Those are some good points, and I think what you’ve highlighted is probably a part of the reason why so many people seem to have the “YouTube should be free” reaction. They literally cannot remember a time before VC money was paying for a lot of services on their behalf.

I’m never going to shed any tears for Google losing revenue, and I’ve got no issues with people using adblockers etc. That said, I think saying that not being able to understand why people pay for it risks being a bit narrow minded.

Paying for things that you use shouldn’t be seen as some abherrent action. If you watch an hour of YouTube a day on average that’s still less than a buck an hour even with the price hike. I imagine some folks also like the convenience of being able to just use the official aps without fucking around, particularly if they have iPhones.

Pay for premium, or watch ads, or get into the ad-avoidance arms race, or stop using YouTube. It doesn’t bother me which one people choose. But this opinion that some folks seem to have that they are for some reason entitled to gratis, ad-free video streaming is so bizarre.

I prefer the current behaviour.

It’s easy to open a link in a new tab without right clicking. You can middle click (Windows and Linux) or command+click (MacOS). However there’s no easy way to force a browser to open a link in the current tab if the site wants to use a new tab.

Kagi’s “quick answer” gives me a better result:

Quick Answer

The countries in Africa that start with the letter K are: Kenya Kazakhstan [1]

[1] List of countries in Africa in alphabetical order

Though I don’t know if that’s because Kagi has fixed it in the last half hour, or some other factor. Still not a great answer. At least Kagi doesn’t show it by default, at least with my settings.

I’m not really sure that a K/V service is a more scalable option than Postgres for storing text posts and the like. If you’re not performing complex queries or requiring microsecond latencies then Postgres doesn’t require that much compute or memory.

People can get unnecessary scared of relational databases if they’ve had bad experiences with databases that are used poorly, but attempting to force relational data into a K/V can lead to the application layer essentially just doing a less efficient job of the same types of queries that the database would normally handle. Maybe there’ll be some future need to offload post and comment bodies into object storage or something but that seems incredibly premature.

Object storage for pictrs is definitely a fantastic addition, though.

Expecting communities related to a certain topic to coalesce on a single server doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, but having some kind of community metadata would definitely be nice. As you said it’d be useful as a way to filtering out certain topics, and it might also be handy for community discovery.