Apple, Kagi, Duolingo, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc Browser, Netflix, Steam, and Spotify are great examples of companies that have a masochistic users.
Apple, Kagi, Duolingo, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc Browser, Netflix, Steam, and Spotify are great examples of companies that have a masochistic users.
Those companies do not respect their users and yet most of their users enjoy their disrespect.
You have to understand that gamers are used to being abused by gaming companies, so Steam gets a lot of credit for being less awful than what came before.
You seem like you have a pretty good grasp of what steam does wrong. I'll say that I'm aware of the ever increasing monopoly they're maintaining on the pc gaming market. I'm aware of the comparatively large share of each purchase they take, and that the existing monopoly makes it difficult for developers to publish games elsewhere for pc.
But.. Those seem to be more problems for creators than consumers. How is it that steam is awful for the average person?
From my perspective, they unified a previously chaotic platform and they offer a relatively generous refund system that tends to err on the side of protecting their users. Valve even introduces people to the Linux environment through the steam deck who would otherwise only ever know windows.
Help me understand why steam made this list
I get where you're coming from and agree with you, but is there a good alternative to Duolingo that's comparable and respects their users?
Why kagi? Is there a better paid option?
Kagi users pay for repackaged search results from Yandex and other free search engines(with little amount of results coming from Teclis) Furthermore, kagi uses the results of Marginalia without contributing back to the code or even supporting the project financially.
If you want to pay to a search engine, just donate to any of the opensource search engines( Alexandria.org, Wiby, Marginalia, Stract or even Metager) you would like.
Finally I will end my comment with this : https://danluu.com/seo-spam/
Aside from being a bit Annoying with its branding, what has Vivaldi done?
Vivaldi claims to be a privacy browser, but it pushes ads to the users whenever possible. For example, the start page tab is filled with pages that have their affiliate links, without asking for the user’s consent. Vivaldi’s ad blocker also whitelists ads that generate revenue for Vivaldi, again without the user’s consent. Moreover, Vivaldi does not have a setting to disable JavaScript; users would have to access the default Chrome settings to do that.( also they keep saying that they don't want to opensource their browser because then they would fail, while this is very wrong as proven by other opensource browsers)
Overall, I think they are very scummy when it comes to privacy and ethics of consent of ads/affiliation.
Their ads are still far less invasive than Edge or Firefox (and especially the latter). As far as I know the default links are all just typical paid defaults. And yeah, it's irritating that the ad blocker has those defaults and that they won't open source more of their stuff. But I still think it's far better than what other browsers have going currently