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.
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I hate all of google. The world would be a much better place if all of google disappeared overnight.
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.
it’s the user experience that makes me hate Google more than anything. “oh hey, come use our unified ecosystem, it’s so much better because it’s all Google” but as soon as you have a problem with Google Voice on your Google Pixel using your Google operating system, every fucking department tells you that it’s another department’s problem.
they gutted multitasking after Android 10 because they were afraid it might cut into their YouTube music profits. they’re just turning off their shortened URLs next year. they refuse to update Google Voice in any way. every time I’ve trusted them with something, they’ve broken that trust
Chromebooks are cool
I hate google’s products BUT some of their free stuff like Google Fonts and Tensorflow are really nice
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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”.
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?
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 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 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”
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.
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.
