8 ms·

Then move off. It's not the only solution. There are alternatives to all these: Search, Email, Game streaming, Online doc editing, Etc

by Guthur 6y ago

viraptor 6y ago
> Then move off. It works for you (as in, single person). Not for your friends and family who will ask you one day what to do about the account they lost. We (technical people) know this happens and have seen it happen - it is on us to push for better solution than convincing one person at a time. Unless one prefers nihilism and watching the world burn of course.
- Guthur 6y ago
  The world is not burning. Do you know what was before play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing. It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    This is not about accounts on media consumption services - those can be easily replaced. From the tweets, this is the problem: > My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay. [...] My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years. This can be literally the end for a small company which started relying too much on that environment.
    - Guthur 6y ago
      We've all been signing those nefarious EULAs for decades, long before Google play store. Stallman has been shouting about it for equally as long and we either called him a crank or label GPL as viral whatever. We reap what we sow.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > The world is not burning. Do you know what was before play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing. You know what was before electricity? Nothing. But switch that off today, and the whole world will burn. Between Google Drive, Photos, GMail, and Google account being used as authentication, losing a Google account is a life-crippling situation for many people. > It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden. That's the thing, though. They did. They put a highway next to it, and now nobody is gardening, the garden shop closed down, everyone's commuting to the city, and no one wants to buy my produce because my garden is too close to the road... ...or, to unpack it: the big platforms, by their very existence, killed off people's "beautiful gardens". Facebook and Reddit are why discussion boards are mostly dead. Google is why it's infeasible for most to host their own e-mail server these days (the heuristic of distrusting senders other than the big e-mail providers only works because there are big e-mail providers).
    - Guthur 6y ago
      Sorry I couldn't disagree more, mobile devices were little more than mono function curiosities, app stores, love them or hate them, opened that too a whole new market where many software providers have made money. You can cry all you want about the Google and Apple profiting on it but there really wasn't any alternative before. And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle. The email spam issue is a problem. I'm not sure the solution for that because people are going to expose their email address and the spam torrent is real.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        > And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle. About 20 years ago, one of my A-level friends set up his own site and discussion forum with phpBB. I still have friends from non-corporate IRC servers, and can even recognise a few Hacker News usernames from some of the channels I was on, though the relationship there is more of “in the same place at the same time quite often” (/me waves to @duskwuff ;)). It wasn’t all Livejournal and AOL chat.
Judgmentality 6y ago
I'd argue there's no real alternative to YouTube. There's got to be orders of magnitude more content there than all of its competitors combined.
- Guthur 6y ago
  I'll give you YouTube :) YouTube feels like it's about to hit some wall though, content matching copyright take downs seem to be getting out of control.
  - tal8d 6y ago
    I've always used private playlists to organize things. They look like swiss cheese with all the deleted videos.
    - Jach 6y ago
      Long ago I setup a nightly cronjob to archive some of my playlists.
    - dbuder 6y ago
      If you pay for google premium those playlists will show you what the video that is now gone/deleted was..!
      - tal8d 6y ago
        lol, wow. On one occasion I actually did need to know, but only remembered which playlist it would have been in. I ended up having to search for websites that linked to a few dozen dead youtube urls. I never thought I'd be happy to land on a poorly executed Chinese content farm full of scraped html and incomprehensible markov chains. After that I started treating Youtube like the ephemeral thing it is.
FeepingCreature 6y ago
> Then move off. Great, let's legislate that you can switch providers but you have to be able to keep your email address, like we did with phones.
- aphexairlines 6y ago
  You already can, if you use an email provider like gmail with your own domain name.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    Which literally puts you on all autoreject spam lists because SPF and DNSSEC. Unless you pay for GSuite and/or your mail provider allows this custom domain functionality.
    - threeseed 6y ago
      So pay for it ? GSuite is $6/month and other mail providers can be found for cheaper.
      - lou1306 6y ago
        The point is, when you switch your phone operator, you don't have to pay the previous operator, in perpetuity, for the privilege of using your number without your calls being blocked.
        umvi 6y ago
        Yeah but most people aren't paying for g-mail. It's like if you were using T-mobile "free" plan where you don't have to pay anything but you get a number that starts with "TMO", and then getting mad when you can't transfer your free number to Verizon because T-mobile refuses to transfer it.
        lou1306 6y ago
PixyMisa 6y ago
Don't like it? Build your own.... Everything.

Then move off. It's not the only solution. There are alternatives to all these: Search, Email, Game streaming, Online doc editing, Etc

by Guthur 6y ago

Then move off. It's not the only solution. There are alternatives to all these: Search, Email, Game streaming, Online doc editing, Etc

viraptor 6y ago

> Then move off. It works for you (as in, single person). Not for your friends and family who will ask you one day what to do about the account they lost. We (technical people) know this happens and have seen it happen - it is on us to push for better solution than convincing one person at a time. Unless one prefers nihilism and watching the world burn of course.

Guthur 6y ago
The world is not burning. Do you know what was before play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing. It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
- viraptor 6y ago
  This is not about accounts on media consumption services - those can be easily replaced. From the tweets, this is the problem: > My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay. [...] My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years. This can be literally the end for a small company which started relying too much on that environment.
  - Guthur 6y ago
    We've all been signing those nefarious EULAs for decades, long before Google play store. Stallman has been shouting about it for equally as long and we either called him a crank or label GPL as viral whatever. We reap what we sow.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > The world is not burning. Do you know what was before play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing. You know what was before electricity? Nothing. But switch that off today, and the whole world will burn. Between Google Drive, Photos, GMail, and Google account being used as authentication, losing a Google account is a life-crippling situation for many people. > It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden. That's the thing, though. They did. They put a highway next to it, and now nobody is gardening, the garden shop closed down, everyone's commuting to the city, and no one wants to buy my produce because my garden is too close to the road... ...or, to unpack it: the big platforms, by their very existence, killed off people's "beautiful gardens". Facebook and Reddit are why discussion boards are mostly dead. Google is why it's infeasible for most to host their own e-mail server these days (the heuristic of distrusting senders other than the big e-mail providers only works because there are big e-mail providers).
  - Guthur 6y ago
    Sorry I couldn't disagree more, mobile devices were little more than mono function curiosities, app stores, love them or hate them, opened that too a whole new market where many software providers have made money. You can cry all you want about the Google and Apple profiting on it but there really wasn't any alternative before. And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle. The email spam issue is a problem. I'm not sure the solution for that because people are going to expose their email address and the spam torrent is real.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      > And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle. About 20 years ago, one of my A-level friends set up his own site and discussion forum with phpBB. I still have friends from non-corporate IRC servers, and can even recognise a few Hacker News usernames from some of the channels I was on, though the relationship there is more of “in the same place at the same time quite often” (/me waves to @duskwuff ;)). It wasn’t all Livejournal and AOL chat.

Judgmentality 6y ago

I'd argue there's no real alternative to YouTube. There's got to be orders of magnitude more content there than all of its competitors combined.

Guthur 6y ago
I'll give you YouTube :) YouTube feels like it's about to hit some wall though, content matching copyright take downs seem to be getting out of control.
- tal8d 6y ago
  I've always used private playlists to organize things. They look like swiss cheese with all the deleted videos.
  - Jach 6y ago
    Long ago I setup a nightly cronjob to archive some of my playlists.
  - dbuder 6y ago
    If you pay for google premium those playlists will show you what the video that is now gone/deleted was..!
    - tal8d 6y ago
      lol, wow. On one occasion I actually did need to know, but only remembered which playlist it would have been in. I ended up having to search for websites that linked to a few dozen dead youtube urls. I never thought I'd be happy to land on a poorly executed Chinese content farm full of scraped html and incomprehensible markov chains. After that I started treating Youtube like the ephemeral thing it is.

FeepingCreature 6y ago

> Then move off. Great, let's legislate that you can switch providers but you have to be able to keep your email address, like we did with phones.

aphexairlines 6y ago
You already can, if you use an email provider like gmail with your own domain name.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  Which literally puts you on all autoreject spam lists because SPF and DNSSEC. Unless you pay for GSuite and/or your mail provider allows this custom domain functionality.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    So pay for it ? GSuite is $6/month and other mail providers can be found for cheaper.
    - lou1306 6y ago
      The point is, when you switch your phone operator, you don't have to pay the previous operator, in perpetuity, for the privilege of using your number without your calls being blocked.
      - umvi 6y ago
        Yeah but most people aren't paying for g-mail. It's like if you were using T-mobile "free" plan where you don't have to pay anything but you get a number that starts with "TMO", and then getting mad when you can't transfer your free number to Verizon because T-mobile refuses to transfer it.
        lou1306 6y ago

PixyMisa 6y ago

Don't like it? Build your own.... Everything.