"Google is Getting Worse," ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs

92 comments

Getting worse is putting it lightly.
Get the fuck off Google services if you can. Highly recommend Proton mail and drive as a replacement.
- Moved to Protonmail earlier this year, just cancelled my Drive sub and am looking at switching to Mega
  
  can vouch for mega, been using it for 8 years now with no real issues. only sticking point is file download limits with Firefox, and thats just because im too lazy to download the desktop app
  
  Why did you cancel Drive?
- ....tell me more of these proton mail services of which you speak!
  
  Been using their paid email, drive and vpn for the last couple of years and their service has been flawless in my experience. Great apps and never had an outage or issues once.
  Free versions are available but the paid version is well worth it.
- Is it still viable in 2024 to run a home email server? I used to have a personal Postfix box back in the day.
  
  You'd have to be really committed. There's more admin work than you think to make sure you're not insecure or getting blocked.
  
  I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It's a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there's a lot of annoying work to "verify" yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn't be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I'm secure still needs to happen, but I don't mind that work and find it fun.
  
  Gmail and other big providers tend to consider new domains to be spam until they've proven otherwise. Can't prove otherwise until you've been up and running for a while. Catch-22. The way out of that is to host with an existing provider for a few years.
  Does it cut down on spam? Perhaps. Does it favor existing providers like Gmail? Yes, definitely.
  Honestly, hosting email has long been difficult to setup, and all the more so if you don't want your box to be a spam host within three seconds of plugging it in.
- I would need to see some alternates for Google Drive in that case.
  
  Proton drive is fantastic.
- Just signed up after they announced the non-profit and migrated all my mail. So far so good.
  I wouldn't go from Google to another for-profit though. I know how it ends.
- But what if Alphabet buys Proton!?
  
  They went non-profit recently to specifically prevent this from happening.
  https://proton.me/blog/proton-non-profit-foundation
- duckduckgo and yandex.
  restricting your search to r*ddit to filter out blogspam.
- Block all their servers on your network, it’s really not hard to go Google-free.

It's not even that their results suck, per se, but they straight up ignore most of my search query and focus on one or two words only. Obviously that makes your search results suck.
- It is just a matter of incentives.
  Remember Google is paid by advertising dollars. So the incentives are to feed you the maximum amount of ads with the minimum amount of content so that you don't leave for something else.

Is GN going to put Google on a Performance Improvement Plan like they did with Asus?

You either die a hero or live and watch yourself turn into a villian.
Tom's hardware, woot, and most recently donut media just to name a few. All were once the place to go, they all were bought out by bigger interest and eventually became the villian.
- Donut - how? All the giga-sponsors they take lately?
  
  They've been bought by an entertainment parent company, which is why the glut of sponsorships along with their content leaning towards pure entertainment instead of including educational and DIY content. Zach and Jeremiah started their own thing recently and explain in their first video.

Google is getting worse everyday and yet we still depends on it everyday
- It's ingrained in many places unfortunately. Like aws and Amazon
  
  Microsoft, apple? netflix etc
  facebook... shit i bet everyone in this thread hitting 3/5 min
  
  My company's goal seems to be to get themselves more dependent on AWS. They're always talking about which things we can replace with AWS offerings.
  I'm the exact opposite. I'm always looking for how to make the things I use more replaceable. That way if a company goes bad, I only need to replace a small part of my stuff.
  If AWS goes bad, I'd feel really bad for out devOPs team...
- I'm slowly moving away to open source, self-hosted applications where possible. Changed search to a combination of Gibiru and Yep. Email to a mailcow server I host on a vps, and I'm moving photos to an Immich server I'm setting up. Home Automation is next, I have a Raspberry Pi 5 to act as the Home Assistant server. And a few other projects in the works to split from Google as much as I can and mostly it is all better.

Who thinks google will still be a traded company in 10 years?
- Yahoo is still around in some form or another.
  Alphabet has enough money to persist well after they lose relevance.
- Too big to fail? Search is only one revenue stream.
  
  Similar tactic among all the large tech corpos, switch focus to IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, become the backbone of the modern computing landscape.
  It's basically a slow switch to becoming critical international infrastructure like power grids, water ways, and gas/oil pipelines.
  This all while locking you in as much as possible and milking as much value as they can squeeze.
  
  That'd be advertising, and by a mile.
- I mean IBM is still traded but it's a shadow if it's former self
- ICQ shut down yesterday and it was relatively small to begin with so I‘m afraid Google will be around for decades to come and possibly outlive most or even all of us.

It's weird that they don't really address the biggest reason Googles algorithm is worse now. The rampant exploitation of SEO.
Bad actors abuse the system in an attempt to be the first result, regardless of relevancy. It's harder for Google to sift the chaff out than it used to be, because they're flooded with content claiming to be related to the search keys.

Hell yeah, more Wendell.

"Google is getting worse. Now watch me talk about the situation on a youtube video. Youtube is a property owned by google. "
- Where's that iPhone comic about society
  
  This one?
- You know who is most fed up with YouTube's policies? Content creators on YouTube. They're locked in, they know it, and they hate it.
- Will we do have Youtube alternatives (Odysee & Rumble). But people can't filter out the stuff, they don't like on Odysee & Rumble. They can do that on Youtube but not on Youtube alternatives. So yeah.
  
  Just took a look at them, and Rumble is for sure a hard pass. The 2 rows under "news" is all far-right extremist videos, which is great if you are aiming for the Parlor/Truth Social/Nazi and Nazi sympathizers of the internet, but I think you'll miss most of the world going that toxic on the frontage.
- I get what you're saying, but they use the platform to spread the word quicker and reach a bigger audience.
- You the stones to destroy the stones.
- You're so edgy! I'm jelly...
- And exactly where do you propose they talk about it and actually have people see it?

92 comments