Right? I had a subscription for Apollo and am now supporting kbin on Patreon (btw, guys, here’s the link if someone wants to help out).

It wasn’t that hard to offer a product that people would be fine paying for.

That’s a good write up, thanks. I don’t claim it’s coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.

Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven’t heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can’t not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it’s not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it’s a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I’m kinda curious now

Subscription-based, restricted to verified accounts Chromium, that shares your personally identifiable public key with each website you visit.
Shudders

I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.