Are you talking about the bookmarks bar?

If so, I had to use “customise toolbar” to drag it onto the space.

Because the “you wouldn’t steal a car” nonsense scares a lot of people off

Because some people want to support the creators of content but digital downloads from iTunes or whatever are more expensive than getting a month of a streaming service

Because there is a level of convenience of having thousands of hours of content at your fingertips without having to store content locally or finding it on a “dodgy” website. Setting up torrents / usenet is more work than giving someone your credit card number

Because a lot of people don’t know where to find content and if they did they don’t know the difference between a 480p avi vs a 2160p HDR DV MKV and get confused with torrents and file formats and how to get them on their TV.

Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.

I guess YMMV, I just tried a few places around me (UK) and it found them all. You can also defiantly tap on a place to select it.

Did you try it recently or a while ago? I know it was pretty woeful when it came out but it’s improved a whole lot over the years.

I wish Kagi wasn’t as expensive as it is.

If it was $5 a month for unlimited searches I would be all over it but 300 searches is too few and $10 is too much money.

Pfttt… at least with DDG you can turn any of that stuff off with a button in a UI rather than having to make a new bookmark or fuck around with your browsers search engine.

You can even turn the ads off if you want.

Also, Apple Maps is totally fine, it’s not overloaded with ads like Google Maps is and it basically always finds the place I search for.

Yes but if you don’t cause a bunch of poor people conflict and pain how will your wife know that you love her? /s

Phones and PCs are fine, I’m talking more smart speakers like Amazon Echo or consoles like the PS5.

I’ve never been impressed with YouTube Music, the UI feels jank and it doesn’t work on half the devices in my home (compared to Spotify which just works on everything)

Brave is run by some pretty shady people who do things like automatically adding affiliate links to your URL or collecting donations for content creators without their consent

As far as an actual browser goes, Brave is based on Chromium so its more likely to work on every site but it has a bunch of crypto nonesense added that you probably would want to uninstall. There are more extensions that will “just work” on Chromium browsers, for example I’ve had issues with the Postman extension on Firefox before

Firefox is based on Gecko, its pretty well supported and follows all the standards but there is probably a higher chance that a site might break (usually down to its pretty strict privacy defaults) there isn’t really much bloat (other than a Pocket integration that you might want to turn off)

Mozilla also feel (to me at least) like one of the last groups of Good People on the web, you can reach their manifesto to learn more.

This is pretty much it.

YouTube Premium is only remotely worth it because regular YouTube is an absolute shitshow

Tab groups are coming but in the mean time containers work well enough for me with the added benefit that they’ll also block tracking from the sites that are within them.

Agreed.

I would be hyped to play a new version of actual Marathon, it’s a game that existed before my time and was only on Mac before they were cool so basically no one played it.

This is just a different skin on a genre that has no interest whatsoever to me.

Ah yea, my bad :(

I don’t know for sure in this case but some EA games require you to use EA Play as a launcher, even if you buy the game through Steam.

It’s EA Play now, which is actually somehow worse than Origin was.

Still, Titanfall 2 is actually a great game (probably my favourite of the PS4 era) and is well worth a little suffering for.

Yeap, but Digg was still pretty early in it’s life and was very much catering for tech nerds.

Reddit is basically the home of all communities these days, its swallowed what used to be individual forums from around the web and put them into a single place.

Building those new communities across multiple lemmy instances also adds to the complexity.

Reddit also didn’t have Reddit to compete with, which certainly makes things harder.

https://www.popsci.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/GluePizzaAI.png?strip=all&quality=95

I feels like they either badly copy (see Gemini) or don’t think about what they’re offering (see Stadia’s busted business model) they’re content to milk the existing services they’ve already got and make them worse by cramming in more ads (see YouTube, Google’s search result pages) and they cut out or dictate the web through their monopolies (see AMP and Chrome) rather than working with other parties to make good products.

They feel like Hooli in Silicon Valley, basically the definition of a fat tech giant who doesn’t do any innovation of their own.

I feel the original Chromecast was probably the last truly great original Google product, it was simple, it was inexpensive and it worked - you just plugged it in, joined your network and you were off, there really wasn’t anything like it at the time.

I really hate what they’ve become.