[Rant] Wow, Google can get fucked

Oh, the joys of living in a world controlled by the Land of the Prudes.

It's like Facebook still blocking anything that might even hint at a female nipple - breastfeeding, breast cancer awareness, statues, whatever.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Yeah, I've started to get weird blocks on prompts that don't even have the word child or kid in them...but MJ allows you to appeal, and so far, every one has gone through
Onlyfakes blocked the regular few terms, which then led to people trying to get around it - "youthful" instead of young, etc, so more got added to the block, including terms like student, schoolgirl, and loli. Even that wasn't enough, so they had to add cute, innocent, shy, and a whole litany of synonyms like that. In fact there's even a tooltip during the "generating..." screen that says that attempting to generate loli content will cause an instant ban. I have not put it to the test.
 
Oh, the joys of living in a world controlled by the Land of the Prudes.

It's like Facebook still blocking anything that might even hint at a female nipple - breastfeeding, breast cancer awareness, statues, whatever.
I mean there’s a difference between trying to block pornographic content and trying to block loli (which is now clear that’s what that user was complaining about.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet

"Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."
 
I also realized that not using google as a search engine but still using chrome is pretty pointless.* Mobile Firefox is so different though. :(

*I can’t stop using gmail or YouTube. Such is life.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
Google recently forced users to switch from their Shopping List over to Google Keep. The upside is that this allows multiple lists, notes, and presumably other features. The downside is that it no longer has any sort of sorting for lists. I used to be able to sort my long list alphabetically, so it was easier to search for duplicates, or to find and uncheck an old item being re-added to my list. I can change the order of of the list myself, by dragging and dropping, but I don't really want to have manually organize my lists by hand.

Why the fuck do companies keep doing shit like this? It's not just Google. So many companies release new versions of their products that are missing basic functionality that used to be present.
 
So, the past couple of days I thought there was something wrong with my internet connection. While playing youtube on chrome on my second monitor, I'd notice that the youtube website seemed to be incredibly sluggish to react, and videos kept refusing to load quickly or would time out and only load in low quality.

Closing chrome and loading youtube in another browser, however, like Opera, suddenly made all of the problems go away. Now the site is super snappy, everything loads instantly into HD, google has to be doing something fucky between youtube and chrome.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
So, the past couple of days I thought there was something wrong with my internet connection. While playing youtube on chrome on my second monitor, I'd notice that the youtube website seemed to be incredibly sluggish to react, and videos kept refusing to load quickly or would time out and only load in low quality.

Closing chrome and loading youtube in another browser, however, like Opera, suddenly made all of the problems go away. Now the site is super snappy, everything loads instantly into HD, google has to be doing something fucky between youtube and chrome.
 
Possibly also related to Google's crackdown on third-party cookies and their desire to become the überbröwser.
EDIT: Or yeah, this:
Weird how just about everyone out there has an article about this today. Must be some kind of coincidence.

-Patrick
 
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I'm on someone's family account for premium so I get the best of both worlds (not paying and no ads) but I had to change a fucking specific setting when browsing Youtube to get past the 5 second slowdown built into it whenever anyone uses anything other than Chrome.

Fuck them. Giving them money isn't enough?

Trying to divest myself from as much Alphabet as I can.
 
5 second slowdown built into it whenever anyone uses anything other than Chrome.
I saw this happening at work and just assumed it was some kind of IT security thing that verified "suspicious" pages before letting them load because it happens on some websites but not others. I am starting to suspect it is something that happens to ANY page that incorporates ANY connection to Google's servers, which means that even sites that merely use Google Analytics (such as Halforums) are getting swept up in that same Adblock dragnet. If so, even more reason to divest reliance on Alphabet services.

Of course as deep as they have their hooks into everyone, I don't think that'll happen, but still.

--Patrick
 
I'm on someone's family account for premium so I get the best of both worlds (not paying and no ads) but I had to change a fucking specific setting when browsing Youtube to get past the 5 second slowdown built into it whenever anyone uses anything other than Chrome.

Fuck them. Giving them money isn't enough?

Trying to divest myself from as much Alphabet as I can.
Before I solved my YouTube problem it was managing to really drive up my CPU usage and not only slow down my internet but slow down everything. All because adblock was installed in chrome.

I don't know that I'll keep it as a long term browser, I'm not a fan of all the extra "gamer" stuff that Opera has taken on as their gimmick, but as a former Opera stan from way back I started using it and noticed all the problems went away. It even seems to auto block whatever bullshit buffering YouTube and other Google sites try to do before loading
 
I considered posting this in the Enshittification thread, but it's probably more appropriate here:
"Web Monetization," an incubating community specification that would let websites automatically receive payments from online visitors, as opposed to advertisers, via a web browser and a designated payment service. "Web monetization is a web technology that enables website owners to receive micro payments from users as they interact with their content."
"Gee, I sure wish my browser had a built-in taxi meter that would automatically send micropayments to the website owner without any further interaction from me" SAID NO ONE EVER.

Fantasy: People hate ads. Let's allow websites to basically bill the user's browser directly for the time spent on their website(s).
Reality: Website hacking spirals as people hack into popular websites to embed frames from their own websites to siphon payments from "Web-Monetized" browsers...sort of like coinjacking, except instead of making the user's computer mine coin for the hacker which the hacker can then convert into cash, the hacker just...gets cash.

--Patrick
 
I can think of 578 ways this can go wrong, in regards to tracking, privacy, hacking, profile/identity theft, yet another esclaation of blcokers vs intrusive mechanisms,....
And I can think of 0 ways this will go right.

I also kinda doubt this'll be considered legal in the EU.
 
I considered posting this in the Enshittification thread, but it's probably more appropriate here:

"Gee, I sure wish my browser had a built-in taxi meter that would automatically send micropayments to the website owner without any further interaction from me" SAID NO ONE EVER.
How to ruin Chromium's market share in one easy step.
 
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