This question was inspired by my hatred of Temporal Anti-Aliasing which, in many games nowadays, is poorly used as a performance bandaid. On lower resolutions it will smudge and blur the image and certain bad cases of TAA will cause visible ghosting.
Yet in spite of all this, certain games won’t let you turn it off or have hair/fur/foliage look like dogshit without it so sometimes I still use it.
Amazon basically.
Some things are near impossible to get in a reasonable time frame, or get shipped from China anyway if i get them at the source.
Also returns aren’t a maze of bullshit and return fees like many other online sites.
Amazon sucks but their return/refund policies are amazing. I pretty much never have to worry about a lost or missing package.
Exactly. Amazon alternatives in India aren’t great when it comes to returns and refunds.
Even if I’m going to buy the thing from a different ruthless conglomerate, I often check Amazon just to look at more reviews first.
I manage to live without Amazon. I just pretend it doesn’t exist, I don’t know if it’s cheaper or quicker on Amazon as I don’t see it (I use a search engine that can block results). It’s also probably other aspects of my life that also make it possible, spare money, spare time, no kids, live in a city.
Youtube.
You should try Piped.
And Freetube!
and Invidious
How’s the recommendations algorithm on piped?
It simply shows videos from channels you subscribe to on your feed. In the settings, you can make it show you either “feed” ore “trending” as default. This of course makes it harder to discover new channels.
Any plans to stop using it?
Nope. Lots of good content on there
Check out one the 3rd party frontends for it. I personally use piped.kavin.rocks on desktop. Same content but you dont visit the YT site for it
My vote goes to Google, to whom I am tightly married. It’s ecosystem and interconnectivity between apps as well as devices is unbeatable. It’s super reliant.
It’s the one entity that can wreck my online and offline presence. I mean, I use android and Google to login everywhere. If Mr. Google so decrees, my phone could wipe and google account be gone tomorrow. Same applies to Apple and Microsoft, but I don’t use their systems as much. The poison I picked is Google and I hate it.
I feel like I don’t use that many Google services (mostly because I’m not convinced they won’t shut down), but the ones I do use are the ones that would really suck to lose access to. I realized this a few months ago and have at least been working on moving my email away from Gmail to my own domain since that is the critical one that could screw everything up.
I moved to protonmail years ago for this reason, but then my friend gave me a free paid YouTube account so I created a new Gmail account and found a new love for heavy metal. Since then the algorithm has learnt my tastes so well I would be devastated to lose my account, but I made a pact with myself that if my friend ever decided to ditch her account that I wouldn’t pay for my own. So I’m totally at the mercy of her whims, and she doesn’t even know!
In the last months I tried to cut as many Google services as I could. I use the Proton suite now, it’s nice.
Unfortunately I still heavily rely on them for Android phone and TVs… Not to mention YouTube, which is yet to have a good competitor.
I doubt we’ll ever see competition to Youtube. It has reached the point where they will basically have to be antitrusted like AT&T to see a competitor.
I don’t even know if YouTube will be around in 30 years, let alone not have competitors.
All gigantic businesses think they’re too big and entrenched and used every day to fail, until they do. Just look at Yahoo! as one example from recent memory.
So, we’ll see, I suppose!
In the end I am just a dummy on the internet speculating. For all I know climate change will be coming down from the top rope and take Google with it.
I mean…you’re probably right. But there’s a little part of me that thinks…they said the same thing about Facebook, that it wouldn’t last five years, that it would go the way of MySpace and something else would jump in, but… it’s been just a few months shy of 20 years now, and even though it’s not the juggernaut it used to be, it’s entrenched in a way I never expected.
And then there’s, like, GE, which is 130 years old…or Cigna, Remington, Citi, or Chase, which are older. Some others, like AT&T, do a little dance and come back…I dunno. Some companies just have staying power (in the case of Cigna, I think it might be a pact with some unholy abomination). And they’re all still dominating or at least leading their respective markets.
Even your example, Yahoo, while certainly not the cultural force it once was, is still around in a slightly different incarnation. Nothing ever really dies, it seems.
Sent from my pixel 6
Windows
I like Windows, it’s MS that I hate and the bullshit they add to Windows.
I hate to break it to you, but the stuff MS added to Windows comprises literally all of Windows.
Ehhh not really. On consumer devices yes, but when you start dealing with automated deployment and group policy and things like that, you can automate disabling telemetry services.
Now if you’re using something like azure or intune, you just have control of the spyware.
If you’re on M365 you get the added hit of them renaming portals, moving or downright removing settings. God forbid ymthe setting you need is powershell only and not ocumented online, cause support doesn’t even know their own products.
Yeah…. The double edged sword of cloud infrastructure is that you have to rely on them not to fuck it up.
Less of an issue with AWS
‘I hate dirt in my burrito.’
‘There’s lots of stuff in a burrito.’
This analogy doesn’t work because you cannot cleanly separate things in a burrito, whereas you can in Windows to some extent.
My burritos never reboot by surprise to force updates that break decisions I mad about what’s in them.
How often does this even happen? In the past 3 years I’ve not met a single person who’s had a Windows update trigger randomly or had Windows make breaking changes.
If you expect me to prove Microsoft’s still doing what they’ve been infamous for doing for twenty straight years, the answer is no. Even if they magically stopped fucking people over this way - this doesn’t justify your dismissal of someone’s complaints about those stupid problems Microsoft created. It still happened to them, and they hated it, and you had to pipe up and say ‘well what about the parts where it didn’t fuck you.’
I’ve always felt theres multiple sides to Microsoft. Theres devs making a damn good and simple product. Then comes the enterprise devs that over-engineer the product. Then theres the marketing coming in and try to buy up competition or bundle the product with other products to force it on people (MS way of advertising). And THEN the suits either ruin the product for money or shutting it down for not either making enough money or for not helping their enterprise products make money (like for example VSCode is a product that helps MS make money on Azure).
Windows 7 was a fantastic operating system.
Windows 7 was fourteen years ago.
Stockholm Syndrome…
WhatsApp
Absolutely, it’s essentially required in Europe… but also, fuck Facebook.
Surprisingly hard for people to accept, if you don’t have it.
I really wish I could get out of using WhatsApp, but it’s all everyone ever uses.
And there just isn’t any good enough argument you can use to convince the average user from doing otherwise. Unless it literally makes the phone explode in your hands, people will not change.I didn’t have it for ages but it just resulted in people “texting” me and me never getting it because they actually sent me a WhatsApp
They will fall, the enshittification has already begun with the integration of influencer-related groups.
I think WhatsApp is still fantastic. Just a matter of time till Facebook incorporates it fully in. That is what worries me.
I won’t deny it is working very well. It is the Facebook part for me too
Facebook. I never willingly go on it, but my friends all use it for events and shit. It’s funny hanging out with them and having someone mention things from a group chat I’ve never even touched. I absolutely refuse to install that fucking malware they call Messenger.
Other than that, anything Google. Have to use it all for work.
So many small businesses have a Facebook page and no website which is quite frustrating too. I just want to see your hours, why did I need to sign up to another website to do that?
Google Maps is normally good for hours if they actually have a physical location.
I’ve recently been trying to de-Google my life. I used to be all in on them, but they’ve changed and so have I.
And yea Facebook sucks, but it’s how I can keep some semblance of social interaction by lurking what other people are doing. 😭
I finally converted my friends over to discord a few years ago, and even then I’m looking to move off of discord. But it was like pulling teeth getting them to leave messenger
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I told myself I would never install it until it became the only option for keeping in touch with a girl I like. But hey as long a that’s all I use it for, they can’t glean that much info from me, right? Right?
Discord. Too many people and communities on it that won’t use Matrix.
I’m sorry but Discord and Matrix both suck. They are no place for a community. They’re places for a group of friends to chat and hang out, not a place for large discussions. They have a large amount of random crap mixed in with actually relevant info and they both aren’t indexed by any search engines. IMO, traditional forums or even Lemmy and Reddit are far better for that.
What stops me from moving away from discord is the in-server game streaming. If something ever shows up with performance parity on that and the possibility of spinning up my own server I’ll drop discord in a second. So far I haven’t found it
Almost anything Google. I have an Android because I hate the restrictions of iOS, but forcing me to sell my location to Google if I want to know where I am (even in an open source app because location is a system thing).
Ah man it’s depressing watching the fall of google. From my gmail beta account which was incredible to do no evil, google are great, theyre open, to so many cancelled projects replaced by similar ones(ehem chats and video chats) and so much bad behavior with their ads.
If you don’t want that, you should look into microG. It replaces Google Play Services with an open source reimplementation, so apps that use it and stuff like location still work but without actually talking to Google. If an app uses Google Maps, it will instead use OpenStreetMap, for example. There’s a version of LineageOS, which ships without Google stuff and instead with microG and F-Droid as well.
MicroG is not exactly secure or privacy friendly if you continue using the same services.
Pootly my thing is a Google Pixe phone, as these now dont have a headphone jack anymore and are from Google, but for GrapheneOS
GrapheneOS! The catch is you need to buy a google pixel.
Look into custom ROMs, there’s a few degoogled privacy focused ROMs but support depends on ur mobile. You can also degoogle it yourself but can be quite time consuming.
Several things from Google.
- Google Maps - none of the OSM-bases options are there yet. I need traffic conditions and good Android Auto support. At the same time I hate that Google Maps is so full of ads. When I search for “breakfast” and the top result is a sponsored result for Dunkin and the closest is 50 miles away…
- YouTube - the content is there so it’s hard to go to an alternative.
- Google Photos - my issue with this is really more tied to Gmail. If I stop paying for more Drive storage for my photos, I will stop receiving email because my account is full. But I did switch away from Gmail at least.
Check out piped.video. It’s content of youtube without youtube. That means no recommendatios based on their algorythm, which might be nice sometimes but it’s a good alternative. LibreTube for an Android app is what I use.
Ente seems good Google Photos alternative, but you do have to pay for it (they have like 1GB free space)
Yeah I use SmartTube on my TV and piped on my phone but I still count that as “using YouTube.”
It also sucks they offered unlimited free photo hosting then reneged.
No they didn’t. They offered unlimited free photo hosting for the Pixel 1. Which I still make use of. Later pixel generations got free unlimited uploads for 2 years.
Isn’t Waze better, functionalitywise, than google maps? I dont think they are any better on ethical fronts, but still better to use the less powerful evil…
I mean it’s still Google.
It is but Waze is owned by Google.
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I deleted my Google account recently and I agree that Google maps is in a league of their own. I now use Magic Earth in my car, but searching for something is not as good as Google maps. But so far the realtime traffic info is good
A car running on fossil fuel.
Well fossil fuel in general…
modern internet
This one wins
I hate that there’s an app for everything, it’s like when everything wanted your fuckin email now they want an app plus your email and a phone number, I have having to download POS apps on my phone for simple things that can be done from a browser, like concert tickets.
YES! This is my number one pet peeve. I am so fucking tired of having to install an app just to use my new e-scooter, or light bulb, or to use 100 new different functions that would work perfectly well on your website if you weren’t such a fucking money grubbing troglodyte.
I work in marketing and it legitimately has no downside to a business other than having one team to make sure it works and the other to make it look good. It makes sense to not have to pay Google or Adobe or whatever other tech company that charges for web usage and ad tracking. At the same time, it allows companies a direct connection to you through push notifications.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/mzb355qT8RI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Amazon. I try to buy elsewhere most of the time but other sites just don’t have the same stuff sometimes.
Delivery is fast, prices are right, and they have an excellent return policy. Also Ive had many moments where I try to go to a store and thanks to this post digital retail apocalypse world we live in their selection is limited compared to what it would have had 10 years ago.
\ Yep.
It took some work and sometimes we pay a little more but we cut Amazon out of our lives.
Prime is just too good if you happen to use Amazon’s other products. Free overnight delivery on Whole Foods items, that’s literally 4-6 hour delivery sometimes. Access to Prime Videos which (very) occasionally has a show I want to watch. And a free Twitch subscription which I use to toss creators I like a few extra bucks every month.
Socks. If I’m at home you’ll never see me wearing socks, not even if it’s -5°C out there. But got to use them while wearing shoes, I guess.
I hate socks and shoes. Something to do with being on the spectrum. I go barefoot, or wear thongs (flip flops) or crocs if I have to wear something. I pretty much only wear shoes/boots when mowing the lawn.
Really? I’m the opposite. My feet are usually always freezing even if it’s warm outside! So I wear socks.
Not OP, I don’t hate socks but they actually make my feet cold indoor sometimes
I don’t mind socks but I hate shoes and I don’t like dirty socks. The sandals I wear all the time have a toe thong so no “socks with sandals” for me.
Browsers. Firefox hasnt given me reason to doubt. Yet. And I find that odd. Still uses it. Because every other big browser have given me reasons.
Generally “free” stuff from big companies is giving me more and more the heebie-jeebies. Even if they have good reputation. But there’s NO WAY I could ever pay for everything I use. Nor donate to every deserving person who has given their free time to create and publish FOSS.
Mozilla really pushes Pocket through Firefox. I’ve gone through the about:config to get rid of it. Pocket gives me doubts.
They also push their VPN a lot. Every week or two I open Firefox and they send me to their VPN page on their website telling me to try it.
Like no. I’m not interested in paying for a rebranded mullvad.
I can understand your frustration, but they need to generate revenue somehow, and presently I think it’s the VPN, donations, and Google default search money.
At least the VPN aligns with their core values.
I recommend Librewolf. It’s a privacy focused fork of firefox. They apply their own patches to every new firefox release so you always have the newest features of firefox minus the bloat.
Comes preinstalled with ublock-origin, no Telemetry, no Mozilla VPN, no pocket, no prompts to create a mozilla account, no ads on the start page, default search engine is ddg and deletes all cookies (exept for whitelisted sites) on launch.
I was a huge fan of Read It Later, which became Pocket.
I absolutely fucking refuse to use what it has turned into.
I think I’d use Pocket more if I could export from into a selfhosted app.
Should look into the ladybug browser firefox while the only “decent” browser isn’t great nether and ladybug looks really promising
