Yeah it pisses me off the way people are like “tech bros ruined the internet”. No, users ruined it! There was no reason to stop self-hosting webpages, forums and IRC servers. Users switched to Facebook instead because they preferred it and didn’t care about the downsides. There’s an alternative to every website and app which respects privacy, serves no ads, and has no algorithm to farm your outrage. Users refuse to use them because they aren’t cool enough.

Is this part of a series or something? I have no idea what any part of it means

All the answers you got show why this conversation goes badly. No one can come up with an actual problem that data collection causes, it’s all silly comparisons to giving people your credit card number or shitting in front of them.

For me, having my data collected is like having CCTV cameras in stores. Yeah, technically someone is filming everything I do. Yeah it would be bad if a private individual was filming me for nefarious reasons. But no one actually uses that data for anything bad, and it doesn’t actually cause any problems.

All that happens is I get more relevant ads.

I still use both Lemmy and Reddit and I honestly think Lemmy is in a sweet spot where there are enough comments for a discussion but not enough to go off topic.

Reddit discussions are never about the OP, they’re always riffing on an off-topic joke that someone made in a reply to the already off-topic top comment.

Overpriced. It maybe used to be worth it, but these days all phones look and work the same anyway.

I used to be an iPhone person, bought a new one every two years from the iPhone 4 in 2010 until my iPhone SE broke in 2018. That was when iPhones jumped to being like $1000, so I thought fuck it and bought a $150 Android.

I was ready for a really rough transition but it turns out these days all apps are cross platform React Native with data stored in the cloud. Once you’re logged in literally everything is exactly the same.