Speaking of being on the wrong side of history, this you buddy?
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself
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As someone whos trans: Yes, this is hurtful...
Fuck transphobes, you are awesome <3
Always has been.
Nah, they were great when they came into existence. 'No ads, no portal, no nothing, just a search-engine". That was their sub-motto (freely quoted from memory). When the results had a time-spent on it to awe at their incredible speed AND accuracy. Before them, searching the web was annoyingly annoying.
But the moment the "don't be evil" fell, shit continuously went downhill. Maybe even before, more unnoticed, surely went gradually.
Nowadays it's even a bad search-engine, except you're looking to buy something.
You're not looking at the choices they made before and during the don't be evil era. With all tech, if they didn't create it, someone else would've because it's not that super smart people "created" a thing but that the community created and made available the tools required to "invent" said technology.
But they were still created from the actual innovation of pagerank, straight out of public research, right?
I don't get your point. When they went into existence, it was a search-engine. It just did that and it did it very well. Nothing else compared slightly. No javascript, no tracking, no portal, no ads, no shit. just results.
"If not them, then someone else". Yes sure. If there's something to exploit, it will be exploited. People are shit. But we're talking about google :)
It started with gmail IMO. That was an early milestone of the evil empire. They announced mining your emails to build an ad empire. I remember being bewildered that nerds on forums were going nuts over 1GB of storage. What a shit trade off I thought. But what did I know then especially relative to the expertise of internet nerds.
Gmail was launched around 2005 which means the concept was in development several years before. That puts the timeline around 2000 probably. Google was evil from very early on.
The thing is, they don't give a rat's ass about history, morals, integrity or all other silly shit like that. Is the line going up and are their wallets getting fatter? Yes? In that case full speed ahead! Money (and power, since it helps to make even more money) is the only thing corporations are interested in...
Late stage capitalism at it's finest
RheinMetall made gun barrels for the nazis, now they make gun barrels for the US and Germany.
Though at the end of the day, the people behind that aren't around anymore so it doesn't really matter
Try telling or explaining it to “normal” people who prefer their comfort and convenience over privacy and fundamental rights.