Does anyone here NOT hate Google?
I'm curious because I see a ton of Google hate on here daily. It's certainly not all unwarranted, and I do agree with some of the privacy concerns.
That being said I do very much enjoy their products. Gmail, Photos, Chrome, Gemini, Home, Assistant, YouTube, Pixel phones, etc... I've tried out many of the alternatives but always come back to their ecosystem.
Curious as to how many of you here on the fedi use Google products without the common associated angst from the FOSS community.
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+. .
They didn't drop the don't be evil thing. It's still right there in the code of conduct where it always was, they just moved it to the conclusion of the document so it's the last thing that remains with you. See for yourself: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
The supposed removal is a perfect example of the outrage-bait headlines I'm discussing in another comment.
There's a whole Wikipedia page covering the motto drop. And yes, it was an ugly move deserving of all the bad press.
From literally the first paragraph stating it’s still there.
The original motto was retained in Google's code of conduct, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. Between April 21st and May 4th of 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct's preface and retained in its last sentence.[9]
So it's dropped from the motto?
Yes, they dropped it.
It was a Warrant canary
If they removed it from the preface and pasted it at the beginning of every paragraph throughout the entire document, a certain type of person would still be focused on the one place they removed it from. Those are not serious people and should not be taken seriously.
They definitely stopped living by that mantra at the same time. It may exist as a footnote to this giant code of conduct but it hasn't been their MO in over a decade. The reaction is justified.
Make up your mind, which one is it?
If it's any consolation, they haven't killed Google Voice. They haven't updated it since 2012, but it's still around.
I get updates a couple times a year.
But it hasn't changed
I loved them for a long time and was around since the beginning as well. When they opted everyone into Buzz without their consent I became real cautious about what I share with them. I still use some services, and even used Stadia when they had it. However, I'm ready for them to turn anything off at any time and don't share any info with them that I wouldn't want public.
I don't hate Google. I don't trust them and I don't think anyone else should either. Vet the products and services you use. But I don't hate them.
This is it. I didn't hate them because "big tech" like other people here. I loved Google and their stuff. But one by one they killed my favorite things, and they made me hate them.
If you don't hate Google for killing s service you loved them your just waiting for them to do it.
They've killed a fair few of the services I've liked over the years. But there are other services I still like (with caveats) that I still use so it's a mixed bag for me. If they kill those services I'll move on to others.
100% this. I don't hate them at all. I just can't trust them ever anymore
Agree with this. I think this also should extend to every corporation.
This kinda conflates hate for the unethical practices of the company with hate for the quality of their products, which seems unfair. As a company they're definitely bastards. There was a long, long period of time where their products were pretty unquestionably top-notch compared to everything else out there. However, for a while now everything has been going really downhill. Then recently it's really accelerated, especially with them leaning into AI. These days I hardly even miss them anymore.
Google have done a lot of great things and run some really vital projects that have benefitted the world. Anyone that refuses to acknowledge that is not coming at things honestly.
Yeah that's my take on it, too.
Plus they're far too big for "Google" to be a useful entity in discussions. The Google C-suites? The CEO? The Maps team? The Mail team? The support for end-user customers? Need to be more specific, because I bet the Mail team is bigger than some competing companies in their entirety.
Not trying to compare google to the Nazis, but this reads a lot like "but he build the Autobahns".
Alternatively, if there was no Google or Google like company, we would likely be much further along in tech, and have better functioning democracies. They have limited innovation in maps and search products. They rely on being big to be competitive. Their products are pretty poor given their engineering team size. Digital advertising: they bought their way into a quasi monopoly, siphoning dollars from people that actually create things.
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.
For me it's a love hate relationship. I love the idea of their products, but hate that often they're the only feasible options in their categories.
I dunno if I hate Google, but I've grown tired of their bullshit. I use their products, but mostly because they've become the default solution being so feature rich and widely used. They've leveraged that to bog them down with ads and Spyware and THAT I despise.
I hate all corporations lol
Google made lots of stuff that I used and enjoyed, then slowly made them worse or outright killed them off. Hangouts was imo the gold standard of simple chat programs, their podcast app was excellent and ad free. Both are now gone.
They also have been ceaselessly working to wring every last cent out of their products at the expense of the user experience. The products and services were fine and they were making loads of money even with adblocking and tracker blocking in place but they knew they could make more money and most people would just accept the inconvenience so they said fuck em and ran with it.
I hate how shit their search is now
There's this study that attempts to quantify this effect, at least.
I don't think you understood the question :)
Reading is hard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I use Google products, at this point they likely know more about me than I do.
Google spies on me, but actually provides useful services (other than search) for free (ish) in return.
Microsoft want money for everything.
The rest of big tech wants all your data for basically no gain.
I don't trust Google, but for now the trade seems worth it.
Imo the trade off used to be fair.
The search results have gotten worse and you basically need to search for them among targeted ads.
They dropped the promised unlimited SD photos storage offer and took the space for it off the email storage
I just don't trust them any more not only with their services but also with their targeted advertising and constant tracking.
I am using Kari, my own domain mail at a we hotel and enter photos.
I still need to use google on my android though but its limited use compared to before
I wanted to like Google, I bought into the whole ecosystem and still regularly use my gmail account, but they’ve fallen quite far in my eyes. They’ve killed off multiple features I used extensively, Search, the thing they should be good at, just isn’t as dependable as it used to be, I don’t trust using Chrome anymore, and the company overall just seems like a pale reflection of its former self. I just don’t trust them as a company. Not as bad as Meta or anything Musk touches, but still bad.
"
Don'tBe Evil"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).
Man I’d say their other stuff is terrible as well. Yeah it functions but what a low bar to meet.
I hate all capitalist enterprises even if I use them.
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.
What's not to hate? They're a monopoly corporation that isn't even pretending to adhere to their "don't be evil" slogan anymore
It is mega Corp and they are all the same.
Treat them as the enemy of the people. Can't go wrong
I don't hate Google.
I despise them. I loathe them. Common transitive verbs like hate don't encompass the depth and breadth of my disdain for Google.
The only thing I honestly don't hate from them is YouTube, which I still use often. But I hate how they treat it now, so they lose points there. And Gboard too, but they seem to have abandoned updating it sadly.
WDYM? It seems to update every 1-2 days on the beta channel for me, always fine-tuning some language or another. Do they not push updates to non-beta any more?
Well, I'm on iOS
I'm indifferent to them. I use their products, but I'm not a huge fan. I use them because I dislike the alternatives more.
I've been considering trying to degoogle myself, but honestly it would be complicated, and there's a wife-approval factor that likely hinders that. We have multiple Chromecasts, Next hubs, etc around the house, and my wife likes the ease of use. I am slowly building up a home assistant instance, but still tying it into the Google home integration for ease of wife approval.
I use what works best for me, and right now most of those options are from Google.
I'm happy with most of their stuff and use it a lot (calendar, drive, keep etc) but I know not to trust them not to kill things. I keep an IMAP copy of my emails and a local copy of my photos just in case...
Made a decision long ago that I’m not going to browse the web, setup a calendar of life events or store my email with the largest advertising company in the world.
Their “eco system” is not the best and their hardware has been hit or miss over the years.
I understand why people do use them and I will use their products when absolutely required. I don’t hate them, I just avoid them.
i hate all tech corps. you can use (and even like) their products and also think they are evil, oligopolies and all.
i cant abandon my gmail because i don't even know how many sites and how many people i have given it to. i like youtube because it's THE slop factory. Maps is also pretty good, love Street View, Chrome is 'ok' but Firefox is a perfectly usable (and in many ways, better) substitute (especially given Google's ad shenanigans).
Google make some good products. I am just not willing to trade my privacy for it.
There's just so much to hate
I'm not whom you're asking for but I'm obligated to say:
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 at least enjoy their fiber internet service.
I've been actively trying to extricate myself from their ecosystem. I hate how incredibly challenging it is.
It's not the company it once was, but there are also a lot of outrage-bait headlines about it that don't hold up well to scrutiny.
For instance, there have been a lot of Lemmy posts about Chrome supposedly removing the APIs used by adblockers. I figured I'd validate that on my own by switching to the version of uBlock that is based on the new API. Well... As it turns out, it works fine. It's also faster.
Mind you, figuring out the actual facts behind each post gets exhausting, and people just shutting down and avoiding the problem space entirely makes some sort of sense. That, and it is healthy for an ecosystem to have alternatives, so I'd keep encouraging usage of Firefox and such if only on that basis alone.
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 hate google's products BUT some of their free stuff like Google Fonts and Tensorflow are really nice
Hate? Ehhhh, no.
At least, no more than I hate any monolithic megacorp. You can't really hate something that empty.
I mean, fuck Google, but trying to hate it is like trying to hate wind. Yeah, we could all get together and figure out a way to keep it from blowing, but you aren't going to do so without a lot more work than people are willing to put in.
Most of Google's apps work fine. Most of their services work smoothly. It's the stuff they tack onto that that makes them hated, and it's why I limit my use of their products. That is, however, a matter of choosing lesser evils far too often because all of the businesses in the same fields are also shitty.
If I was to waste hate on Google, it would be to their ceo and any board members. They're the ones that make the company hateable.
I dislike a lot of what Google has done to their product and how people have screwed up searches with SEO nonsense. Recipes are a prime example of what I dislike about Google. Gemini is way less useful than the Assistant used to be. I'm still waiting for Microsoft to dip their toes back into the cell phone market or see some FOSS alternatives to Android/iOS that are supported by service providers. Ultimately I just have to put up with it.
I use a lot of Google products. I still rate their phones as the best, recently I use a Jelly Star instead purely because i was due a new phone from my pixel 3 but every current phone from Google and it's competitors that fit my needs are way too big.
I stopped using Google search because in the last few months I've started realising it's harder to find stuff that i want/need, so i now use ddg, which isn't better than old Google but better than current.
Outside of those though I still use my Google account as my main federated account. Still use gmail (wish inbox was still around for it though), still use chrome, and drive is my cloud storage of choice. On top of that I have 3 Google nest minis and a Chromecast with Google tv.
I may be drifting away slowly but Google still has is teeth in me and at the moment where I'm being bitten I'm fine with it. Doesn't hurt at all
I grew up with "hate" being reserved for the very extreme feeling, and I don't think I have hated anything or anyone since I started understanding what it really means. I have no reason to. Not even Trump. But I do wish they hadn't missed.
Anyway, so, no, I don't hate Google. But I am actively trying to find ways to leave their ecosystem. Even paid alternatives.
Hate is a strong word.
I have a dislike for them. Especially in recent years. There was a time I thought they were the cool hip company with lots of cool innovations. When Google docs launched it was so revolutionary that two people could work with the same document at the same time.
Now I see them more for what they are: an advertisement provider. They’re only after our data. Once I realized that my dislike for them grew.
But my dislike for them hasn’t been enough to stop using their products. I’ve tried DDG a few times, but I’ve always been dissatisfied with their results.
Hate is a strong word.
I prefer to avoid their services due to privacy, and because over the long term, they're unreliable. Any other for-profit corporation that tries to offer a bunch of free SASS products is going to end up with privacy issues as well; knowing the incentives lets us predict the outcome.
I'm keeping my Pixel 4a as long as I possibly can though.
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.
Bit of a reach, but I agree with your other points
Thanks. But if you work with a small hoster, they wont change the terms on you usually. Most of us understand that this is only „legal“, not morally sound.
True, I guess my experience was moreso “we can legally sell out whenever.”
For a long time I used mediatemple for their affordability, flexibility, and scalability
Then they were acquired by godaddy
https://origin-blog.mediatemple.net/news/a-new-chapter-for-media-temple/
Then I used webfaction, for the same reasons. They too were acquired by godaddy
https://groups.google.com/g/cloudy-dev/c/LF1eDRHt1W0
Many of the devs from web faction built opalstack, which I love
https://opalstack.com/
But I definitely won’t expect their terms to remain the same forever
For work, sheets is a godsend.
Everything else, i have better software.
Today google search turned on dark mode and trendimg searches against my will once again, makimg me google how to turn them off again.
It's annoying.
I'm pretty neutral towards them. I use Gmail, Drive, and Google News.
Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.
I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that's a balance that works.
I host my own email server so no Gmail.
I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).
I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).
Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.
You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.
How are you finding this? How much is it costing you, and how much time/effort does it take for maintenance and also how was it setting up? I've also heard that self-hosting a mail server means your emails usually get marked as spam, have you had this problem? Interested in self-hosting email but I'm not sure it's worth the effort for me and my threat model.
I started in 2012, and it wasn't that difficult. I'd say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it's quite out of date now but the principles are the same).
Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it's not enormous, maybe £20/month.
Don't even bother if you can't use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn't match your domain name.
It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.
Overall, I'd say it's worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.
Me. Drive is useful, youtube is addicting, gmail is... fine, once you figure out a few things.
Whoever that person is, they definitely exist. We just haven't seen them (and we probably never will since they're drown in downvotes immediately).
But they'll probably stop liking Google once they learn about the whole "collecting data and selling it to advertisers" thing.
I don’t hate Google
My stance is neutral, leaning towards negative. I think Google is still full of talented engineers who passionately want to build the best tech, but the higher ups are screwing up as seen everywhere else too. Their basis for all this data collection seems acceptable (personalization) but they're blind to the fact that this information can quickly fall into the wrong hands, like a hacker or bad government.
I still use a Google Pixel with the stock software because of the little things other ROMs don't provide, as well as Maps, Drive, Wallet, YT and Home. For everything else I use alternatives, albeit it's not because of a super strong dislike towards Google itself but because I want to support the competition.
i hate Google but I still use YouTube way too much
Chromebooks are cool
If Nazis made a great product, would you start supporting Nazis?
Nice try, paid Google shill.