Youtube hands down. Youtube is the best dad, best teacher, biggest information hub, and arguably the best meme generator in existence. The fact i can dive into any type of video content and come out feeling like i gained so much is incredible.
But it’s not free. You pay for it either with money (premium) or your eyeballs (ads). Not to mention the analytics data.
Depending on how you look at it then yes its not free. Though you could use something like Libretube to prevent both ads and any form of analytical data from being collected.
Though other alternatives like revanced manager prevent ads and give premium benefits. Not sure about the analytical instance of it though.
You can use piped instead.
Its built on opensource. A youtube frontend without tracking, ads etc.
I haven’t paid a cent for YouTube in my life. Wouldn’t that mean it’s free?
Apollo for reddit
any web browser
Genuinely free? VSCode
Freemium: Discord
You pay with your data: Google Maps
If there’s one service that I’m okay giving my data over for, it’s Google maps.
Without that, we wouldn’t have traffic data or how busy a business is. Crowd sourcing information is the only way to get a service as good as google maps. It’s actually amazing to me that it’s free given all of the satellite and street imaging done.
I used to contribute to google maps. I had the same vision you do. But then I learned about their dark way of stealing people’s data. All your contributions to google maps are now property of google. You are giving away your efforts so one of the richest world companies becomes richer. And keep abusing their users. So now I use openstreetmap.org
I remember when I tried OSM maps for navigate my city a lot of years ago, awful experience. Today is almost perfect and changes in roads are updated so fast. I love OpenStreetMap.
Yeah why the fuck is that? VSCode has no business being as good as it is. It’s developed by Microsoft, after all. Are they planning to take it away from us and charge money for it in a few years? Why does it work on Linux so easily? Is it a government conspiracy to fill our brains with subliminal messages somehow? Wtf is the catch?
My best educated guess is that’s it’s a ploy of some kind. If Microsoft makes a free code editor that’s really good, maybe no one will make a free open source one that’s as good so that they will have control over the 1 most viable code editor? There are other things similar to VSCode but they cost money and are too big a pain to pirate because VSCode is better than them anyway.
Here might lie the answer to your question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish
It’s not only VSCode, it’s also Github and C# and TypeScript to a lesser extent as well, probably. They want to have control over the “coding” ecosystem. And look at what they already did with github, they trained AI on all projects on it, and they then sell access to that AI.
Github Copilot is worth the money. I’ve had it finish out functions for me after just a few lines. There’s usually an error or two, but the consistency with which it can predict what I’m doing or trying to do is pretty impressive.
How can we use C# in a responsible and FOSS way? A huge advantage of C# is that it can’t run into include order problems like C++ can. This makes it easier to make better object oriented games because the object structure can be more useful and you can get better results even if your object structure planning wasn’t as well thought-out.
They learned their lesson with the old Visual Studio. Spending all of that money to maintain an IDE where the core 90% of it was no better than any open source or shareware alternative.
The only reasons people needed VS specifically were all features that could easily be turned into self-contained plugins.
And with everything turning into cloud services, there’s pretty much no point in trying to sell installable local apps that are impossible to fully DRM and have no justifiable subscription fees.
And when an enterprise goes to pick a cloud repo service, cloud code workspace, cloud hosting, devops system, AI development assistant, etc… Who are they gonna pick? Maybe the one from the same company that makes “that one app all our devs rave about”?
Their privacy policy says they don’t sell your data.
Not that you should automatically trust any communication platform (present Lemmies excluded), but exchange of data for services is at least not the business model on paper.
In a sense, you still “are the product”, because people won’t buy Nitro if there’s noone to talk to.
But that’s different from like… tracking micro-motions of your mouse to categorize your personality traits and increase ad conversions.
Please have a look at this about Discord Terms of Service:
