Escaping Tech Giants => is a “youtuber”
They’re actually moving to PeerTube and self-hosting - “youtuber” is just the familiar term ppl still use for video creators regardless of platform.
I am trying to avoid using Google as a verb, turns out it’s harder than switching to a different search engine
Searxing
well, maybe it helps to know that companies don’t actually want their brand name to become a generic term, even if it seems like a sign of immense success. The brand name loses its distinctiveness as a trademark. Essentially, the public starts to perceive the brand name as the name of the thing itself, rather than a specific brand of that thing.
For instance, in the UK, people still say things like, “I’m going to hoover the front room” to mean they’re going to clean it with a vacuum cleaner. Notice that the brand of vacuum cleaner doesn’t actually matter in this case - most people own non-Hoover vacuums, yet will still say, “love, get me the hoover out the cupboard”.
Other brands that this has happened to include Aspirin, Cellophane, Band-Aid.
So maybe we should actually start saying, “I’m going to google this with Qwant”. In principle, we’d be undermining and devaluing the brand.
Richard Stallman was always right (in matter of freedom of code and hardware)
