6 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 27.1 ms ] thread
Google’s start of darkness — it only continued downhill from there.

Remember when Google was cool?

Yes, having gmail account was wild in early 2000s. Hotmail or yahoo were the only options.
2000s was also the time when the motto of google was “don’t be evil” and people believed them. Most importantly Google employees believed the company believed it.
This was the point I began my Google-exit.

What I feel is more remarkable than how long ago this all began, is how stable the choices I moved to have been. Fastmail has been amazing, Feedbin is still very solid, DuckDuckGo while not perfect is good enough while Google search results continue to get worse.

Other than occasionally needing to use GSuite when others share documents through it, I pretty rarely use anything by Google intentionally anymore.

Gosh, was that ten years ago already? I remember this vividly. In fact I moved all my feeds over to feedly and still have a task in the back of my mind that I should check whether there is anything in there that I should keep up with. Clearly not that important if I haven't needed it in ten years. Lol
Same. I used to read my 100s of blog subscriptions every day until Reader closed, I switched to Feedly, and I completely and utterly stopped following every single blog. I think Google+ filled that gap though, but when that shut down, I quit social media (except for family and friends on Facebook) because I absolutely couldn't stand, well, Twitter, really.