I've tried DDG for some time, but I keep finding myself using !g to find better results. I read a comment on Reddit that you just need to get used to searching things differently, but I'm starting to think that DDG just isn't very good. Kagi works well and I use the free version a bit for academic stuff, but I don't see myself paying for a search engine. Anyone have long-term reviews of search engines like Brave, Qwant, etc.?

We recently did a Kagi trial giveaway, and I have since received another email from Kagi with 3 additional trial codes. I'm assuming other Kagi subscribers also received the same thing (I got my email on February 25 with the subject line "A treat from us"), so I figure we're due for another giveaway topic.

As before, if you would like an invite, please request it in a comment.

If you have invites to give, please PM them to requesters, then reply to their comment so that other givers will know they've been sent one and don't double up.

It’s been about a month and a half since our big Kagi trial giveaway, which means most people are probably about halfway through their trial periods, so I figured we were due for a follow-up.

To those who started using it recently, what are your thoughts?

What do you like and dislike about Kagi?

Do you think you will continue your subscription past the end of the trial?

Note: I’m not affiliated with Kagi in any way besides being a happy customer myself. I’m asking this entirely out of curiosity.

I recently moved apartments and I'm leaving my beloved Google Fiber behind for some Spectrum cable internet that's included with the apartment (and I don't have any other choice). The issue is, it seems like I keep randomly losing connection and because I'm using my own router (but their modem) the Spectrum tech support hasn't been super helpful. For example, this morning I woke up and internet on my phone wasn't working, on my desktop I could ping stuff but it took ~20 seconds for the first packet to go through, but my router could ping things instantly. DNS was working if I got it from my router, but I have two PiHoles that I use for DNS with the router (running Unbound) as upstream. Rebooting the modem actually fixed it in that case, but I'll still have momentary drops here and there.

Anyone have any ideas of things to check? I've thought about going to Lowe's and buying one of those coax cable testers but I'm not really sure if that'd help much.

EDIT: For what it's worth, I live in Texas and there was a massive windstorm yesterday... and I think it's possible that that was the issue 🤦‍♂️ I haven't definitely confirmed that, but it seems to be stable since the wind stopped and the wind did cause at least a couple of outages in the area.

The word "content" in this text means works that you can consume for knowledge or for entertainment, e.g. books, films, TV-shows, video games, scientific articles, podcasts, poems, music, all of those Youtube-videos you have saved for later never to be watched again, etc...

With streaming services, apps and tools becoming worse and harder to use while also increasing their subscription costs more often to appease investors, AI is taking over not only our future jobs but also our hobbies and passions, i.e. the very thing we were supposed to be able to make more of. Sponsored as well as subtle user-made advertisements are infesting site after site, but increasingly, the interactions these ads get also come from bots. Social media is no longer a place where I “trick” my peers into thinking I had a wonderful weekend - when in reality it was mediocre at best - but instead a battleground of different actors trying to inflate numbers for short-term gain. It feels like no film, no video game or book, no service, no image, no friend nor foe on the internet exists anymore for anything other than a fleeting moment of transactional gain. Nothing seems trustworthy anymore. Nothing seems genuine.

With the most recent YouTube video by Technology Connections (“Algorithms are breaking how we think”, 22. February 2025) that talks about “algorithmic complacency” and how people today let themselves be fed curated content instead of finding the content they are interested in, it highlights a shift I have felt the past year but never have had the words to express clearly, which is the following: People don’t care anymore.

And why should they? It’s much easier to come home from a long school or work day and just get cheap dopamine without having to put brain power into searching for entertainment. After all, I’m not trying to learn anything right now.

Now, I know I am preaching to the choir on this site. I don’t need to tell you of the bad effects today’s customs and practices on the internet will have on us and especially the next generation, both short-term and in the long run, but the worst one I can see is not back pain, short-sightedness, decline of web-searching skills or even gullibility. It is apathy.

Propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, manipulation, advertising, reaching voters, gaining consumers, decreasing attention spans and a willingness to pay more as long as no additional effort is required on my part. Escaping this fate seems to require an ever-increasing supply of vigilance and effort. The thought arises: What exists behind us?

Now, this might seem nonsensical. We all love to go back to older things from time to time. Stuff from previous generations has always intrigued us. But I am asking you, have you given any thought to the mind-boggling amount of content out there that has already been made? Think about all the books, movies, music, video games - although all this most probably was made with profit in mind, it was still made by people who chose to make it because they could.

The other side of the coin is realizing how small a portion all of this represents, when compared to the amount that has been lost to time, in one way or another. Why then, does it seem like the minuscule amount of content we have left from times gone is not treated with any respect at all? Why are alternatives to modern content taken from us just because they do not entail profit? Libraries have fever books, video games are taken offline, free software starts selling your data or making the free version have big restrictions, and then there is of course the whole case of The Internet Archive. I have even had to sail the seven seas to get ahold of books that don’t come in a format that confines them to a specific, paid app. This last part is seemingly becoming the only way of accessing a whole lot of stuff nowadays, which is a shame.

In essence, as archives and physical media die, we look to the corporations of today to satiate our craving for quality content, and in so doing, we alienate ourselves from our uniqueness and our soul. Why read a boring book when this streaming service is constantly getting new movies? Why make art when AI can make it for me if I ever need it?

It is precisely for these reasons that we need to keep a steady grip of the very thing that makes us human: our interest in creating. It is good for the mind, for the body, for the personality, for the diversity.

Thus, this is an argument for - or rather, a call to action to - spending time with content that was not made for one-time use, but rather, content that respects the time you put into it, be it book, film or game, not forgetting to let yourself be inspired and expressing yourself in the process.

I'm trying to go beyond Reddit and Tildes when it comes to some particular interests. I dislike Federated websites due to their usability issues, but I also get the impression that they try to replicate or improve on Twitter. I never used or cared for Twitter in the first place.

I found TrekBBS which looks great, but I was wondering about similar forums for my other interests, such as science fiction literature, classic movies, etc.

So I am curious to know about everyone's favorite old-school forums that are still active and cool!

The websites are not required to be actually old, as long as they work similarly to traditional internet forums.

I get that it’s supposed to make things more secure, but it feels like a constant chore every time I try to log in somewhere. Grab a code from my phone. Check my email. Open an authenticator app. Repeat this process for every single account, over and over.

I know there are tools like YubiKey that are supposed to make 2FA easier, but the reality is that most websites don’t even support them.

I already use a password manager, and all my passwords are long, randomized, and secure. Is there something I am missing that makes this easier, or is this just as infuriating for everyone else?

I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

I'm one of the moderators of a small / medium community. I've been doing it for around a year, with no prior experience at moderating or helping to foster an online community.

We have a section for jokes and humour, and somebody posted one of those "train dilemma" memes. It gave the choice of letting the train hit one of several groups of people. It was general enough to not name anyone specific. The options were similar to:

Let the train hit:
a) Nintendo developers
b) Sony developers
c) Microsoft developers

Fine. A bit crass, but hardly shocking.

A commenter then replied by stating they don't mind which, so long as x well known developer is shot.

Now that really threw me.

The moderation team have been divided over it, although not strongly so. We are all generally in favour of removing it. But we are concerned about over-stepping and of course the topic of free-speech has arisen.

As it came up with us, I'll also mention that there are no specific rules of the website, or this specific sub-community, to state such humour is disallowed.

Where is the line drawn with free-speech? We would certainly remove anything pro-fascism, racist, homophobic or grossly offensive, but we do have rules that cover those.

I'd be really keen to hear any views on how you would approach this and how you would justify your decision.

To be honest I have some problems explaining what I mean, which might be why I can't find a solution or explanaition for it.

I use firefox on Linux and out of habit i highlight text while reading it. I always did that and it helps me to read a lot faster and to relax my eyes while reading. It's something i don't think i can get rid of, even if I tried, it's just so deeply burned in.
As well I use to scroll the text I'm reading to the top out of the same reasons or maybe it's just habit as well, but I realised I cannot get rid of it as well :-)

So no to my problem:
Usually this works flawless, i can highlight text and have the cursor where I'm reading in the topmost visible line. But for some strange reason this does not work in the "new" wikipedia layout. where if I highlight text in the upper third of the page it scrolls upwards quite fast which just fucks up everything and makes my day bad. (this behaviour is not present in the old design which e.g. the germand wikipedia still uses)

Is it me?
Is it my browser?
Is there a way to get rid of this, so I can keep my workflow while reading and learing on wikipedia? Is somebody else observing this behaviour?
Where can I even start to look for a solution? I don't even know what to look for.

It truly bothers me, as I'm close to every day on it, and it might be my favorite website.
I heard there is a way to switch to the old wikipedia layout, which might be a workaround. But I actually like the new Layout a lot, so if there is a way to avoid that it would be great :-)

Hey all!

So I was thinking of how when looking at privacy, having a platform being a walled garden (i.e. data not being found on search engines) can feel like a worse experience for what is regarded as the open internet.

I don't have a solid solution for this. So my question to you is,

How do you respect privacy while sharing content for search engines on a platform?

I don't mean that I'm scared by some terrible content on the internet, or that I'm actually afraid of using it. What I mean is the same feeling I often get from open-world games: FOMO, a sense of chaos, being lost and lacking direction.

Internet is inherently like an open-world game. There's so much content available. In your entire life, you won't see even 0.001% of it. This very post will probably be seen by like 100 people at most, which is such a tiny share of all internet users.

I get very anxious thinking about this. People often talk about how they miss "the old internet", which consisted of small websites and had to be explored. To me, that sounds like hell. I don't want to explore internet. I want to know where something is and how to find it. Information is on Wikipedia. Opinions are on Reddit. Et cetera. But the internet doesn't work like that - there's so much stuff that I don't even know how to grasp it.

I recently discovered https://are.na because someone mentioned it here on Tildes. I signed up, and immediately got that feeling. There's a huge amount of content, and I'm supposed to just explore in until I stumble upon something?

Tildes is one of the few websites where I don't feel that, because the amount of content is relatively small so I have a feeling of keeping it under control. But it also makes me think about how there are countless other small communities like Tildes, and ones that I'll never be aware of - and that's also pretty scary.

Does anyone else feel something similar? I've seen many people talk about similar feelings regarding keeping up with social media, but that doesn't actually bother me, but the amount of communities that can be explored does