It's a bit more nuanced than that. Their servers are based in the EU and therefore a rather easy target for copyright lawsuits, and they have neither unlimited funds nor the manpower to fight them off (even if the allegations are completely unfounded, you need a lawyer to refute them, and lawyers charge actual money).

Sometimes it's easier to focus on your strengths than fighting the good fight on all fronts and go down swinging.

You're not forced to use smartphones. I happen to live in China, and there are people without them.

You can buy tickets at the counter or vending machines, you can text or call instead of sending wechat messages, you can pay bills by card or direct debit, and supermarkets all accept cards (Chinese ones, that is) or cash.

People use wechat or alipay out of convenience. Just like people in the West use whatsapp, signal, fb messenger, telegram or whatever else there is. And some of those are testing payment service integrations (whatsapp pay for example is live in India since a few months ago).

You don't like it - don't use it. Nobody will force you. But if it takes me 7 seconds on my phone to finish a task vs. 2h in person, guess which one I'm choosing.

Edit: Typo

If you can't afford a good VPN, you can't afford to torrent.

If you don't pay for something, you are the merchandise. And the last thing you want is a VPN that sells you out, when your primary use case is to do something illegal with it.

I use DeArrow basically exclusively for LTT.

For those who don't know it, that's a crowd-sourced youtube title replacement script, intended to purge the platform from clickbait. Made by the same devs behind the SponsorBlock addon.

https://dearrow.ajay.app/

Use Firefox, and all the same adblockers as always.

Youtube has startup music???

Mongolia is a country.

Inner Mongolia is a province of China.

Some basic fact checking before posting should really be the norm here.

Fennec still supports it, just as it supports add-ons from the official Mozilla store. Don't see any reason why I should go back to the official app.

Looks like Yahoo! in ca. 2002.

I'd love a fediverse-wide tagging system for various kinds of NSFW (porn, gore, death...), Sports (ideally also by discipline), Anime, Music (again, with genres), Gaming etc. to hand-pick what I absolutely don't want to see.

Never in a million years would I think of scouting video platforms for book recommendations.

Hardware? Hardware was never profitable. It's a gateway to spending more money on proprietary software.