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Comment by gitgud | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of people trying to cut out plastics from there life. This is hard because plastic is cheap, convinient, useful and it's embedded in every product in modern life.... Just like Google

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I don't see the problem. There's still privacy benefits to be had by cutting Google out of your life 90% of the time, or even 75% or 50% of the time.

I've largely cut out Google, but still occassionally use YouTube, Maps (usually through a 3rd party), and very rarely search.

For me, StreetView and the huge library on YouTube are just too useful to completely give up, and, unfortunately, I don't know of any alternatives making headway in those areas.

Bing Maps has a street view equivalent that covers most cities, at least in the US somewhere close to a margin of error difference to Google in terms of cities covered.

In fewer cities and increasingly hard to find in the interface (because a lot of it is growing out of date, and it is in general more rare than Street View), Bing Maps also has a really cool best of both worlds "Bird's Eye view" taken from helicopters in daylight at a particular distance and an isometric-esque angle chosen to provide a strong amount of detail. I've found that be extremely useful for picking up a neighborhood-worth of landmarks in a glance for navigating a space by foot or car. It really is a shame Microsoft/Bing stopped advertising it so heavily as a competitive advantage and have let its prominence in the UI disappear to the point where finding it is a labyrinthine task, but unlike the mythical minotaur, I know it still exists (for now).

I don't know what to do about YouTube. I keep hoping that they've made the non-Premium experience so bad that enough of the people I follow might move to better platforms, but so far network effects win again.

I do like Bing's "Bird's Eye View", but I have to disagree about their Street View coverage.

Here in Colorado, for example, Bing Maps doesn't cover anything in the western half of the state, not even larger cities along the interstate, like Grand Junction. Meanwhile, Google has Streetview imagery for practically every paved road in the state, and even a lot of forest service roads in the middle of the mountains. I know that's not a big deal for most people, but it's a huge use case for me to help plan bike trips.

And Bing doesn't cover much, if anything, outside of the US.

yeah, the original comment's comparison seems disingenuous as it just lists various generic positive things and completely ignores any negatives. television would also seemingly fit the bill.

there are obvious downsides to plastics, google and TV. that excising it completely is extremely difficult if not impossible in the modern world does not diminish the positive effects of reducing consumption.

Plastics can also be the cleanest solution if they are reused over and over.

Alot of the consumer plastics next to ABS and PET is polypropylene, which is hard to reuse or recycle.

Liking this analogy - if we continue the logic - there is another property of plastic in that it’s known to be toxic with mass consumption.

Also would the advertising industry then be like oil/petrochemical complex?

Plastics don’t randomly disappear some mornings. Plastic compatibility is dictated by chemistry and not political crap.

Doesn't mean it's a bad idea, just hard. Same as plastics, and still worthwhile.

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