It’s Chromium underneath, so using it increases Google’s control over web standards

mocp

I’m all for paying for the media I consume, but I will never pay for YouTube. First and foremost, I don’t think they pay artists enough, which is why I buy all my music albums individually on services such as Bandcamp.

Second, I believe Google is working hard on turning the internet into a privacy violating walled garden riddled with unblockable ads, where all relevant technologies and standards are de facto controlled by them. I use uBlock and reVanced to block ads on YouTube and pay content creators through Patreon because I WANT to hurt Google financially by spending their compute resources without giving them ad impressions. I think everyone should do the same.

I’ll just use this opportunity to mention kagi.com, a search engine that you pay for, but which doesn’t track you and gives you controls for customizing your search results yourself instead of letting an algorithm build a profile of your habits. I’ve used it for months now, and I’m not going back.

Goat Simulator

This. It costs money, but on the other hand it is FAST, looks good and ad-free. You also have the ability to block spammy domains so they just don’t show up in results.

Text is in both languages. This is common because the countries share a long border.

But there’s a picture of cheese next to the text!

Edit: it also says “cheese aroma” (“ostarom”) in Swedish.

I actually don’t have a problem paying for online services. I host my own email, I pay for Kagi search and I do monthly donations to Mozilla and Wikipedia. What I have an issue with is services that start out as advertisement based and then introduce paid plans, because now you still have all these shitty mechanics just for driving up engagement which results in unhealthy incentives for content creators and rabbit holes. I want a service that is for YouTube what Kagi is to Google Search. But perhaps that model is too difficult to monetize, I don’t know.

I bought a good inkjet printer because I like taking photos and printing them in physical form, so I can hang them in the house or give them as gifts.

I’ve also used Kagi for two months and can really recommend it! I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo a few years back, but Kagi is just so much faster and also generally has better results.