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.
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
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 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
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.
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A car running on fossil fuel.
Well fossil fuel in general…
Google.
Reddit - I don’t post there any more, but sometimes I still end up there looking for answers and information.
BUT most of all:
LinkedIn - This platform is built to benefit companies, employers and managers, not the masses of people scrambling to use it to get noticed and build their careers. There are so many things that bug me about LinkedIn, but ONE is definitely that I have no real options NOT to use it (without suffering terrible economic penalties if I you know, don’t want to give them my data). I get resentful and anxious every time I look at it.
If you work in IT, LinkedIn is just another spam source.
I deleted my account the first time they were hacked. So much fluff and fake networking. Any employer that relies on that shit is a place I don’t want to be.
Capitalism
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.
Really? I’m the opposite. My feet are usually always freezing even if it’s warm outside! So I wear socks.
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 was a huge fan of Read It Later, which became Pocket.
I absolutely fucking refuse to use what it has turned into.
Should look into the ladybug browser firefox while the only “decent” browser isn’t great nether and ladybug looks really promising
money
Facebook because my family is on it.
I can manage to skip FB altogether, but 99% of my friends and family are on Messenger
Google, YouTube, Gmail, chrome.
Duck Duck Go, Grayjay, Protonmail, Firefox.
Nebula is great too!
modern internet
YouTube. I wish they made better decisions about how to run the platform,.
You might be interested in trying out the grayjay app
It being free is only barely enough incentive to use it. If they ever have effective anti-adblock and force users to watch five ads before every video, I’m gone. I will never give any money to a monopolistic company if I don’t have to.
They are making great decisions for their customers and stakeholders.
Windows
How else would you get natural light into your house?
Single use plastics 🤮
