(06-27-2023, 02:01 AM)huckleton Wrote: im collecting concrete reasons like these to describe this distaste [for google]
Here, let me help (sorry if you didn't need it, but this is fun for me and I like feeling helpful):
Quote:Killed by Google is the Google Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Google in the Google Cemetery.
Quote:Earlier this year I was arbitrarily locked out of one of my developer accounts with no way to retrieve it, and that gave me the push I needed to switch to an alternative email provider.
Here recently, talk about two recent lawsuits against Google by the United States government, as well as my own recent discoveries about how Google identifies users through CAPTCHA and warnings from Google that I needed to DO something with my Google Drive files all encouraged me to revisit the subject and see what else I can do.
Goodbye, Google+, You'll be Missed, At Least By RPG Fans
Quote:The shutdown may have disastrous effects on the roleplaying game community and designers. While the rest of the world seemed to overlook Google+, the RPG community made the platform its home. It’s not an exaggeration to say that there are games which wouldn’t have been made and success stories which would not exist without it. Now, people are mourning while scrambling to find a new place with the same vibrancy and foment, with not a small amount of freaking out about how the new, Google+-less world looks for design and sales.
The Google Plus Role-playing Blog Directory: to get an idea of just how extensive that community was
Why I gave up (on YouTube): my own story
Quote:If your video gets demonetized, they apparently plan to take the money you earned from that video OUT OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.
Videos now cannot have ANY swears in their intro. Previously, we were allowed “the usage of moderate profanity (e.g., shit and bitch) in the first 30 seconds”.
This applies retroactively to all videos made before the policy change.
Holy shit, they’ve invented an infinite money generator! Every video that was allowed to say “shit” in the intro is now a gotcha!
YouTube's new TOS allows chargebacks against future earnings for past violations. (safereddit link)
Quote:Seems like it can only get worse; it's in a corporate decomposition stage where the product is about as good as it gets but $ growth is expected for investors. So now it's cut and restrict the product to get people to pay and add more ads.
Quote:unfortunately, this is (somehow) even worse than it sounds. a somewhat reasonable thing to do would be to guess people's genders probabilistically, like a weighted average of the known-gender distributions of all the videos you watch. say, "this user is 60% likely to be male, 30% likely to be female, and 10% likely to be User Specified" or whatever. still a wild thing to do, but at least it would mean the Imagined Data would still be like kinda meaningful.
youtube does not do this. it just, assigns you a gender. (it does this, of course, so it can know which gender-targeted ads to show you.) in the above example, this hypothetical user would be Assigned Male at Google, just taking whichever of the strict boxes al-Gorithm deems the most likely.
what this means is that if you're, for example, a youtuber who makes videos that appeal to an audience that's around 60% male, everyone whose gender youtube doesn't know who watches your videos (and other videos that appeal to that 60% male demographic) is Assigned Male at Google.
okkk that's all I got for right now, I'm making the forum's wysiwyg editor so mad.