And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
This isn’t even close to being okay. It’s 100% bullshit.
Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.
A lot of them never had to make a profit before.
Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it’s like buying a lotto scratcher.
The underlying issue is wealth imbalance.
That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.
If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.
But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.
Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.
Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.
The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.
And one of the primary reasons they never had to make a profit was that, so long as interest rates were functionally zero, it didn’t really cost the investor class much of anything to park money in a money losing operation while waiting for it to become sellable.
With interest rates back to pre-2008 levels, though, there’s a price to money again. And a real opportunity cost. So, compete with bonds or watch your investors walk.
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Honestly, this second half of 2023 for me has been about finding FOSS options for literally everything. And eventually I’ll have a home server I can use for the things I can’t use on the cloud
It’s like in Silicon Valley when the VC tells them they don’t need to be profitable they just need to market, then as soon as he dips below technically being a billionaire he demands that they focus on being profitable immediately
The enshittification of the internet shall continue.
We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.
But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌
I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism… That’s how they’ve been brainwashing us till now.
You’ll finish your enshittification and you’ll like it!
We’re on Lemmy. We’re already winning!
Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding “reddit” at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.
And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.
So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.
Hello from Kagi. It’s better over here.
Yeah I’ve been a little interested in trying Kagi, but it is quite expensive… Are the results that much better?
They give you a couple searches for free each month (I think it’s 10) - go try it out!
Nothing about this is recent, those who pay attention to the standards process have been screaming for ages about the Google problem. It’s just that now between interest rates being what they are and them having a monopoly on the browser market that they’re cashing in on their investment.
Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it’s usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there’s really very little that can be done.
The main problem with us users is that we are god damn lazy. We want everything to be the most convenient it possibly can be.
Remember when Apple updated iOS to allow users to stop cross-app tracking, which severly upset the Zuck, that absolute manchild?
Turns out that if you actually inform people and give them a clear choice to make, the overwhelming majority of users do in fact not agree with being tracked, as an example.
and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).
They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.
Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.
Luckly we still have free platforms like lemmy, browsers like Firefox, networks like tor or i2p, torrents, monetary system like bitcoin.
We can step out of the world of and we are the ones who have the most intruments to do so.
Yes, which works for the few, but they know that the majority are completely oblivious and will just consume whatever they are given.
The tech sector just hit a major correction recently. Wall Street found companies like Google to be overvalued and as such their stocks suffered. This is Google trying to claw back some of that value. See step 3 in the enshittification process. This isn’t just Google. It’s the entire tech sector.
I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.
Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.
For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.
Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.
So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.
I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw
Sounds you might enjoy the Enshittification of TikTok article floating around. It explains quite well the mechanism why a site have to becoming worse and worse over time.
Because for the first time in 14 years money is no longer free.
Right now the interest rate sits at 5% and it will remain there for the foreseeable future. Investors no longer have the patients to wait for growth because bonds are actually investable now, so all your “get user first find business later” companies began to panic and tries to squeeze everything out of its users.
Hilariously, the only social media company that will come out of this relatively unharmed is probably Facebook, because their unethical practices actually makes money
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Growth reaches a saturation point and now they have to cannibalise every single thing in order to continue growth (in company values). This comes at the expense of product quality for the person using it but that’s fine if you have no competition because everything is a monopoly.
The capitalist system is the problem. The system will ALWAYS reach this endpoint for as long as it is a system that demands infinite growth.
What do you mean, Google of all companies… It’s a company that makes 90% of its money from ads and all of its products are made with the express purpose of enabling them to spy on you or creating technical dependencies so you can’t quit their services.
Plus they’ve already tried to lock the web into proprietary formats (AMP, PWA etc.) and have maneuvered so they have 90% of the browser market and the smartphone market but can’t be actioned for it.
Check out “enshittification”
Their fake advert viewing numbers and YouTube’s inability to monetise without ruining itself are forcing them to think of new ways to encrapsulate user’s and drain their wallets.
Instead of, you know, providing a service people want and would pay for.
This happens when something, in this case the Internet, is a monopoly or oligopoly.
IDK, but we need to riot. Fuck google.
AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.
A race to the bottom with who can come up with the next dogshit idea on how to ruin the internet and make things actively worse for the people who use it
I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.
I don’t think it’s coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they’ve really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don’t understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they’ve already made a decision, they decide it’s because we don’t understand the squeeze they’re under to make money.
- Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing’s a disaster because that’s really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there’s some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
- Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
- Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they’re doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they’re doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They’ve learned the following lesson: if you’re big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it
Elon Musk wanted to drive Twitter into the dirt once he was forced to buy it. Criticism, jet tracking, rejection of fascist-adjacent opinions that are “logical” but only if you’re a heartless engineering robot.
His hubris forced him into buying it, but once he had to, he might as well destroy it. How else do you think he got the Saudis in on it for another billion?
I laughed about this theory at first, just memeing it like “ha could you even imagine?” But every single day it seems more and more like he does the worst thing possible to “monetize” and then gripes about it like the only reason his brilliance isn’t working is because big mean liberal woke mind virus society is trying to do cancel culture because they’re just jealous he’s rich.
Duckduckgo is a wrapper for bing? No wonder it sucks… I want to like it, but the results are usually pretty bad in comparison to Google. Takes me much longer to find what I’m looking for with DDG. :/
I have exactly the opposite experience. Google has gone to shit, and duckduckgo gets me there faster 90% of the time. Plus the results are short and concise, or immediately helpful.
The SEO of the internet has really fucked googles algorithm. At least with duckduckgo I can end the search with !g to switch to google if I need a second go, but you cannot !d in google.
I’m using an anonymous browser and for me often DDG has better results than Google now. My Google-fu used to be on point but recently I can’t seem to find sites that aren’t SEO traps.
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Capitalism is spreading further into the dark reaches of the internet.
One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.
I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.
Obligatory use Firefox
Let’s hope there’s already a law that the EU can find to apply (since they already don’t like the non-EU dominance of big tech), or that they make one in time.
I was just thinking that I’m sure Google will lobby the US government to get this model enforced as law, making it illegal for anyone to create workarounds, or alternative browsers. And the US legislative government being what it is, will hand Google whatever legislation it wants to turn their nightmare into a reality.
It is imperative to make as many people as possible aware
What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore in light of not only this, but everything that they’ve done in the 21st century? Why do we keep listening to them? Why don’t we build our own networks and design our own chips?
What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore
The Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court.
Why do we keep listening to them?
Democracy, loyalty, nationalism, trillions of dollars, global power, the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, National Guard, FBI, CIA, local and federal police, the largest surveillance network in the world, thousands of prisons, and a million other reasons.
Since this is something that can be used as a DRM solution, hacking it might be already illegal under the DMCA. IANAL though.
With how shittily Chrome has been running for me lately, I’m feeling like making the switch to Firefox sooner and sooner.
I guess now is one of those famous best times to do it. If you want even more privacy and security ootb, you can try Librewolf. Recently released Mullvad Browser seems to be pretty up there too, at least from what I’ve read so far.
And if you’re on Android, Mull is pretty much for Smartphones what Librewolf is for Desktops.
What additions does Librewolf have over stock Firefox? I haven’t been using FF for a week now with Ublock Origin and it has been great.
It pretty much has all the possible settings (on and under the hood) for more privacy and security applied ootb, and comes with uBlock Origin.
Technically, you can achieve the same result by configuring base Firefox yourself, but why do that if someone else already did the work for you
use Firefox
been doing that since I left Internet Explorer, aeons ago
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Obligatory use Firefox
No way. Why should I feel obligated to use something I feel has inferior UX and UI than the browser I’m using now? For Mozilla’s CEO to rais her wage (again): https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html ?
You people are really delusional if you really think that Mozilla are the only good guys (or good guys at all, for that matters).
Inb4, unimaginative people downvoting just because they can’t stand different opinions.
What’s your alternative?
EDIT: Oh I just found in the profile. It’s Brave. I used it for half a year before I got tired of the crypto ads sneaking into my home page’s links no matter how many times I deleted them and of some other stuff. I prefer Firefox’s UI. Also I don’t expect any browser to be 100% ethical but Brave is below Firefox in that list for me
If you truly cared about the state of the internet youd only browse websites with wget and text editors
Or something
https://lynx.invisible-island.net/ come now, we don’t have to be barbarians, there’s text browsers out there
Nice detective skills. I have the opposite view about Brave/Mozilla. But fine, we can agree to disagree and still be (virtual) friends.
Opposite view of what? Brave is peddling crypto bullshit
I find very amusing when people talk out of their asses.
Then you must find yourself very amusing
We don’t wanna be friends with crypto-bros here.
Cool. On my part I, as a non crypto-bro, don’t want to be friends with stupid people. So, I’ll ignore you from now on.
Nice one mate. Looks like your personality is well-received here. Maybe going back to Reddit might suit you better.
It doesn’t matter and it’s irrelevant here. I just despise Mozilla and their false morality. Use whatever you want.
It’s not irrelevant since you stated Firefox is less good than what you are using now. Of course people are interested in a feasible alternative. So, since you introduced it, what are you using instead?
I said that I feel it’s less good. I’m not going to tell people what they should use and I surely won’t tell them to use the same browser I use. People should simply use whatever they prefer/suits them best.
So you’ll rather give in to blatant corporate greed?
What kind of Alt-Right logic is this?
I didn’t know I was so evil that I’m doing the world a worse place just because I prefer a different browser. And I’m ideologically far form alt-right, btw.
OTOH, talking about corporate greed:
that is a funny graph. Even assuming the data is true, it deliberately missrepresents market share as usage. Which pretty much neglects the fact hat maybe a person or two and a device with a browser or two have entered the market since then.
Also it does not have any information on source of the data, methodology, definition of the terms etc. So it is pretty much worthless as an argument.
that is a funny graph. Even assuming the data is true, it deliberately missrepresents market share as usage. Which pretty much neglects the fact hat maybe a person or two and a device with a browser or two have entered the market since then.
Fine, so on the same basis we can also reject the “chromium dominance” argument, which is the main selling point of Mozilla.
I downvoted you because you made a terrible case for yourself. Learn to make a salient point, or learn to love being “edgy”. the choice is up to you, but the internet already has plenty of the latter, why not become the former?
Nice to know that you downvoted me for no actual reason, as I didn’t make any “case”. Have a candy.
??? What’s your point even? Usually when someone attempts an argument they have some information.
He’s concern trolling for big corporate, probably. Or just angry. Possibly both.
I feel obligated to raise awareness about these topics. I won’t prevent anyone from choosing Chrome, but at the very least it’s important for people to know what their choice can entail, and base their decision on that.
We also need to raise awareness about what giving google hegemony over defining what the web will be means.
I won’t prevent anyone from using FF, either. I just think that the “obligatory use Firefox” is quite arrogant, to say the least. And, to be honest, I’m quite happy it’s not going to happen until FF is managed by Mozilla and their poor choices.
The obligatory use Firefox has been a running gag in the FOSS community for ages now. Nothing arrogant about it, though it does come across as a bit blunt and brazen, to be fair.
It’s just that letting a single entity be the ultimate authority on how the internet (or anything, for that matter) should look like is objectively a bad idea.
Especially when that entity is widely known for being insidiously self serving, malicious and manipulative.
That being said, enough people have explained this already, so I’m gonna leave it there.
Have a nice day
There is a huge difference between mozilla and google. That’s quite obvious to most. The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you, and you prefer Google, where they have enormous salaries and incomes? It’s one of the richest companies in the world.
Firefox doesn’t have inferior UX at all. It has more functions and features than chrome. It also has very good default privacy and the plugin system is amazing.
And it just became faster than chrome as well.
The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you
It’s not for me (anymore). It should be for you. She was raising her salary while firing devs… But whatever. Mozillians are seldom rational.
Keep being delusional, It’s free, after all.
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I don’t have to point anybody in the direction of anything. Make your choices as I did mines.
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Dude, look, I’m sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.
They’re not saying you should feel obligated to use Firefox. It’s a tongue-in-cheek joke about how everything FLOSS, Privacy or GDPR related always includes a comment thread about using Firefox. I use Brave too but you gotta read the room. Lemmy users in general are going to be much more pro-Firefox than anything else.
I understand. I just feel it’s quite arrogant ans annoying to be (indirectly) schooled by strangers on the internet who think they know better.
UX is not worse than Chrome, please shut up.
What do you use?
Not Firefox.
It’s IE isn’t it?
It’s Brave. Gotta get that crypto!
I think they probably use Netscape
Indeed, I’d love Seamonkey to be a viable alternative, for instance.
You criticize but don’t even have the balls to name your browser? To back up your claims?
That is pathetic.
It’s Brave, as evidenced in their history. The browser that peddles crypto ads, has a transphobe CEO, and has been accused of selling copyrighted data
You forgot to list autocompleting urls with affiliate code without the user consent
I surely deserve death for using a browser you don’t like. Jeez, people can be so obtuse sometimes…
I surely deserve death for using a browser you don’t like.
I’m not sure how you managed to come to that conclusion. You claimed Firefox is a poor choice, I’m demonstrating why I believe your alternative choice is worse. Nevermind the fact that use of Chromium is effectively an acceptance of Google’s monopoly over the web standards, which is the point we’re all arguing here. If you can’t handle criticism you should reconsider making such hyperbolic remarks.
It’s Brave btw lawl
Someone just insulted me and called me “alt-right” person or “crypto bro” (I’m neither of both). So, do you really think that I’m the pathetic one?
And… Which “claims”, by the way? I just said that I’m annoyed by people telling me “I should” do something and that I’ll decide by myself. Full stop. Coherently, I’m not giving you alternatives nor have I to disclose anything.
Sometimes it looks like one has to apologize for using Brave or Vivaldi or any other shit that didn’t come out from Mozilla’s ass. Keep using FF if this makes you happy. It made me happy for 20 years, but then I got fed up by 1) Mozilla, 2) Mozilla’s community 3) The browser itself.
Don’t worry. One day Mozillians will receive a reality bath and realise the farce they have supported.
People should be attacking your idea, not their perception of you based on your choice in browser.
My objection with Brave, Vivaldi, and other other browser that is just Chrome with a different skin of paint is they are all signalling an acceptance of Google’s monopoly over the web standards ecosystem.
Mozilla is a shit organization run by a shit CEO, but they’re the only alternative we have to the megalith that is the advertising company known as Google. It really shouldn’t be a hard argument to understand that putting an advertising company at the head of the web standards process is a really bad idea if you care about anything other than Google’s revenue streams, ie a free and open web.
Chromium only exists as a way for Google to keep antitrust regulators from coming after them like they did to Microsoft when IE had a monopoly. It’s source-available, not open source, they don’t accept commits from non-Googlers. The moment they feel safe closing down the Chromium repos without having to lose too much money in fines or blowback, they absolutely will.
We’re literally watching this happen right now with Android, another formally open source project from Google that is slowly having all of its open source components clawed back so that they can maintain their control over the ecosystem and protect the revenue stream that is their data collection and app store.
When Google inevitably decides to pull the plug on Chromium the collective of forked browser developers is not going to be able to keep up with the massive engineering effort required to keep a modern browser going. Especially when a corporation like Google can and will push forward complex and difficult to implement standards expressly for the purpose of making those forks obsolete. They have the manpower, capital, and control over massive web properties to effectively push out anyone they don’t want.
All it takes is them making a change to Youtube that hinders alternative browsers and that will be the death of that open source ecosystem. They’ve literally pulled this exact move before with Youtube by hindering Firefox’s performance by pushing through the implementation of shadow DOM.
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. Trusting an advertising company with control of the open web is the nerd equivalent of leopards ate my face
This is the result of the world blindly using Chrome and other Chromium based browsers. Now with effectively full control over the browser that more than 90% of the world uses Google can force its will on the internet
Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.
Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this “Web DRM”.
My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
For what it’s worth, this comment just inspired me to switch my work PC from edge to Firefox. Was already using it in Linux, and will switch my home PC tonight.
All they need is a few major sites and tools requiring it to domino everything on the internet. Suddenly it’s standard.
Most businesses all use either chrome or Microsoft. And they’re both Chromium.
Literally just applying it to YouTube would send tremors throughout the internet. If YouTube stopped working in Safari or Firefox, anyone using those browsers who don’t really care and just liked those browsers for other reasons will give them up and go to a chromium based browser.
Google is fighting an apathy battle. One they know they can probably win because they own the Internet’s favorite content hub
It makes sense that they have YouTube in their sights for DRM lockdown.
Reminds me of Microsoft with the ActivePlatform / Blackbird stuff in the 90s.
Awful to see Google turn into that.
Google will just say that pages with DRM will rank higher in their search and it’s all done.
It’s time to fork the community internet off the corporate one. Set up our own DRM-free sites and our own search engines, run by open source software. With blackjack and hookers.
Sites that rely on ad revenue would have every business reason to switch to WebDRM-only.
Everyone talks about this like it wouldn’t open a massive attack surface for the mother of DDOS.
Make the attestor slow or take it out, you take down large parts of their business. I don’t know, i wouldn’t put too much stake in a platform/website that could be taken out so completely.
Doesn’t Firefox support DRM? I know on netacad.com it prompts me to enable it, or rather on a CCNA course. Or is it something else?
What you are mentioning is media DRM (think Netflix, Spotify). This is something entirely different: a mechanism to ensure the entire content of a web page is not tempered with.
Oh… thanks.
Please drink verification can
ERROR! Piracy detected!
I have exceeding low expectations, but I would hope that would be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit against Google as Chromium browsers account for roughly 70% of all users (based on numbers I pulled from Wikipedia)
Antitrust lawsuit? What’s that?
When is the last time any of the big tech companies got hit with antitrust? Microsoft is brazenly doing shit on windows they wouldn’t even dream of in early 2000s. Resetting user defaults to their products. Constantly advertising their products when user launches a competitors software.
They don’t give a fuck and neither do the governments.
Sounds like EU will come for the rescue. In 2029…
I would stop visiting any website that implements this. Simple as that. I will step away (will try at least) from any system that doesn’t respect my privacy or myself. Like I ditched Facebook, Reddit and others.
Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)
Congratulations, guys. You are now internet pariahs. Your unrepentantly mercenary lack of engineering ethics is now recorded for all eternity. You have nobody but yourselves to blame.
That’s a good way for me to never visit your website again. Honestly, this kinda sounds like the death of the internet if I’m being honest. This would transform it from a free medium into a full blown corporate dystopia. It’s really scary to see the digital (corporate) development over the past couple decades. Would be really cool if we don’t move further towards some cyberpunk like future where megacorps control everything.
Google taking some ideas from Cyberpunk 2077 and NetWatch.
It’s already owned by corporations.
Bit late on that front. If you think governments are in control, then you are a tad naive
I think the level of government capture in the US is unique. The EU is kinda balanced, as many good things as bad in this regard, while the authoritarian part of the world is definitely not corporate controlled.
That’s a good way for me to never visit your website again.
Good luck with that when all websites do this.
We’ll start our own websites, with blackjack and hookers.
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Yup. They already duplicated the web on their own servers with AMP, making the mobile internet a much worse place.
Didn’t they already try something like that on the Chromebook?
Watch them do it and then watch me cry :(
Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds
And they went ahead and blocked comments now - “An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past.”
Fucking cowards
EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don’t pay the big tech you can’t access anything.
So soon we’ll need uBlock Origin FitGirl Edition?
Hopefully we won’t have to deal with a uBlock Origin Empress Edition
Oh do fuck off Google.
Just this week or was it last week, I made a comment on some post that putting privacy aside, we should still be encouraging people to use Firefox instead of any chromium browsers to break control. It is good to see that right now I am just given a very good example why Chromium being a monopoly allows Google to control the spec (even if other companies are on board)
This PR nails it
How can the smartest people be so dumb?
Please, please, PLEASE… if you care about a healthy open internet, donate to Mozilla, Thunderbird, and/or the EFF, at the minimum, if you’re able to.
I liked to subscribe to Youtube Premium to support my favourite channels but this kinda stuff turns me off.
Easy to confuse stupidity with malice. They’re chasing one thing and one thing only: the almighty dollar. Look at it through that lens and their actions make sense. For the rest of us though, that’s just stupid.
Not just the almighty dollar.
Some people just pursue a perceived challenge with zero care for the terrible consequences of it.
either way, they need to be stopped
It’s not like Google engineers are hard up for cash. I know I know… it’s never enough for the rich…
Mozilla, Thunderbird, and/or the EFF,
Do you know that donation to Mozilla don’t (and can’t legally) fund Firefox development, right? (opposite to what happens for Thunderbird, actually).
But, hey, you can guarantee Mozilla’s CEO a better retirement:
Thus, your money are better spent donating to Thunderbird or EFF or whatever other foundation that does something actually useful.
How can the smartest people be so dumb?
Who are you talking about exactly? Because I doubt that everyone working at google knows everything thats going on, even while working on it.
I think he is talking about the 70% of the world that uses Chrome/Chromium based browsers
I wonder how much of the money would go to the creators themselves rather than YouTube though. I’d rather use adblock and give money directly through patreon or something. Fuck Google.
Most 9-5s are dumb as fuck
Are you something else? What’s your work schedule?
8-4, he’s an early bird. He gets so much more worms than those 9-5 dummies.
I said what I said and I am a business owner so my work schedule is 24x7.
Why are you so aggressive? Lack of sleep? I was just asking
Outside of some government jobs, 9-5 is all but dead. Most of the Western world is [at least] 8-6…
In some countries, workers have rights
This may honestly be it for me.
I quit playing games because of all the greed and hype, I went back to piracy when streaming started to fracture and greed set in, I left non-federated social media because of the enshittifaction and invasiveness, and I go to fairly extensive lengths to block ads and protect my privacy as much as possible…
And instead of moving to any number of fair, non-exploitive business models, they’re just going to force ads down my throat like that episode of black mirror.
If this goes through I’ll be sorely tempted to wipe everything I can and start over as best I can. Only interact with the Internet when I need to.
You’ll find me paying cash at the local used bookstore, at least until all the major publishers make that illegal.
EDIT: It’s honestly depressing, I genuinely enjoy technology and the internet, but when companies like Google are able to force garbage like this it just sucks all the joy out of it for me.
It’s like everying is becoming a shitty mobile game. Do the toolsheds that develop Candy Crush clones not think we can understand why in app currencies are sold in bundles of 100 but every thing we purchase with them requires amounts that end with a five? Does Google not think we know the real motivation behind a system that strives to prove ads were delivered to your browser either?
I know a lot of people may not see the real driver here, but I’m tired of being underestimated and infantalized by a bunch of dorks trapped in a corporate echo chamber. I think I’d prefer it if they just straight up said they’re going to sacrifice our privacy and user experience for a quick bump in stock value.
All this enshittification lately really inspires me to de-google.
You don’t have to look at reducing your Google use as a monumental effort. You can slowly transfer, minimise the number of services you use.
Simple - Switch your default search provider to Duck Duck Go.
Easy - Switch to Firefox
Mid - export your documents from Google Drive
Complex - Transfer your primary email to another provider.
I never understood why anyone left Firefox…it’s great
I actually think switch email wasn’t too bad (just take it slow!). It’s Google Drive I actually don’t have a good replacement for.
That and Google Photos.
Suggestions welcome.
Good suggestions. I just set Firefox to use DDG as my default search… something I’ve been slowly working my way through also, is replacing all the default-google apps on my phone with FOSS alternatives. It’s involving a bit of trial and error, as of course free software that doesn’t monetize the user often doesn’t provide the polished experience you get from a google app. Many of them are perfectly fine though.
I’d recommend also that everyone installs DuckDuckGo browser app on their phone, as it blocks trackers in all your other apps even when you’re not browsing. Pixel 7a has a truly disturbing amount of tracking requests, not sure if other phones are as bad.
What’s a good Gmail alternative that has a relatively professional name? I have a hotmail account from way back still, but the name “hotmail.com” has always sounded silly to me. I guess there’s Outlook but idk if they’re the best option.
I’ve always had an aversion to corporate anything so I’m already part way there. Use DDG half the time, Firefox user since it was called Firebird!. I really just need to drop Gmail and use DDG or others full time. I’m finding parting with gmail difficult and scary though as over a decade of history and old friends that may know that address as my only contact.
So what email providers are good alternatives?
DuckDuckGo results still suck and are not even remotely comparable to Google‘s. The best alternative imo is Qwant, which uses bing and I think also it’s own index.
