Does everyone hate Google now? | Google's story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth

Hopefully DeGoogleing will go a bit like the cable "Cord Cutters" did in terms of headlines over time:

1. Is cutting cable feasible?
2. Some are are finding solutions to lower their cable bills.
3. Industry denies cord cutters are impacting profit.
4. Providers cling to sports broadcasts as a way to short-circut cord cutters.
5. Are young people the "never-cable" generation?
6. Here's where to watch the Olympics online.

Of course, streaming is worse than cable now... so lets learn from that.

We demand infinite growth. Why? Because shareholders want to buy shares and sell them later for more.

Do anything it takes to make that transaction happen, cut people's jobs en masse, whatever.

Forever.

its a human flaw... insatiable greed.

we distilled this greed and removed all actual responsibility creating an entity, 'the stock market'. this well of irresponsible greed has reached a singularity.... a point of no return. we are all too dependent on this terrible thing and so it cant be removed.

the majority of us just get to suffer while being told 'theres no other way'

we cant have nice things because humans are just so fucking greedy and incapable of controlling that greed.

They took down the Don't Be Evil sign.

Despite the convenience of some of its tools, the hardcore tech set increasingly prefers tech companies like Signal or even Apple, which is currently running expensive TV ads about how other browsers (read: Google's Chrome) spy on you.

One important thing to be mentioned is that, while Apple is correct when highlighting that Chrome is a privacy nightmare, Apple and Google are cut from the same cloth and they're both user-hostile when it comes to privacy, monopoly enforcement, censorship, etc. Both deserve the hate that they get. (Alongside Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.)

Notice how Google Maps data hasn't been improving, and if anything getting worse?

I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned...then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play "go talk to the other parent I cant do anything" when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.

I worked for Google but Google didn't want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn't work for Google.

Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).

My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.

What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.

Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.

(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).

A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows... that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor.... except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time...

...and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?

I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to... totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out.. again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.

Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.

I hate Google.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

How about "monopolizing the ad industry, going all in on manipulative engagement farming, and making billions off of destroying the internet they helped create, and possibly democracy"

I think the headline proves most people don't really understand how deeply Google has embedded themselves in, and farmed, well, everyone.

For the 113th time: YES

Google stopped being cool ages ago and Chrome marked the moment they turned evil. They no longer had an incentive to just throw money at problems, they wanted to completely drive the web ecosystem and they did. They had a browser.

I've started to try and move away from Google as much as possible, which I knew would be difficult, but it's proving to be harder than I thought.

I can't do anything about my work stuff, because our company uses Google for email and cloud storage. I set up an account on Proton Mail for my personal email and file storage. I currently have an android phone, but I don't like iPhones so I don't really know what I want to do there. I switched back to Firefox after 15 years of using Chrome. I actually started using Bing search more. I'm looking into alternatives for the Chromecast that Google doesn't seem interested in supporting anyway, which might just end up being a small PC hooked up to the TV.

I'm just so tired of Google services either being shut down or slowly getting worse and worse until they're nearly unusable.

Hate Google ain't enough, plebs need to deny Google profit.

That's how you hurt a parasite.

Nationalize google and turn it into a coop that is democratically controlled by worker and users. Lets us vote on their management and corporate priorities and policies.

To hell with the shareholders! They ruin everything!

On August 5, 2024, Trump asked his supporters to stop using Google.

Did not know that. Well. Stopped clock, blind squirrel, etc.

Corporations: Hmm, we seem to have saturated our market. How do we make line keep go up?

1. Diversify our products to cater to new or niche markets.
2. Accept the status quo and focus on making our existing customers happy while integrating feedback to improve and entice people to ditch our competitors?
3. Make everything worse because what are they gonna do, use Bing? LOL
4. Congratulate ourselves on winning capitalism, then selling our stocks to the employees so we can go enjoy our wealth and return forever.
5. HAHAHAHA yeah right. Time to squeeze this shit for every red cent then cash out before the stock price crashes and move in to the next victim.

Whats a good google maps alternative?

Ive had some success with OSM+ but only if I supply the end point myself. Otherwise it had a really hard time getting a place like Home Depot or a local university, etc....etc....

everyone with common sense and the ability to pay attention has hated google for over a decade.

All my homies hate Google

All companies enshittify themselves eventually, and the fact that those that were trying to fight it within the company were still getting shit on from within and from outside the company only hastened its fall by just removing them as a deciding factor through sheer pressure. Google really isn't as dystopian as people put it as - for one, it's too incompetent at starting and sticking to new ventures.

As it continues falling and eventually the traditional competitors overtake it, I think it will become apparent what a truly dystopian megacorporation actually is before Google completely becomes anything remotely close to it - Microsoft would have reached that line if they had successfully been able to sneak in Recall. DuckDuckGo fell when Bing did, smoke and mirrors... Google is pretty bad right now, just not what I would call a dystopic megacorp.

Yes. I hate advertising companies.

Strange, they don't seem to hate it enough to stop using it.

A lot of people still don't know.

Some people don't even know what Reddit is.

Now, Reddit is charging Google for priority access to its posts (article - only Google and Brave will show those results in the near future).

Perhaps Google will start charging money to use it also.

Google's motto in 2003: "Don't be evil."

They sure let that motto slide.

Wait until you learn of their role in the apartheid and genocide in Palestine

I don't use Google anymore except for Google maps in my car. :) I guess they can spy on where I'm driving. But no search history.

I'm all about that duck duck go yo

for the same reason we hate apple. they put a pencil pusher with no direction other than higher stock price as ceo.

dOn'T bE eViL

You either die a hero or less be long enough to become the villain.

You got that right bro. Greed breeds abuse of the customer. Mega-companies, become the worst problem the world has because of that same greed. To put it bluntly "Greed is not good" to mis-quote a 'Wall Street" movie character player by Charlie Sheen.

LOL. a bit late. the story is: how lazy and selfrightious are people using alphabet, apple, microsoft or meta?

i feel they are to an extent of being immature. no matter if you are a majority, that doesnt make things right.