What is your personal most hated company or corporation?
What is your personal most hated company or corporation?
Hello everybody,
What is the company and corporation that is the object of your hate? What did/do they do to get that spot for you?
Mine is Facebook/Meta for their egregious data collection policies, psychological manipulation of its users, and more recently, them not seeding content.
Thanks in advance for your time! Have a good one!
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I'm really starting to dislike Google recently. The amount of things that simply don't work after their Gemini integration has me fuming. I have a pixel tablet I mainly use as a smart hub, Me: "Hey Google, what's the weather like today", Assistant: "I don't know". What do you mean you don't know? That's the one question you ever get asked.
Google switches an old system for something new, releases it half-baked, and never parodies the features.
Lemmy seems to have a very strong voice for pushing people towards Linux.... But I don't hear nearly enough about ditching Google and other mega-corps. I started Degoogling long ago and have been really happy with the result. There are lots of alternatives and there's no reason to stick with Google the way people do. Your description of half-baked shitty products is their hallmark. Their bloody search doesn't even work well anymore and that's what the whole business got launched on.
Lemmy please strongly considering De-googling. It's quite easy for almost all services.
As a teacher, I also strongly reccomend degoogling. Google flagrantly ignores FERPA. The private info of students is safer with Microsoft of all things, but traditional Windows laptop can't compete with the cheap-ass Chromebook which means schools are quickly switching to the Google ecosystem.
Holy, don't get me started on ChromeOS.
I have seen more guides for ditching Google on Lemmy in the past few months than I’ve seen in the past decade across all the internet. I guarantee you you can find hundreds of posts here with people detailing how to do it or their own experience doing so. The problem isn’t Lemmy, it’s the communities you are subscribed to.
Edit: I also think you’re underestimating how hard it can be, in particular Google calendar. So many other people use it it’s hard to leave it unless you have some pipeline to convert calendar shares to your new calendar system that also allows it to consistently update. That’s the one that I’ve found the hardest time dropping. Email and gdrive were relatively easy once i sat down and did it.
Google maps is also tricky. I like organic maps but it is not nearly as robust and Apple/Waze are lateral moves
Why use Google docs, when you can download pdflatex for free?
I just started trying to de-google and I'm having a really difficult time with the search engines. I switched to duckduckgo on recommendation and while it's nice not to have the AI response (that was my biggest bother), I'm having a really difficult time getting good results for local businesses and like even tv shows. I know a lot of it is that Google is spying on me so it'll usually know what I'm getting at even if my search wasn't the best, but I'm just not sure how I can improve my queries or what I'm doing wrong.
I use Brave search and that serves me well (although Lemmy really hates the founder of Brave and my comment is going to get a lot of downvotes). If you need to use google, then you can reduce the data gathering as much as possible by using startpage for google search results.
Degopgling isn't an "all-or-nothing" endeavour. Even if you start using google 20% less, then that's still progress and you can improve slowly over time.
Yes that dude is a POS but thank you for your response. I did find that brave unfortunately had better results than DDG when I used it before. I've never tried startpage so I'll give it a shot, thanks!
I think Google is neck and neck with Microsoft these days. Which is crazy given the past 20 years.
I much prefer Microsoft to Google.
I hate MS in some markets, but don't mind it as much in others. Can't say the same about Google.
I reverted back to the old Google Assistant and now it can set alarms by voice command again.
It's absolutely ridiculous how they keep breaking what is working.
The only thing I use assistant for on my phone, is asking for navigation. Eg, while driving somewhere I haven't been before, "hey google, navigate to <address>".
Before Gemini: Opens google maps, finds the address, starts navigation, and works perfectly.
After Gemini: "Hmm, I don't know how to 'navigate to'. Let me google that for you. Here are your search results for 'navigate to <address>', you're welcome".
GrapheneOS runs on the pixel tablet
Google has such potential, but their management structure just ruins everything. I wish they would be broken up into multiple companies. Then maybe at least some of their products and creativity would be allowed to thrive.