly I do use third party email services, simply because hosting one myself meaning ending up too often in GMail and co spam, BUT, I own my mails because I do not keep them on third party IMAPs but on my homeserver, the mail provider is just a relay of my "incomplete" mail infra.
For files I have a desktop centric setup, the homeserver run a paperless-ngx instance with "a certain set of docs" meaning I do not mirror my org-mode/org-attach entire home structure to paperless but only some selected docs to have them available on the go via mobile if I need them and simple webdav dir to share some if needed. I do not want OwnCloud considering it a monster I can't really know by it's mere size so I prefer giving up with it.
I've tried Immich and Jellyfin for my photos and movies/music but they end up essentially unused.
For RSS TT-RSS is far from perfect but can handle conveniently a significant number of posts quickly skimming them also on the go.
Wireguard is nice enough to encapsulate my services
To make it short, my point is not avoid a company like Google than choosing another like Proton, my point is being able to have and work with my data if some services disappear in a snap.
Moving 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.
I 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.
The official Android Auto app works on GrapheneOS as an extension to sandboxed Google Play. We don't have our own implementation yet and it's not planned in the near term but it is available. Google Pay doesn't allow alternate operating systems but it does work on GrapheneOS from a technical perspective, it just doesn't allow using it in practice without pretending to be the stock OS on a legacy Google-certified Android device without support for hardware attestation. Most banks have their own tap-to-pay implementation in Europe but that largely got phased out in the US.
In some regions, banks stopped supporting their own tap-to-pay systems or they never even got widely adopted in the first place. It's much better in the EU than the US, where most banks still have their own tap-to-pay.
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.
Google Domains was sold to squarespace. Your domain will be migrated soon/already has been. Check your inbox.
> Your Google domain has been migrated to your Squarespace Domains account.
You can now log in at Squarespace Domains with your Google account to manage your domain, example.org. This is part of Squarespace's acquisition of all domain registrations and customer accounts from Google Domains.
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.
To add to your list (I made very similar choices):
Standard Notes was pretty decent for acessing notes between multiple devices when I used it. Now that I am back on Android, I use Syncthing for both pictures and notes, without a cloud intermediary.
Aegis instead of Google Authenticator. I found it the most straightforward, and it has backups/transfers not tied to any account.
QKSMS instead of Google Messages. It doesn't support RCS and reactions come across as texts, but no issues otherwise.
Fossify apps for other basic functionality.
Something to keep in mind with custom ROMs and OSes is that only some have VoLTE support. Which, with 3G shutdown, is a must in the US, unless you are in a great 2G coverage zone.
PSA: DuckDuckGo is just a Bing frontend. So you’re out of the frying pan and into the fire. The only really independent option is Brave Search. It also happens to have better relevance than Bing, in my experience.
I'm mostly degoogled myself, and disable/firewall every Google app on my device. Pretty hard to switch away from GMail as it's essentially everywhere for me, and YouTube doesn't have a viable replacement. I use 3rd party apps for both though, as well as the store. Re the store, I endured doing manual updates weekly for several years. Then recently when I upgraded my device I discovered Shizuku (allows elevated access without rooting), which connects nicely with Aurora Store and handles the installs. It's like a huge breath of fresh air.
Does anyone know how private ProtonMail is? I heard admittedly crackpot-sounding rumors that it was some sort of NSA honeypot, but verifying them seems like proving the existence of a divine being.
Proton's encryption provides privacy by default - we cannot access any of the email content, email attachments, calendars, files stored on Proton Drive or passwords, 2FA codes, notes etc. on Proton Pass, and therefore cannot share any of this with any third parties.
We have also discussed such baseless claims of connections to NSA with our users on multiple occasions, including here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/14demhj/debunki....
I mean after the Crypto AG / Project rubicon came to light (let alone many of the disclosures since) I don’t think you can rule it out - but at least it’s unlikely your data is for sale /being actively used against you for commercial purposes
It really takes effort to scrub oneself of big-tech. I don’t know how non-HN-types are supposed to do it.
My weak point has been Apple Photos. It “just works” for me and I really appreciate that it does all processing for faces, cats, etc. locally and in a native app. Every other option I find either doesn’t do syncing, offers an Electron app, or forces viewing through a browser.
Does anyone know of a solution that fits the bill? I will happily self-host.
Well, do you have the hardware to self-host?
People nowadays usually are not okay with 1 week of downloading a torrent like it was in 2005. That is probably how long the embedding will take on your cpu for all the video/picture files?
I was an Android user, looked at this mountain to climb 6 years ago and just decided to go with Apple. They offer email, calendar, etc, but don’t run a business model based on ads and data mining. That said, I can’t get away from YouTube and I still keep my Gmail account but only as a backup.
Somehow my temperament makes me much more comfortable battling an exploitative captor (Google) than succumbing to a coercive one. The fact that these are the only workable options depresses me.
Kagi is totally the only way to degoogle. It’s the only product where the results are clearly better or on par with google. Everything else I’ve ever use I found myself subconsciously back at google a few days later.
Does anyone host their own email in a jurisdiction with a domain and VPS US Feds can't seize arbitrarily? If so, which webmail software do you use? Do you handle backups and/or high-availability?
I'm having PTSD flashbacks since I had a startup based on it when VMWare owned it where we M&A'ed small mail hosting businesses and migrated them to our ZNE instances. Our license costs totaled maybe $15k USD for a dozen instances and we had access to VMware staff on Sand Hill.
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.
I've been using GV for over a decade. It's the last Google service that I still use regularly. I use mailinabox for my email/contacts/calendar/drive. I've looked, and there aren't any drop-in substitutes for GV. I've had a Number Barn account with two phone numbers for a few years. They seem to provide better voice quality than most alternatives, but their SMS integration is poor. I'm not sure if they even do voicemail, but I don't think they do.
Looks interesting. I got as far as where it asked me to pay them $15, which I'm reluctant to do without first trying out the service. How does one receive a Referral code?
These de-Googling or un-Googling submissions always seem to follow the same pattern: try to find a "replacement" for every company Google has acquired.
What I never see is someone who proposes "de-Googling" and foregoing a replacement.
Consider the following generic example.
Google acquires some company that intermediates some task that people perform using a computer. Now Google collects data about its users.
A hypothetical computer user makes use of this intermediary "service" as well as others offered by Google. Eventually user decides he wants to stop giving away data to Google.
User then publishes to the web the idea of ceasing to use Google-owned intermediaries by using other, "equivalent" intermediaries for each and _every_ service. Or he tries to replicate role of the intermediary himself through "self-hosting".
But he never considers that in some cases using an intermediary is itself a problem, or may be unnecessary, irrespective of whether it is Google or some other entity. Why does he need to preserve each and _every_ Google acquisition by finding a replacement.
The use of an intermediary allows data collection and in almost all cases that's why someone started a so-called "tech" company. They saw opportunity to profit from being an intermediary (middleman).
The attempt to find a replacement for _every_ Google-owned intermediary seems rather brainless. As if every Google acquisition is something that must exist and must be used.
Certainly there is an arguable privacy benefit from using disparate third parties for different tasks instead of using the same one for every task. However there is also a benefit from not using a third party at all, or even from not performing the task via a server (self-hosting).
HN is not a replacement for Reddit in general though.
Reddit is a collection of forums/communities with wildly varying topics. HN is just one specific forum.
Some of the worst behaviors that are common in many Reddit subs are discouraged here in HN, and for that I'm thankful. But the topics aren't the same, so one cannot replace the other in general.
A farmers market has a narrower selection than a supermarket, but you’d be healthier in the long run only shopping at the farmers market than going to the grocery store and being bombarded by processed garbage, even if you try to stick to the good aisles.
The problem with Reddit is that the worst of Reddit inevitably pollutes the best of Reddit. Better for your mental diet to avoid altogether.
Continuing the analogy, what if instead of groceries/vegetables you want to buy a car, or discuss a movie, or exchange ideas about watercolor techniques? What use is a farmers market then?
> The problem with Reddit is that the worst of Reddit inevitably pollutes the best of Reddit. Better for your mental diet to avoid altogether.
Reddit does attract some unsavory types, but on the other hand, HN has a very narrow focus while Reddit covers more topics I'm interested in. It wouldn't make sense to avoid it, or to claim HN is a way to de-reddit -- they don't cover the same niches!
And I don't go randomly browsing Reddit looking for subs to read; instead I seek out subs about specific topics I'm interested in. I would say it's HN that I browse randomly, without looking for anything in particular... HN is a "random news" portal for me.
I still use Reddit in the way you’re suggesting, which is when I occasionally have a specific use.
What I meant was that I don’t visit Reddit by instinct anymore when I’m bored - even “good” subreddits. The general user base is not high quality. Even for topics I’m interested in, I really can’t stand the Reddit vibe that inevitably seeps through. It’s incredibly predictable.
Man yeah I'm trying my best to
do the same. it is so hard. I pay for kagi and email services.
Buut yeah can one of you hackernews geniuses please create an alternative to youtube? The only alternatives I can find are crazy republican right wing websites that I have no desire to help or support.
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 off of other people using Peertube. So it can scale if many people are watching the same video. Permanent storage, though, is not distributed. It's not Bittorrent.)
I've been using LibreOffice and its predecessors for decades now. My last purchase of a Microsoft product was Word 97. Desktop browser is Firefox. Mail client is Thunderbird.
Backups are IDrive. Add blocking is the EFF's Privacy Badger, which breaks many ad systems while enforcing privacy.
My phone uses F-Droid. It is not connected to a Google account. Browser is Fennec. App store is F-Droid. Search is DuckDuckGo.
The "problem" is that other people have different needs and usage patterns than you do. Acting like your experience should be universal is a bit weird.
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 to help me if there was a serious account problem). I still use Google Docs suite, but "important" documents are stored locally as Word/Excel files. I still use Google Drive/Google Photos, but I make periodic backups to a local SSD + other online backup services (iCloud/OneDrive). Etc.
I don't understand why you would want to "ditch every Google product and service". Some of them are objectively pretty great, or inherently have low switching costs (like Google Maps).