After their shameless Synology shilling a couple of weeks ago, today Techlore is trying to sell me Proton Pass.
Is Proton Pass a bad password manager? I don’t know. It seems okay, but I have no opinion.
What I do know is that Techlore is affiliated with Proton, which makes their newest 10-minute video - in which they reveal the affiliation only at the last minute - 10 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
Unfortunately, In the business they’re in, the merest hint of a bias kind of invalidates any advice they give. As the saying goes, when you point out other people’s body odor, you’d better make sure you took a shower yourself.
Unsubscribe…
I’ve been following Techlore from the early days Go Incognito, and I’ve definitely noticed a change in his content too. He seems to have lost some of his idealism and is more focused on convenience and the just works mentality. The shift started to happen around the time he started collaborating with the admin team from Privacy guides more often.
I get it that a person may get to a place where their approach to privacy takes on a more general and unfocused approach, but his videos do seem a little tone deaf to the specific audience he spent years creating 😕
did not these guys get discredited?
Not to my knowledge, privacy guides is still the gold standard of open decision making.
But if there is something, I’d love to know about it as well
I’m unaware of any specific failings as well, but I think there can be some issue with the very specific set of priorities that shape their recommendations. It was one of their main admins that corresponded for Techlore at the Synology conference in the video mentioned by the OP, promoting closed source software. That’s all based on your values though, as closed source software can still be privacy respecting. All in all they are a good resource, but it seems like they, along with Techlore, have shifted focus to convenience and centralization instead of more rigorous compartmentalization and FOSS.
I just checked their website, they don’t actually recommend Synology in the website in any of the guides I could find.
So I think it’s reasonable for a person to have personal opinions they state, but in their official work not expose those opinions.
And the criticism is fair, everyone should be open to feedback, but I don’t see a smoking gun here that discredits the work they’ve done so far
Certainly not, as a resource they are invaluable. Just a few trends that I personally take in to account when it comes to their leadership. Kind of like recognizing a news outlet has a slight political leaning.
last i heard is that they did some weird shit on reddit community and locked out original community
I am talking out of my ass tho
Yeah there was drama between the current team and the original founder of Privacytools.io
Long story short, they disagreed on how to manage the site and had differences regarding ownership of contributed content, so the bulk of the team started up their own site in an effort to separate from the founder. Probably good given the monetization efforts the founder was starting to incorporate in the site (and is currently doing last i checked).
It does seem wrong to me that they archived the privacytools.io reddit though, I can only take that as them wnting to drive traffic to their new site and subreddit. They should have let their work stand on its own merits.