Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
Google has become an awful company. I’m in the process of degoogling but it’s not easy given all the monopolies they have created
Use piped or invidious instead perhaps.
Alternately, disenshittify YouTube using addons like DeArrow, Sponsor Block and uBlock origin.
I already use those things. My main way of watching YT is with Tubular.
The problem is that there is one, centralized hosting provider with an all-powerful, non-customizable (by the user) recommendation algorithm. That algorithm, like it or not, dictates the type of content that is made on the platform. If there is content that Google doesn’t like, they can (and have) very easilly shadowban the content, meaning only people who specifically search for it will see it, if not remove it altogether.
Is piped or invidious working for you?
The popular servers are down. Google put some kind of limit on them. I’m going to guess bandwidth limit.
Use them at no benefit to them. Obviously, don’t buy yt premium.
I use Grayjay. Get it from the grayjay website and sideload it instead of through the apk store. Updates come quicker. It gives you commercial free YouTube, pretty much all the premium features, and let’s you download vids.
I already use Tubular, and I have been using NewPipe (or the fork Tubular) since the very first alpha.
Grayjay doesn’t work well for me since I’m subscribed to over 1000 creators and they force rate limiting over 200, which makes it completely unusable for my usecase.
My grayjay hasn’t worked for a couple of weeks now, “block attempt detected” warning and then the video starts over.
I like Nebula so far, but most of the videos are also on YouTube. I signed up for a promo through a channel (I can provide some if you like), so I got it for essentially $2.50/month.
I also sub to a few channels on Odyssee, and a couple on Rumble. If you’re good at searching for stuff, PeerTube can also work, but I personally haven’t found anything I really like there.
Only about half of the channels I follow are on YouTube, so if I really needed to ditch it, I could.
I follow over 1000 creators on YouTube, many of them niche creators who don’t often upload content. There are a very small percentage who are on another platform.
The main app that I use (Tubular) also supports PeerTube, but PeerTube has a big issue when it comes to both content discovery and delivery. YouTube hosts not only the “full” quality video, but they also host many different versions of the same video at varying resolutions/bitrates. This is unfeasable for basically anyone but a big tech company. YouTube also has a very effective (albeit very flawed) recommendation algorithm that smaller platforms struggle to compete against.
I also sub to a few channels on Odyssee, and a couple on Rumble. If you’re good at searching for stuff, PeerTube can also work, but I personally haven’t found anything I really like there.
Good on you because the goal of getting off of google is definitely good but…these names sound like things that a writer would come up with as fictional social media platforms on a comedy show.
Ironically, Odysee doesn’t have enough censorship for me. Like any fledgling community, the main inhabitants of any alternatives are people who aren’t welcomed on mainstream social media. And I don’t mean the modern “every person right of me is a Nazi”. I mean a lot videos have comments calling for killing all Jews, one of the top education videos on the front page is by an occultist about how the wrong witchcraft caused 9/11, another is how the vaccines are going to start killing babies, etc.
Technically, it’s fine, but who wants to post good videos or interact in a community of crazies?
There is nice tutorial here - simple steps how to get rid of the Google on Android Phone: https://www.jumagazin.cz/How-to-protect-your-self-on-Internet-part-II_468.html
It is good. The problem I’m having is they still gobble tons of data from any Android device that hasn’t been rooted and locked down.
For example the Google Play store, the main source of apps for everyone, grabs what when and how of everything one touches in there, and they squirrel it away with all your other juicy information to craft the better advertising weapon.
Yes, F-droid, apkmirror, others. But the point is it’s not enough to just limit interactions with official Google apps, the platform itself has to be locked down via a custom rom (which is its own, different set of challenges).
The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.
Yes, but it still would be only a momentary stop AND it would create worse service, because many google products are uncompetitive in themselves and can only exist because google steals everybody’s data through these platforms and sells it to advertisers. Like how much does google pay for youtube servers to keep running and how much would it cost for the users for the same thing and it to not be part of google. Every google alternative would either have to be worse service or be subscription based. I know I’m a devils advocate here, but still.
How about some kind of federated alternative instead? But maybe with a better pricing model than what Lemmy does, where instances have 1% of their users tossing in a few bucks, and many smaller instances have the operators paying for most of it out of their own pocket. This would take a lot more bandwidth, storage, and CPU/GPU than a Lemmy instance would.
No, that’s an insane option. Look at how the government runs other services and ask yourself if you really want Google to be run that way:
- Defense Department consistently fails audits
- Healthcare.gov was completely unusable at launch
- this list of high risk programs
Do you really think the government is capable of running something like Google if they can’t even keep up with tax returns?
No, nationalizing it would likely just make things worse, breaking them up makes a lot more sense.
Government should stick to things where it can actually make a difference a commercial company can’t, like welfare programs, policing, etc.
On today’s episode of “underfund government agencies so we can argue govt doesnt work and privatization is bae”
Google is basically a government in itself regarding it’s resources, GDP, personnel and the power that it wields, and they can do it just fine. Actually they are doing it so well and smoothly, that nobody notices being fucked by them. Your government just sucks in general, we know this. Instead of demanding less government, singing praises of private companies and people as fixes to everything, and then watching everybody getting railed by private interests twice as badly as before, you should instead demand better government.
Following any “let’s chop up google” replace it with another platform is just a game of fools whack-a-mole. No matter how small you would chop up google the same monopoly would still form under a different name, maybe in a little different configuration. We have been in this moment before in the past. You can’t kill monopolies, no matter the field because free markets internal logic will create monopolies no matter what you do and then it seizes to be a free market and you get all the anti-consumer, anti-competition, gatekeeping, general parasitic behavior that you got before. it’s not that google is run by bad people or is inherently evil now. it’s current tricks are what is required by the market and it’s investors because they want every single cent out of it’s customers. It’s that maximizing profit no matter the cost that is combined with cornering market on several sectors that is the real problem and creates that anti-user behaviors. You wouldn’t have that with a government institution.
With monopolies it’s either suffer or make them work for you. That is what a nationalization would be, since even a sham democratic control and following of social goals would be improvement on private interests doing the same and worse. If you are worried about governments spying on you, then don’t be. They already pay google to do that for them already. the real problem really is that companies like google and Microsoft are so big and influential that global politics would enter into play if US did anything to their pseudo independence from the state, no matter how benign their intentions.
Last update on July 10, 2023 Published on October 26, 2016
That’s such a misleading thing to post! Thanks for adding this for lazy ppl like me
@pooky55@lemm.ee - best practice is adding [2016] to end of headline
Lemmy’ll let ya edit it now still!
I believe the reason it was posted is because Proton recently linked to the article again on Twitter, claiming that Proton Pass is appearing too far down in Google’s search results relative to its popularity. This is when searching for “password manager” (Google’s own password manager is the first result).
Recently I used Google maps to search for the nearest DHL near me so I could return a package. DHL is not that popular near me and when I specifically typed for DHL, I would get only their competitors in the search results.
There was a DHL service center near me and I had to scroll a bunch to find it. Oh, and apparently big box stores (or anyone) can pay Google to come up in the search on maps, even if unrelated.
I don’t think they have skin the in shipping game but their algorithms are over optimized that they don’t even show what your searching for, but trying to infer why you’re searching for it. That or whoever pays them more. Certainly a search risk
