I don't know if you like podcasts, but Know Your Enemy is a take on the right from two leftists who used to be conservatives who approach it from an intellectual POV.
I linked to the political magazine that helps support them since it gives some rundowns of their topics that might give you some of the sources that can be read instead of listening to their podcast, if you'd prefer.
I'm confused. No silver piece is in sight. How do they expect to be taken seriously! /s
Losing access to personalized YT would suck, but losing decades of emails would suck even more (when I initially got GMail, I imported all my old emails in ... I guess I should probably look at making a backup periodically, like I used to). I share your sentiment that I fear what these companies are going to do next in the pursuit of more money they can burn and/or give to shareholders as they continue to tank their reputations.
I, personally, don't see that happening, but I can easily imagine them making it a TOS violation to use adblock and then killing your account if you continue to do so :-/
Same with Google's ads in general. For a long time they were whitelisted by default on just about every adblock list out there because they were so unobtrusive it didn't make sense to bother blocking them, especially when you compared them to the other ads that were common at the time. They were also generally relevant ads, so people actually did click on them and use them since it actually related to the thing they were searching for.
They're obviously more profitable now, but you have to wonder by how much and if they'd be a more trusted company today (and what's that worth monetarily) if they hadn't gone down this race to the bottom.
ETA: Part of what I mean is that now they create things like Stadia and most people didn't even bother trying it because they knew it'd hit the Google Graveyard in a few years. Had Google been a more trusted company, people may have been willing to give it a try and they could possibly have printed money since by all accounts the service was actually pretty good.
Yeah, and I can't speak for everyone here, but I didn't even bother trying it even though I was intrigued. It seemed like the kind of thing that could be completely game-changing and I wasn't willing to get hooked on another Googler's pet project that'd just get the axe in a few years. It's a self fulfilling prophecy at this point, nothing new is likely to get any traction because no one wants to run the risk and then Google cancels it. If they were willing to put in writing that they'll support something for x number of years (that's end user facing, not just whatever contracts they make with devs or whatever), it'd probably go a long way, but they're not willing to support an expensive flop if the product is what actually sucks, so, they're not likely to do that.
Hell, even anything older still runs the risk at any time :-\
When I installed fdroid from their website a month or two back it was like 2 or 3 clicks. Then whenever I want to install anything from there it's an extra click or two over what it would be from Play.
I've seen people click through way more complicated processes than this without even knowing they did it. Modern computing has taught people to just keep hitting whatever the approval text is (yes windows, I really do want to copy all of these god damn files. Yes, really, I still do! Yep, again, ALL of them!)
Right?! Super easy to be "privacy focused" when you just flat out refuse to acknowledge anything as personally identifiable information!
Right‽
The movie was unbelievably dumb and personally I loved it! Dunno what that guy wanted/expected out of the movie, but I feel like it delivered on what the title promised me
Ah, my apologies for the assumption, it's been almost a year but I'm still too used to Reddit apparently!
Yes, the default launcher had ads, the SHIELD itself didn't, but I also didn't like any of the 3rd party launchers I used but I don't remember specifically why. Then, the SHIELD stopped booting so I didn't want to buy another one and went with the ATV instead.
As I mentioned, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to someone who knows they'd regret not having the cast functionality, but, if you just want a device that works very well and doesn't ever have so much as a hiccup during navigation, it's been great!
I would still recommend the SHIELD for someone that wants cast or who wouldn't have a problem with (mostly) relevant ads being shown on the device (stock).
Yeah I used to have a PC and a Harmony remote that would send macros to a custom script and Kodi would do different things or it could switch to Netflix and ... Like, we just want to watch a movie or TV show not have to perform tech support whenever Netflix changed their webpage!
I'm in this picture and I don't like it :-D