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Comment by beejiu | Hacker News Reader

> I would actually be looking to either reddit, or gaming YouTubers or gaming sites I already use

In my mind, this is actually the problem. Over the past 15 years, the "web" has become increasingly platformized, and it's getting more platformized every year.

The web is, for all intents and purposes, at the control and direction of Google, Meta, YouTube and a few other players.

When you do finally get into the "independent web", it made up Forbes, Tom's Guide or CNET. 16 companies own the vast majority of the web that we all use: https://detailed.com/google-control/

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So, I agree with you, but as a counter anecdote - I was subscribed to Nebula for ~2 years, and I barely used it because there was no algorithm telling me what things it thought I'd like. Even when I had a topic in mind that I was interested in (mega projects as a random example) I'd get low 100s of results, many from creators I had never heard of, and the ones I chose to watch would typically be from creators I knew from YouTube which of course, were presented to me by "the algorithm".

While I agree it's harmful to the web to be essentially under control of a very small number of mega corporations, even when you actively avoid them like I did in my nebula example, it's not clear what the solution to content discovery is (and of course, google et al don't really stop you from consuming content you already know about which is my problem with the original article)

Similar experience when I tried using DuckDuckGo as default on recently bought Android phone.

I'm all in for privacy - and actively dislike many of Google/YouTube moves (which seem intentional part of plan and not so much accidental or with technical reasons) - e.g.:

YouTube doesn't allow parents to limit their young kids to only whitelisted channels ...

Even worse, if you block YouTube.com domain - kid can't sign into school account (Google classroom stuff) because signing into anything Google actually goes through something like accounts.youtube.com.

And yet after 20th or 30th time when I was not finding things though DDG and manually typing "google.com" to do a search there (browser and other android search boxes were defaulting to DDG).

I just switched default browser and search engine back to Google :(

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