[jpmattia]

Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people.

I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.

[TheDong]

> move them over to ChatGPT

OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did.

Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral.

I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.

[itopaloglu83]

Or give you results that are completely unrelated and even try to convince you that what you’re trying to search doesn’t exist.

Studied with a guy from old Soviet Union, they were educated in a way that every modern invention had a Soviet inventor.

ChatGPT can create an individualized reality and truth for everyone depending on which advertiser’s target demographic they fit in.

[LtWorf]

Like how americans are convinced they invented the telephone because the patent office said so?

[alanh]

Curious, I asked Grok:

> Is there controversy over the true inventor of the telephone?Yes, there is controversy over the true inventor of the telephone. While Alexander Graham Bell is widely credited, several inventors and researchers argue for recognition based on their contributions:

> Antonio Meucci: An Italian inventor who filed a patent caveat for a "voice communication apparatus" in 1871, five years before Bell's patent. Meucci's device, the "teletrofono," could transmit voice over a wire. Due to financial hardship, Meucci couldn't renew his caveat, and Bell was granted the patent in 1876. In 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution (H.Res. 269) recognizing Meucci's contributions, stating he demonstrated a working device earlier, though it didn't officially credit him as the inventor. Some still argue Meucci deserves primary credit.

> Elisha Gray: An American engineer who filed a patent caveat for a telephone-like device on the same day as Bell, February 14, 1876. Bell's patent was filed hours earlier, leading to disputes. Some claim Bell may have had access to Gray’s ideas through patent office connections, though no definitive evidence supports this. Gray later challenged Bell’s patent but lost in court.

> Philipp Reis: A German inventor who developed a device called the "Reis telephone" in 1861, capable of transmitting music and some speech. While it was less practical for clear voice communication, some argue it was a precursor to the telephone.

[itopaloglu83]

Just like how the history is written by the victorious, every nation tends to accept certain truths as their truth.

exclusions apply, ask your doctor if the truth is right for you.

[typpilol]

Ok I'm curious. Who's the real inventor

[ghshephard]

Antonio Meucci invented the Teletrofono around 1849 and filed a patent for it in 1871. I know this mostly because it was a big deal in a Soprano's episode.

[eru]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_telephone might be a good starting point.

[alanh]

See my reply to parent. Reply to sibling: Whoa, I've seen the Sopranos 3 times and never caught that reference.

[LtWorf]

And by the downvotes it seems they also get really touchy if it's pointed out…

[zamadatix]

Wait long enough and it seems like almost any company tries anything to increase its bottom line, but the main difference between ChatGPT and Google is at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them from ever getting to that point... but it'll go farther than "here's search, we pay for it via adtech".

Kagi is a similar boat - the product is what you pay for, not what they can get users to put up with.

[firejake308]

> at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them...

Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fruit for quality enhancement start to dry up, which is kind of already happening.

[zamadatix]

I think the coexistence of ad supported plans is orthogonal to the above. E.g. Netflix still has an ad free plan, regardless of the other plans, but Google gives you no option.

[eru]

Google's YouTube has an ad free plan, at least.

[TheDong]

"And now let's introduce this video's Sponsor, SpywareVPN"

Yeah, sure, "ad-free plan". As long as you don't watch (what feels like) the majority of videos on the platform.

I pay for premium, but I'd gladly pay 4x as much if Youtube also required creators to mark sponsored segments and let them all get skipped automatically if you paid for youtube "double premium double ad free" or whatever.

[BobbyTables2]

It’s funny, in the late 90s and early 00s, respectable companies had no ads on their websites.

Now it seems like they all do!

[anal_reactor]

1. The reason why ChatGPT is free despite being honestly very advanced, is that they want the general public to have an association of ChatGPT being "the default AI", just like Google is the default search engine and YouTube is the default video platform. Once they have this position they can throw as much garbage at the users as they want and nobody will care. This is why it doesn't really matter how much it costs now to capture the market, if the potential benefits are huge.

2. Once the market is captured and solidified, ads and enshittification ensue. If you're willing to put on your tin foil hat for a second, I'd tell you that as a matter of fact the technologies to integrate different services with ChatGPT are being developed right now, and once they're ready it's just a small step to make sure that ChatGPT prioritizes answers mentioning those integrated partners, which can easily be justified to users as legit quality-of-life improvements.

Maybe the answer is indeed to just buy a book and go touch some literal grass, and let the civilization drown in the sewer of disinformation it produces.

[chasing0entropy]

Books, zero watts per token.

[eru]

You do know how paper is made?

[double0jimb0]

Just imagine all the gigawatts cooked to just serve ads via LLMs

[eru]

How's that different to all the time and effort spent on making television shows so that they can direct your attention to the next beer commercial, which also took lots of time and effort to make?

[notnmeyer]

maybe, but there was a time when google was the best alternative too.

[rurp]

I'd say it's practically guaranteed. It would be wildly unprecedented to not follow up the amount of hype and fundraising in the LLM AI industry without a massive amount of enshittification following it.

Even if improvements continue for years we might already be near the peak of LLM usefulness because all of greedy and abusive dark patterns are sure to follow once the manic land grab settles down.

[physicles]

This is one of the reasons why I’m getting familiar with self-hosting. Local models are improving shockingly fast. I use Gemma3 27B for generating summaries of podcast transcripts, for instance.

[eru]

> OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did.

Sure, so move them off OpenAI, once they start paying back?

[kajaktum]

In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.

[gxs]

Yeah agree 100% - this is why I’m a happy kagi customer

It’s kind of cool being treated like a customer

New feature releases aren’t about ad placement or SEO or personalization / tracking

Instead, their product updates are targeted at me - cool nifty features that I can immediately try out

Like kagi or not, just the feeling of having devs care about my actual personal experience is a breath of fresh air

I know not everyone is an fortunate, but I’d happily spend on other software of this caliber

[ibfreeekout]

I recently signed up for an annual subscription to Kagi on their Starter plan and I couldn't agree more. Search quality with them has been great so far, and I realize their small web search and exploration features too.

I've been slowly working to find other paid services as alternatives to the free ones that I'm currently using (next big one was shifting away from Gmail and onto a personal domain for mail using Fastmail). Migrated away from Notion and using Obsidian with Syncthing running on my unRAID server at home. Generally just trying to find alternatives that aren't in the data mining and user lock in sphere and more about maintaining a positive user experience without taking advantage of their users and their data.

[gxs]

That’s awesome

Be sure to try the assistant if you haven’t and browse the settings page for all the things you can do, again if you haven’t

It’s my default on my phone through their extension it works well

I’ve contacted their support in the past and they always give me real answers to questions about he product or suggestions

Gl!

[kajaktum]

This. Please can we go back to the days where I simply pay for services or items instead of being trapped inside a maze of buy now pay later, credits, coupons, bonuses, gifts, tiers, etc

I am sure there have never been such a time, but I long for it anyway.

[kibwen]

> At this point, we have to be actively be against free services.

Nah, GCC is free, Linux is free, Debian is free. What we need to be against is free stuff provided by for-profit entities, because the love of money is the root of all evil.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Linux is free as-in freedom. Linux is not zero-cost: it has taken tens of billions of dollars of investment from thousands of organisations over three decades - and countless volunteer hours - to make it what it is today; that the wider community gets Linux security patches and feature updates for free is a side-effect of the GPL license coupled with the low marginal cost of reproducing software once-written. I’m here to remind people that the bulk of Linux’ codebase was not written for free as an act of charity.

What I’m saying is that, hypothetically, if the entire business-world suddenly ditched Linux overnight and went back to IBM and Burrows like it’s the 1960s again again (and let’s pretend Android isn’t a thing either) then no-one would be funding significant Linux dev/eng work, and as much as we value the hacker-spirit of unpaid community/volunteer projects, I feel it isn’t enough to keep Linux viable and secure (especially in high-visibility, high-exposure scenarios like desktops and internet-facing services).

[colordrops]

They said service, not software.

[eru]

Much of Linux is provided by for-profit entities.

[kibwen]

Which doesn't matter, precisely because those entities have no ownership over Linux and thus no ability to enshittify the product.

[eru]

Eh, I heard lots of complaints from the Xen folks that the prevalence of RedHat in the kernel development community leads to double standards that makes their favourite product (KVM) get nicer and quicker reviews than the Xen related changes.

(I used to work with the Xen folks.)

[toomuchtodo]

Kagi, as others have mentioned. Google search is dead.

[captainkrtek]

Kagi is quite good, its clean, simple, and not much money.

[Baeocystin]

Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.

[cmrdporcupine]

Buy them a Kagi membership and switch them to that.

[daveidol]

A lot of people want to complain but don't want to pay (not saying that is OP, just generally)

[cmrdporcupine]

to be fair, I had a Kagi subscription for a year, but I recently cancelled it (mainly because I'm not working now and need to cut monthly expenses). I'll probably rejoin eventually, but I can understand why people cut these things out or won't do it. Recurring monthly expenses can be hard.

[MarcelOlsz]

My parents hate technology but they love their little KDE thinkpad.

[jgalt212]

> I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock)

I guess they are all on Firefox.

[nytesky]

Creat your own family yahoo — a website you maintain that has links to the websites they commonly use like mail and bank. Set as home page and new tab page.

It’s a slight security risk since it shows where you have accounts.

If you are savvy, build your own search that just passes it to an LLM and returns as page.

[cpeterso]

Maybe that’s business opportunity for some to create and manage trusted personal portals for family members.

[shreezus]

This is a real risk. I know of someone who got phished with a fake number for Apple Support (the fake number was promoted and appeared at the top of the search results). Apparently they do this with banking phone numbers as well.

[cyanydeez]

So inatead of being scammed, theyll be emotionally manipulTed.

Bizzaro solution. Sign them up to kagi.

[inamberclad]

Network wide ad blockers like PiHole are also quite useful but they can cause some confusion from the client side because things just break for no apparent reason.

[condiment]

I pay for Kagi for search, my family uses Kagi. I pay for NextDNS to block ads, all of my family's devices use NextDNS. I pay for credits on OpenRouter and host an OpenWebUI instance, all of my family's AI is private. I pay for the news - The Economist, the WSJ, FT, NewScientist, etc. Lies are free, the truth is behind a paywall.

The only thing money can't buy, yet, is a phone network free of robocalls.

[bombcar]

I gotchu fam: https://tincan.kids/

It’s a phone, it’s a network, it has no robocalls!

I know, I know.

[gxs]

Dude not to mention their ai assistant is top notch

Happy customer here as well

[ragall]

Kagi is a better alternative.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I just use duckduckgo and turn off the ads in search settings

[Suppafly]

>and move them over to chatgpt when possible

That's a huge mistake.

[james_pm]

Kagi search.

[bdangubic]

kagi ftw

[ransom1538]

Who uses google in 2025. That is bizarre.