become worthless
Finally something I can be good at!
You might have excelled at it already
Verify your age…
No
Upload a profile picture…
No
Update your home address…
No
Here’s a cool product…
blocks user, blocks group
Here’s a new feature
disable
Unknown foreign number
Don’t pick up
Unknown local number
Listen, then end the call without speaking
Unknown contact on whatsapp
Block and report as spam
Ads on websites
Block with uBlock originFor T-Mobile, you can remove voicemail all together. You have to call in. So it stimulates that the phone number is bad and gets removed from calling lists.
I got a new phone a year ago and didn’t bother setting up the voicemail. It’s outdated, just text me.
Dropbox recently enshittified REAL bad (little fucking diamonds everywhere. The second I see those I nope out because I know its vibe coded shit). It was so fucking laggy. Froze my whole computer. I instantly disabled all their shit, returned it to classic, sent them a review saying their update sucks and no one wants their ai and now I will be cancelling my subscription becuase of it.
Theyre also an evil company anyway so nbd. Dont use them.
Alternatively, answer all unknown numbers, immediately hit mute and let them hang.
Spam text? Request their username and password to continue.
I am doing most of the things he mentioned but I’ve gone further. No social media at all. No Google. No YouTube. I buy physical media and self host all my drm free ebooks and other media I actually own. I only use fediverse sites. Librewolf on Linux behind a VPN and strong firewalls. I have no cameras or microphones on my property. No credit cards and no debt at all through being careful with my resource management.
That doesn’t mean I’m not an asshole though.
This is the way. Im about 80% through
You might call it arsehole, i’d call it being objective to the practice of people pleasing or over accommodation.
Are you me? Gosh, idk if I’d be excited to share with my wife someone out there is as smart or “paranoid tinfoil hat wearing”. She’d argue the latter.
Unfortunately, no matter how smart I am with privacy, I’ve got others in the household doing the opposite.
This is why They want to kill physical media. Itll make it a lot harder to do this. Of course we can with files, but They can easily block ports and ban vpns so we can’t share media either or ban you from an ISP then you have no internet .
You have 0 phones on the entirety of your property? Really?
Is there ONE person in Lemmy that’s not an asshole? I’ve been searching for non-assholes here, no luck so far.
Plus, that great feeling when we tell someone “lol, that would never happen to me, normie!”, makes the satisfaction of it worth every ounce of being an asshole.
No doubt!
Generally a good approach, but…
Do you have to use or choose to use AI products? Why not use every single one of those tokens available to your subsidized subscription? Did your search engine build in a “free” AI product? Ask it as many useless questions as you’d like. Getting emails from AI agents? Why not chat with them and lead them on until they hit a billing wall?
Good thing the planet’s not dying.
Yeah, I’m not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it’s obviously wasteful. On the other, if dickheads get their money wasted enough, maybe they’ll knock it off. Probably not enough happening to make them stop, though, so probably just a waste.
I’ve been buying more physical media lately because I don’t like the idea of paying for digital copies that someone can decide to pull from my library with no recourse.
Also, have found that a way to partly combat being productized online is to build a life, hobby, or community offline. Time not spent on the algorithms is usually better for my mental well-being anyway. YMMV
I still buy digital media, but only if it’s in a format that I can download and keep locally, such as when I buy albums these days, I make sure to buy the MP3 versions so that I can download them to my machine and keep them.
Anything that’s accessed through some sort of app and won’t allow me to download it is an immediate no.
Shout out to Qobuz, I started my digital collection there. They sell DRM-free downloads in FLAC format (when available, otherwise MP3)
Do you have to use a big social platform? Click on all of the ads you see or click on some of them, but don’t buy anything.
Check out AdNauseam, it’s based on uBlock Origin
Using that app kinda makes browsing suck. I’d never gotten captchas from google themselves until I used it, then I got them frequently.
It does good work though.
Oh, I thought my VPN was the reason I got all of those.
TBF, google throws up captchas & ‘suspicious activity detected’ at the drop of a hat these days. One of our clients is a SMB that runs off Google SaaS, and recently implemented a 3rd party, device based SSO that is supposed to sync with Google auth. We’ve has nothing but issues, VPN or no, adblockers or no, and stupid captcha pages all the time. Youtube as a google product sucks now bc embedded videos randomly flag across all browsers and make you sign in to watch an embedded video on someone else’s webpage. I understand (though disagree) with google flagging something like known mullvad vpn IPs or something but a corporate vpn? A company approved ad blocking extension allow-listed in GOOGLE ADMIN? GTFO. Just a mess.
Like many of my fellow lemmings, I already do most of what he suggests. But I also realise I only do it out of principle. I’m not hurting these companies. I’m not costing them anything. A visitor who rejects cookies may not help their bottom line, but that handful of extra page requests isn’t going to cost them a single red cent extra. A GDPR access request may make a smaller company scramble, but the larger ones have systems in place to handle it, and very probably completely automatically.
Sure, stop giving companies your data if you’re so inclined. Just realise it is more of an inconvenience for you than it is for them - even if it’s not really inconvenient for you, it’s even less so for them. Unless a significant portion of users starts doing it, it’s mostly symbolic.
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You also get less spam and calls that way.
It’s kind of amazing. I do most of this stuff in my day-to-day life without even thinking about it.
He mentions libraries and thats awesome, but my library just got rid of their CDs (I’m buying them all this weekend). Their DVDs are next. Really sucks man why can’t we have nice things.
Soon libraries will be gone and replaced with a kindle kiosk 😆
