Boycott US

As far as I can see, every company eventually becomes evil once it reaches critical mass. It's seemingly impossible to have a non-evil massive company; it's like an inevitable law of society.

Therefore, supporting non-evil businesses requires a constant engagement and dealing with small, inconvenient businesses. As soon as you get comfortable and in a routine, the business becomes profitable and popular, and really gets off the ground; you're done. You must cut all ties with that business and find a new, inconvenient, and small to medium business to trade with.

If we all stopped using AWS and started using something else, eventually it would become the same thing. It's strange and doesn't make much sense to me, though. I think it's a consequence of promoting greed in a currency-based society, but we don't exactly have any other case studies to compare against.

Thankfully I can avoid Amazon and still get everything I want or need in 2-3 days.

Don't play into this deviding bullshit. The consumer does not hold enough power just through consumption.

You don't need to explain yourself instead Talk about the structural problems that actually keep these businesses alive.

Yep. I live in a very rural northern part of the US. It's the same for me. If I don't use amazon, I have no access to 3/4 of the things most of these people take for granted.

I think you might be shocked by just how much people order amazon, regardless of what other places they have to shop. I'm sure for some people in some locations they have limited options... But around here that's not the case, yet I still see homes that order hundreds of things on amazon every month.

Very rare though for most use. Any item I need to buy I always found a competition. Of course there must be some things people can't find elsewhere but that doesn't justify for most people

I genuinely believe that if you want to completely distance yourself from all of these companies and completely insulate yourself from their actions, you're just going to have to cancel your internet subscription. Full on local net only. Or just throw yoyr comp in the river.

Or make all tech companies public, but we're not there yet.

but fuck me, I don’t feel like going through the process of making sure I have everyone my new email, change all my accounts, etc, so I’m taking my time sunsetting it

Set up your gmail to have a mail forwarding rule, so that any message it receives gets forwarded to your new address. After switching over your more major things, all you need to do is keep an eye out for things that have been forwarded from your old gmail, and switch them over when you notice one. Eventually, very little will be going through your gmail anymore. Even then, it's not a terrible idea to leave it open and still forwarding, just in case someone important tries contacting you there years later. But with this forwarding strategy, you can pretty quickly get it so that 90% of your messages don't go through gmail anymore. While cutting google out of your life completely would be ideal, reducing usage and reducing what they have access to is still a good thing.

For a while there I was just upset when I'd order off a third party/manufacturer's site, they used Amazon to handle sales.

Now everyone's moved to Shopify and that's it's own convo nobody's ready for yet.

I think we're all going to eventually have to come to terms with the fact that any internet use is going to imply complicity.

"Stop using Amazon/YouTube, just use <small service without the things you're looking for> instead" is just empty nagging.

I don't lose my shit about it; I just point out the catch 22:

Creators don't want to leave their established bases, and viewers are gonna go where the creators are.

Get some big creators to move somewhere, anywhere, else and their fans will follow and likely cause a domino effect with other creators. Yelling at the viewers ain't gonna help a damn thing. There's basically no content elsewhere. We need to yell at the creators.

Boycotting YouTube outright will not hurt Google nearly as much as it would hurt the creators you are trying to help out.

I'm sort of guilty of this. Id love to switch to something else but no where has anything close to the content. I was going to switch to twitch for streaming but that's fucking Amazon as well.

Yep. More important than where you buy things is how much you buy. Best we can do is just boycott everything. Keep your overall economic participation to a minimum.