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0 pointsechelon2mo ago0 comments

> Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.

That's false.

There are hundreds of free offerings in this and many other spaces offered by lots of other companies.

There does not have to be one monopoly controlling all of it for the freemium model and advertising to work.

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Aerroon2mo ago

What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then?

There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.

Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).

Google search and translate do have alternatives, especially these days with LLMs doing a lot of the latter.

What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.

Are the free Maps alternatives good?

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