Awful change, basically killed GMaps WV overnight.
Wow it’s so much cleaner. And we can just turn this on all the time?
You don’t love random selfies of strangers that come up in photos of pinned locations?
My favorite is random pics of someone’s kitchen because they live nearby.
great! hopefully there is room for others to start to grow
That’s be nice, but let’s be realistic, everyone is signed in, and no one will even notice. This is probably to fight scraping.
And let’s be realistic: if they’re not signed in - or if they even don’t have a Google account (because they live on the moon), then they’re just gonna follow the instructions and do what they’re told.
Everyone else*
Fuck google.
So they really just removed the only features that made their propietary service better than the foss ones? I can check public transit with the official app, and do everything else thats navigation related with OSM. Insane move
They didn’t remove it, just require that the user be signed into a Google account to see reviews & images.
So its effectively removed unless you are in Google’s spyware ecosystem.
Are they trying to fight scrapers?
Fight scrapers, provide more targeted advertising, use this as a beginning to get people to make an account.
Google doesn’t have an incentive to keep this information open without an account but several incentives to put it behind an account wall.
What’s odd is that for a very small portion of the users, this is incentive to actually logout! Less clutter? Yes please.
Maybe. Could also be trying to promote their AI because you can get the information through Gemini still.
ActivityPub review system? I don’t want to figure out how to make that right now. Somebody else?
You also can’t view users’ 3D photos either :c
Lol they are probably worried about AI crawlers.
WV still working for me?
Yet another locked down platform trying to fight the infinite network of bots that is AI scrapers.
