Made me feel a little unwell at the beginning as well, but considering that the search is one of the main, key features o use daily, multiple times it is totally worth it.

I pay for a search engine, but:

• High quality search results
• No ads
• High customizability
• No weird SEO optimized Website results which help me not at all and I lose hours in a year clicking them by accident
• Did I mention no ads or sponsored content?

Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).

Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.

And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.

Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.

And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.

Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.

There isn’t much left.

First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.

Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.

Discord had a few changes the community didn’t like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.

YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn’t any competition which is urgently needed.

UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.

Which other big social media platforms are left?