The best time to switch away from youtube was several years back, after the growth phase of our few remaining tech players ended and maximizing revenue started.
The next best time is now. They will only get worse, and bow to powerful interests even more. Them demanding we prove age by providing commercially valuable info they will keep no matter what they say, should be the last straw for all of us.
Find smaller competitors, youtube and google are lost causes we need to quit both.
From my end I cannot always use private vendors without paying more and it taking longer.
That said I bet I have bought less from them in my lifetime than you have.
Help fix the post office then tell me to totally drop them.
Exactly, and the post office is further hobbled so amazon is often cheaper and quicker on shipping. 7 days for a package in the post now, from 1200 miles away inside country, from an independant seller for me last two times.
Vendor said that is for all of their clients. It was 2-3 days anywhere in country for lifetimes and since 2020 gone up and up and I seem to be the only one furious about it. 7 fucking days. Amazon sent something in 4 with free shipping on order.
I need it and or venmo, owned by the same parasitical company, for work for client payments.
I am in a little place on land in nowhere and need to use amazon for some stuff. Big box stores are 40 plus miles away and they may be overpriced if they even have it.
I try to order direct but for some stuff I need amazon still. As to google I hope to change phone to open source but idk how yet.
Our authorities and politicians want us to be vulnerable so they can see everything we are doing, and doing so they make us vulnerable to every other organized actor, groups working for business, foreign government, intelligence agencies, criminal groups, Etc.
That would be a popular reform to offer in 2028 if we could somehow get some candidates that did not live up the back side of the plutocracy.
May I ask what they banned you for?
Most everyone will give the authorities the benefit of the doubt, be it government or business, and assume these enforcement actions are in good faith, and if they were wrong that it was a mistake on their part not intentional misapplication of their rules for ad hoc reasons other than their stated reasons.
Reasons like government agencies sending lists of accounts to ban for reasons unrelated to why you are getting violated.
An ongoing reign of terror by a one party state run by the worst people in cooperation with the plutocracy is all but inevitable now.
The succession fight to our dear leader is the only real chance to take it back, but we still have the same worthless opposition in charge, chosen to be weak, to not offer reform, and to be constitutionally opposed to building and running a real political machine that could take the government from this Republican machine fixing to rig the elections every way they can.
I have never posted pictures on Facebook either, and have likewise always considered it extremely reckless for everybody else to put all of their information on there without even any protections in law and mechanisms of enforcement.
The federal government just streamlined purchasing information from data brokers, before every agency bought it piecemeal and they paid for the same information twice oftentimes. Now they basically buy everything and distribute it to the agencies that want it in an end run around the Bill of Rights. No warrants, no judges involved. Let alone probable cause or even reasonable suspicion for mass collection of data. https://theintercept.com/2025/05/22/intel-agencies-buying-data-portal-privacy/
It is also a brazen violation of the Fourth Amendment of the American Constitution. Using third parties to collect data on citizens without warrants or judicial oversight is a rejection of the highest laws they barely pretend to follow.
Gorilla mask. Or one of those 6 foot tall bunny costumes. Or uncle sam ala carnivals a hundred years back.