I think the only reason it’s controversial is that the wording of the OP is very confusing. I certainly use “they” to refer to others by default but it’s not for privacy reasons…it’s because I don’t automatically know the pronouns of strangers. I took this post as saying that we should use one pronoun for everyone to create the smallest amount of data to be collected.

If that’s what was meant then yeah I wouldn’t mind that, but I read this as more a suggestion that we shouldn’t refer to the genders of others because doing so would leak information. I use “they” for others by default but this reads as telling me that I shouldn’t tell others I use “she” and that others shouldn’t use “she” for me to maintain the utmost of anonymity.

Nah, my pronouns and gender are a key part of my personhood and I intend to assert them wherever I can. I’m not going back in the closet for any privacy concerns.

Data collection is a problem but the solution isn’t for us all to hide who we are, it’s to smash the political environment that makes that abuse possible.

Having read his page on that, his suggestion was to use another one instead of “they” for petty prescriptivist reasons. While to me it comes off as a silly Stallmanism that I don’t mind that much, it’s plenty understandable for people who use “they” and have come across thousands of arguments making the same linguistcally questionable points for transphobic reasons to be suspicious of that. Especially given his awful thoughts on other things.

…yes, but freetube is actually comparable to the featureset of newpipe, piped, or invidious.

You’re approaching this as a confrontation when it isn’t one. You listed two players which are not necessarily replacements for a desktop user who wants subscription management and such, so I provided one which does.

You only mentioned newpipe and mpv…

I’ve seen no reason to believe any privacy frontend I’ve used has done this. However, even if you are concerned about this, Freetube is a more convenient option which can use its own local API similar to how Newpipe does it while still keeping a nice interface with subscription management and such.

He says it was 15 minutes, and I doubt 15 minutes in the sun is gonna give anyone cancer.

Looking at the page, I don’t see any reason to think this is a joke. There’s tons of stuff like this and also real paid events that people seem to be into.

Arkenfox’s page on extensions is helpful for cutting down your extension list by using built in browser tools and expanding the capabilities of the few you should keep.

I’m not super concerned as a user of the search engine and not the browser. When I see stuff like this it certainly gets me paying a bit more attention, but I think DDG is still fine and I don’t mind using it while it continues to have the best experience for privacy-conscious search engines. This appears to be a legitimate issue with the browser, but nearly every bad headline I’ve seen about the search engine has turned out to be complete bs.

If this is enough to shake your trust in anything they touch, fair enough, but I’m not there yet.

Losing /r/piracy would be a real shame. I haven’t had a reddit account in years, but I still visit occasionally because the megathread and other things are such great resources (especially when I need to grab stream links for friends too scared to torrent). It’s important for outreach, whether we like it or not.