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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • I got some Google home mini devices and now none of them work to do basically anything of value. Actually I shouldn’t say now, they stopped doing the basic functions I wanted them for around 2 years ago.

    Telling it to play a show on TV doesnt work, which is essentially why I bought them. The most they can do now is basic on and off functions. They were constantly going off at random times when no one was talking. They have now become fancy looking paperweights.

    I also have Google TV which is slowly becoming worse and worse. I recently bought my kids Rokus because they had all the same functions as Google but without the microphone remote. They were half the price and are working better than my Google TV.



  • I have experienced it, and in my experience it was in no way possible for it to be confirmation bias. My wife and I sometimes do something weird where we just talk for hours. Crazy I know, but we bounce ideas off each other to an extent that we get into conversations about stuff we have never talked about nor ever searched for. Not even anything remotely close to related to things we search for.

    We used to have and use a lot of Google home minis. Within hours we would see ads for the exact thing we were talking about. We would see ads for thing related to conversations we had within hours. We started getting hyper vigilant about it. We started randomly talking clearly and loudly about nonsense subjects and products that we have no sense to talk about and waiting to see how long it would take to see a suggested ad pushed to us by Google. It usually took less than 24 hours no matter what it was. This went on for months.

    It became a running joke to us and I would walk into the room and say something like “I would love to buy a farberware brand vegetable peeler. There is nothing more that I would like than to purchase farberware brand appliances and homewares”. My wife would laugh, and usually before the end of the night I would have large targeted ads on my phone for farberware appliances.

    Honestly since we stopped using the Google home minis (since they barely work with anything due to googles bullshit software support) it happens far far less.



  • On a tangential note, this is the same reason I will not buy a phone without expandable storage. The cheapest statistic of a phone is now the difference between a $800 phone and a $1200 phone. For $30 I can double my storage, but that is not ok for manufacturers, especially when they can make $5 a month for 1G of space, that requires internet access, from millions of people. Learning that most people have to pick and choose memorable pictures and videos just because they run out of space is horrendous to me. The companies know that data storage will increase over time for every user, and they are banking on everyone banking their data in a more insecure manner, with them, at an ever increasing rate. I refuse to have my memories and heartfelt data held hostage by bullshit companies that can’t even support their own devices for more than 5 years.