deliriousdreams

I’m sure this will make people who use it feel better, but as a form of protest it does nothing. Unless you’re gonna install this extension on a bunch of public computers.

Lots of people who have taken to the internet at large may not understand the root cause of why, but they do know Google’s reputation for killing projects and enshittification. That discussion is happening everywhere. And you should also note that a lot of the early adopters of Google Now and Google Assistant (including the hardware) are tech enthusiasts who absolutely did have the realization at one point or another about how these companies were essentially rifling through their emails and other information they were collecting in order to provide such detailed information. There were multiple articles about it (from outlets and blogs that these kinds of people follow). Perhaps once Google assistant became more mainstream (where people were more likely to pick up assistant enabled devices and such in Target or the like), those people didn’t realize. But they still see the enshittification.

There’s a lot of people claiming “no one wants this”.

Thing is, people loved this when they introduced it with Google Now back in 2012. They literally used to trawl your inbox and tell you when to expect packages, when you had appointments, when your flight and hotel were booked for/when to leave for the airport.

All of that was useful information and it was free. Later their assistant could call to book you a table at a restaurant or add things to your shopping list or whatever. Some of this functionality started off very clunky, but it could absolutely be useful. But slowly but surely people started realizing that they were the product and that in order for Google Now and assistant to do this stuff it had to be reading emails and processing information in the cloud. We didn’t have devices that could do that kind of processing on phone.

After backlash (and likely because it wasn’t making them any money because they hadn’t figured out how to monetize the product yet), Google got rid of Google Now and Google Assistant took over.

it did some of the same things but distracted users from what was missing with flashy new hardware and smart home things. Lots of people loved that stuff too.

Then Sonos sued and forced them to kneecap their products. Suddenly the honeymoon was over in a big way. Some of the most basic smart home features were broken and in such a way that people who used them were irate.

Some of those integrations and functionality returned eventually. But right in the middle of that Google launched Gemini and it sucked at most all of it. It keeps getting “better” supposedly. But for a lot of smart home users the magic has been lost. They want what they had and lost and Gemini isn’t even a reasonable facsimile of that.

So it’s more that people are frustrated with Gemini and angry at Google for killing another service they found useful.

People still want technology to make their lives easier and more efficient. But they also want privacy and for things to just work. Google hasn’t made a product that just worked in a long time and AI isn’t going to be it.

Corporate censorship is not illegal. If you come to my house spouting Nazi rhetoric I have ever right to call you out on it and kick you out of my house.

There are laws deliberately protecting the people’s right to free speech that is not infringed by the government.

Now if you want to talk about how we should remove companies/corps rights as entities, we can have the conversation.

Trump was banned from Twitter and it was a good thing because it was them enforcing their TOS/EULA rules in a reasonable manner that doesn’t play favorites. Because the average person like you or me couldn’t say a lot of what Trump said on the platform and not get banned.

That doesn’t mean Twitter is a good company. There are no good companies. Corporations are not your friend. But they also aren’t government entities and they shouldn’t be. So if the state wants to sponsor the internet as a utility it can create its own cloudflare-like service for the purpose of DNS blocking and block whatever it wants. But cloudflare isn’t a state sponsored utility. It’s a corp. It has every right (whether you agree it should have rights or not) to not operate in countries it doesn’t want to operate in.