i used to love google… ive been around since the beginning and used many of their products.

it feels like a friend or family member thats slid into serious meth or other drug use… you can only stick around attempting to help them for so long. at some point you know you have to cut your losses or be further dragged into their destruction.

when they dropped the ‘dont be evil’ was right around the time i also realized they dont actually support their products, and kill them on a whim. i jumped ship ~2012 when they started fuckin around with google voice and had no real ambition with G+. .

I don’t have feelings about corporations.

“Loving” or “hating” brands, let alone massive oligarchal conglomerates makes no sense at all. I want them well regulated and split down to reasonable size if necessary. Ideally competing in a well populated marketplace and restricted in their ability to cause damage.

That’s not “hate”. And it certainly doesn’t stop me using Google products and services and judging them based on their quality and performance.

Yes, I am a riot at parties, thank you very much.

I hate how shit their search is now

I hate all capitalist enterprises even if I use them.

It is mega Corp and they are all the same.

Treat them as the enemy of the people. Can’t go wrong

Hate? No, I do not hate Google. I still use a Pixel phone (and photos/assistant on it), my Gmail is still my primary email (I also self-host a few other domains but those are primarily used for automation and a few other one-off things), I subscribe to YouTube Premium, I still utilize my Stadia controller as my primary game controller, I use a Google TV set top box, etc.

I don’t use Search (I use Kagi instead), I don’t use Chrome (Firefox), I don’t really utilize Gemini all that much (I just run ollama for the few times I want to use an LLM).

Really I just use their products that work well for me, and don’t use the ones that don’t. There’s no love/hate about it.

FWIW I don’t really like tech companies in general. They’re monopolies.

That said, I really admire Google’s environmental policies. I worry a lot about global warming and habitat destruction. They’re doing better than any other tech company on that front.

Other companies will just lie about their emissions. Like Amazon claiming it’s 100% renewable (it’s not even close). Google has been honest and clear with it’s emissions numbers since the beginning. And it has never been afraid to call out when they were wrong. For example, they recently updated their numbers when they realized one of their accounting methods was wrong. No other company has kept themselves as honest as Google on environmental things.

It’s a big company with 170k employees. I can name a million examples of it doing shitty things. Like shutting down Inbox. But the environment is far more important to me than some product I didn’t pay for.

I at least enjoy their fiber internet service.

I’m frustrated because IMO their search keeps getting worse, but most of their other core products (Gmail, Chrome, Drive, Docs) are pretty good. I’m not mad about the lack of privacy because I feel that that was part of the deal I knowingly accepted back when I was an early adopter. I’d rather get free service than pay for impossible-to-verify privacy, especially when the free service has minimally annoying ads (eg. Gmail but not Youtube).

I’m not whom you’re asking for but I’m obligated to say:

That being said I do very much enjoy their products. Gmail, Photos, Chrome, Gemini, Home, Assistant, YouTube, Pixel phones, etc…

With many of these products, you are the product being sold. I especially don’t understand the point about going back w/ alternatives, eg gmail is just an email service; nothing changes for you as the end user if you just use a different email provider. Same for Photos, it’s just a cloud hosting service. I only ever used it for syncing so I could replace it with syncthing, although I don’t because I don’t really care about accessing my photos on multiple devices. If I need a specific photo I’ll grab it via usb cable or if I’m getting a new phone I’ll copy over all the photos etc to my computer before wiping the phone. But if you need to sync you can just use syncthing, if you specifically need cloud hosting there are more privacy-respecting options out there that aren’t by ad companies.

i hate Google but I still use YouTube way too much

Yeah, google is great if you dont care about your privacy and dont care how much money you spend.

There is absolutely no reason to use google though. For a great experience you have to pay anyway and that you can as well do with someone with someone who hosts nextcloud for you. Added benefit: your data is not harvested and you can expect the terms to stay the same forever.

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