And this is why you VPN.

Even on mobile it’s a couple clicks away from being on or off. Saves me more time than it costs when something doesn’t work the way I want.

Well said, and the things you’ve listed are why I’ve begun to de-google myself. After decades of wishing they’d fix certain products and features or compromising just to keep everything under one roof, I’m done with them.

I appreciate the role they played in helping shape the internet, but I won’t be a part of helping them try to kill it.

Reddit will continue to do things that push the users away. As apps and accessibility to Lemmy improve, hopefully quality posts and comments will continue to grow.

YouTube filtering is fairly unique to YouTube since they serve ads so aggressively so it's unlikely to help on other sites.