the more traditional style of forums are still around too.
They’re very rare these days though. It’s a whole lot easier to keep all your interests in one place rather than heading off to one forum for gaming chat and another for programming chat and another for gardening chat.
Keeping it all in a single feed means your interest can be piqued at random times and you’ll be more likely to interact.
I never used to mind ads that much, yea they were there but the sites had to earn money somehow and advertising was a fair way for them to do it. I’m not going to pay a subscription for every site that I want to visit.
Then one time I was looking at jeans on GAP and was bombarded for the next 3 weeks with ads for them on basically every damn site I visited.
I don’t hate ads that don’t track me about and are obnoxious in their presence, but that just doesn’t exist anymore.
American Gods really pissed me off though if they had stuck to the books it could have been an amazing series with great characters and weird but fun storylines in a unique setting. But they added too much stuff and there was a total mess with the show runners leaving so it all sort of fell apart before one of the best plot lines of the whole story.
In the UK at least, switching banks is super easy, I’ve done in twice in the last 2 months because they offered free cash to do so, there is enough competition that the banks have to make it easy to move or else they lose customers.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t be a problem (power companies etc could prove to be sticky) but there are legal requirements that entities above a certain site have to meet.
I really liked some of the Volition stuff over the years, Freespace, Red Faction, Saints Row, they were never “top tier” but they made some great stuff.
So there are still some 3rd party reddit apps that seem to work, Orion and Reno on iOS, probably others on Android, neither are as good as Apollo (RIP) but they’re not terrible.
Once they stop working, I’m done. The shitty ads alone are enough for me to dump that trash fire.
I like Invasion but it’s always felt like popcorn entertainment, silly contrivances that advance the plot, characters that do things out of character, a decent amount of action but nothing particularly deep and hardly “prestige” TV like The Last Of Us.
So - for me - the first episode felt pretty on-brand.
How about The Expanse or The Martian? They’re both relatively hard sci-fi that focuses mostly on our own solar system.
The Martian tells the tale of a man stuck on Mars and his ability to survive on his own whilst those back on Earth figure out a way to get him back. Both the book
and the film are great so you can’t go wrong with either.
The Expanse covers more of the local system. Earth and Mars are on the brink of war, whilst others live out near the asteroid belt, Jupiter and beyond. It goes a little sci-fi later on but it’s an inherently human story that has some great characters living in a time when space travel is still dangerous but achievable by humanity. It starts a little slow but ramps up brilliantly and has a nice conclusion that wraps everything up pretty neatly. You’ve got 9+ books, a 6 season TV series on Amazon Prime, and a newly released TellTale video game, all of which are well produced and worth investing time in.
Tabs are always vertical which is better for todays ultrawide monitors
You have the ability to pin tabs to the sidebar which means that whenever you’re on a particular site (not page!) they’re stored in the same place
Other tabs are ephemeral, they’re open for at most the 24 hours from when you use them, then they get cleaned away
There are separate workspaces; like swappable sidebars that you can use to - for example - keep work and personal tabs separate
The vast majority of commands (going to a tab, getting to settings plus loads more) are access via a Stoplight like global search control
You can “boost” a particular site and change its style sheet to be different colours - this can be handy if you’re a developer and need to be extra careful when working in a production environment.
That’s just the stuff off the top of my head, there is probably more.
I wish it was that easy…