Big Tech Deletion Thread

S

stadtaffe

Orthodox
Heirloom
Post your deletion stories here.

My Facebook went very many years ago and there were at least five reasons at the time why it had to go. May share at some time in the thread if it becomes relevant.

Whatsapp went not long after Meta took it over.

Instagram went, although I barely ever used it, but for good measure it had to actually go.

My most recent 'purge' was Amazon. No more Amazon account for me but almost never used it. Feel lighter without it. I got rid of AWS Amazon Web Services many years ago.

Still have Twitter but don't use it, but with Elon taking it over and free speech absolutism I will be unlikely to delete.

I have been forced to recreate an anonymous WhatsApp account but do dislike having it.

Oh, almost forgot, my Google account went many years ago, and along with it goodbye to the youtube app, goodbye to the playlists and goodbye to the reviews I'd left for various busineses unfortunately. Never had Gmail or an Android phone which was not degoogled.

If only I could get rid of Mastercard and Visa, but that belongs in another thread.

There are many reasons - artificial intelligence being weaponised against people for wrongthink, tracking people accross devices, takes you away from real life into a computer world, big tech is centralised walled gardens and decentralisation is a possible cure.
 
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The solution to big tech existed in the early 2000's and late 90's - small tech. Where everyone owned their own platforms in the vein of blogs, forums, etc. and if anyone is wanting to get out of big tech and still use the internet to the real potential it has - start a website. There aren't enough good ones out there!

I have found a middle ground to this: use "Big Tech" platforms simply as a marketing tool to get people to the places that you actually own and control. This means that if you are not trying to help others/create value for them, there is no point in having any big tech accounts whatsoever, as they poison the mind and make it harder to live a life close to God.

This means that you must remain disciplined to only post to them, never to scroll or to participate in any meaningful way. If someone messages you on the platform, kindly send them to your website or give them a direct point of contact without the middleman. I have been successfully spending less than 30 minutes of screen time on my phone for the better part of the last year doing this method - if I am able to get enough people unplugged, I may consider deleting them entirely.

There is a massive foray into the darknet as of late for many - it is the internet renaissance 2.0, where privacy and anonymity are once again valued, this is an alternative as well.

Some other alternatives:
- Genesis/Gopher
- Federated platforms
- i2p/Freenet/TOR
- "Free speech" platforms
 
I never had a social media account, nor Google email and whatnot, because I was always skeptical of that kind of Internet. Those who never experienced the early days of the Internet stuck to their apps, which I see as a kind of digital jail. My Internet access is done through a browser and email client, and I also read news through a text-based browser like Lynx, if this is possible.

When it comes to multimedia, I download most of my content to my MP3 player, which reduces my screen time significantly and allows me to do other things like work in the kitchen or go to bed early and listen, which doesn't kill my sleep.
 
Bird said:
I also read news through a text-based browser like Lynx,
Click to expand...
That is an interesting program, browser in a terminal. It actually saved me once. I have it installed but never use it. One day as happens maybe once a year my gui crashed and I had to repair linux from the terminal. Needed to curl some repository and install something to fix it, but how to find that without a browser? That is where lynx came in handy. If you actually don't have a gui for some reason it is actually helpful for in a survival situation to know that it exists and preferably have it installed.
 
RSS feeds are a great way to read news/blogs/etc. that you enjoy following without having to go to the individual websites. You also get a text only interface, so the chance of distraction with imagery and video is far lower. You can also follow youtube channels (and pretty much anything) via this method, so there is no "next video" or "suggested videos" rabbit hole to fall down.
 
Thefinalepic said:
RSS feeds are a great way to read news/blogs/etc. that you enjoy following without having to go to the individual websites. You also get a text only interface, so the chance of distraction with imagery and video is far lower. You can also follow youtube channels (and pretty much anything) via this method, so there is no "next video" or "suggested videos" rabbit hole to fall down.
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm a big advocate of RSS feeds too. You can follow YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, blogs, news, etc all from one place. Forums and one or two social media sites are the only ones I follow nowadays not in a RSS reader (since they're either not available in RSS or unsuited to being in one).
 
Thank you for this thread. Yesterday I deactivated my Twitter account. It was too much of a temptation to waste time and after 5k tweets, I had 25 followers (half I believe were bots) and next to no interaction. There was no purpose in it for a small-time user such as myself. I also ended up blocking loads of accounts because they were too incendiary, deliberately and skillfully provoking engagement through ragebait. Even people I liked ended up posting things that made me irritated with them because of their tone.

Not that long ago NYC experienced flooding. There were a couple of videos on Twitter of the event. What baffled me, however, was that there weren't loads of videos. I mean, everyone has a phone and can upload videos, right? Why was I seeing the same couple of videos over and over? I found myself frustrated with however Twitter appears to truncate data (maybe not correct term), or deprive us of what's really being tweeted, which surely must be an awful lot. If I can't see many rapid and unique videos then what is the point of this service?

I got tired of the information overload and realized there was never going to be a way to be informed on anything. I find forums such as this far better, especially because it's easy to go back or look through archives. With Twitter it was incredibly clunky to go through someone's tweets, especially if there are thousands. I also felt sad that a lot of brain power is being wasted by people trying to have good takes so they get a little bit of attention. I had fallen into that trap myself and sometimes trolled so I could get engagement.

I rarely found Twitter helpful and informative. I've been learning to program and I tried to curate who I followed based on programmers, tech entrepreneurs and so on, but the things they tweeted were not helpful in any way. I can only read stuff like 'we all feel imposter syndrome' or 'tailwind is great' so many times before I hang it up.

The only other social media I use and I'm not sure if it's Big Tech, is reddit. But for reddit I curate it so I only follow tech and programming subs. Still, it's hard to avoid liberal snark and negativity and so my use becomes increasingly limited but I check it from time to time.
 
I remember only four years ago, I rarely used my cellphone. Then I had to buy a new one to have memory for all the apps. Now I can’t live without it. I can’t even make a doctor’s appointment without a smartphone. The technology sucks you into a prison.
 
God only knows what kind of fate my parents saved me from, just by casually warning me at an early age once or twice, "social media is bad, my boy". There was no struggle involved, I was young enough that I was just like "oh, okay mom!" and then The World was never able to give me a convincing argument that she was wrong, because it has no real arguments for anything, it literally just relies on lying to you before your family or your priest can tell you the truth. I was now completely impervious to 90% of all psyops, forever. Glory be to God. Proverbs 22:6 comes to mind.

I did unfortunately get sucked into watching youtubers, however. I have fairly recently broken free from YouTube. I installed this FOSS extension that basically removes a bunch of spiritually harmful things from YouTube. For example, it removes its ability to suck you in for hours by disabling all video recommendations and autoplay, along with many other toggleable features, such as (wow this is going to look like a shill post):

- Disabling comments sitewide
- Disabling only the profile pictures in the comments section (personally it really bothers me viscerally when I see a youtube comment where the profile picture of the poster has satanic imagery or cropped pornography or something)
- Removing all comments except the ones that contain timestamps (those are generally the only ones worth reading)
- Removing the YouTube homepage entirely and automatically redirecting you to your subscriptions page
- Removing shorts entirely or turning them into normal videos (no more brain-rotting TikTok shenanigans)
- Hiding or blurring thumbnails (no more stumbling upon vulgar/disturbing imagery)
- Removing the notifications bell (this is great if engaging in online arguments is a passion for you)
- Removing astroturfed nonsense and trending videos from searches. If I understand correctly, YouTube sometimes just slaps Jewish propaganda on to your searches and puts them above even videos that exactly match your search query. It even shoves things in there that the algorithm thinks you'll like, or worse, things that normies like, because when you're searching for a programming guide, that's exactly what you need, Shakira singing in Spanish about how much of a girlboss she is and how sexy she thinks she is even though she is like 50 or something.

These days, using YouTube without this or a similar extension is rather irresponsible, even. It's important to make your internet use as intentional as possible, or else the internet is the one using you.
 
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Does anyone have a maps website recommendation other than Google maps or other big tech?

Of course I don't have a Google account but don't like to even use the page unless nothing else works.

I used to use the Here Maps but it somehow just had too many errors and user unfriendly quirks.

On my phone I have OsmAnd with the downloaded offline maps. Actually many of the POIs on that are quite useful, not necessarily businesses but other features around cities. The Open Street Maps website however is not so wonderful.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be worth having some kind of Linux or Gnome offline maps on the PC, but maybe there is some other maps website which is good.
 
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