Not just Lemmy, it happens on Reddit and other social medias too, if it was just Lemmy I’d just write it off as that. I do accept the possibility that I’m just tinfoil-hatting about this though since I’m just speculating.

Kagi has always felt suspicious to me with how many people advocate for it in any search thread. Surely any lesser-used thing that people enjoy will get talked about, but compared to others it feels like it gets way too many for the amount of users it has. Their site claims it has 35,696 paid users at the time of writing this (source), but you’d swear everyone and their cats use it every time search engines are mentioned.

I’m sure some people genuinely enjoy it enough to share it every chance they get but it just feels off to me. That paired with the CEO thing keeps me away from it.

Just giving my +1 about what others have said:

in terminal man to get an overview of a command and usage, tldr.sh is a “tldr” of those same man pages simplified and very user friendly, and apropos to search man pages by description to find tools that do what you wanna do.

Ex usage:

man ls gives an overview of how ls works

tldr ls gives a quick user friendly overview of how ls works (after installing it, or using the site tldr.sh)

apropos compress will search man pages and output a list of commands that have “compress” in the description

Linux has an overwhelmingly large amount of commands or things you can do, it’s good to learn a subset of common things, but arguably more important to learn how to quickly find info on the fly using tools like the above to reference as you do things. I’ve used Linux for about a decade, but still only use the same 5-10 or so commands regularly in the terminal, and look up anything else whenever I need.

Reposting my tl;dw from another post:

Affiliate injection: When you click the “Find coupons” button, it will inject their affiliate cookie. This is somewhat okay in normal circumstances, but if you visit a site/store via (insert YouTuber) 's sponsorship and use a Honey coupon, it will override theirs and use Honey’s. The YouTuber loses the profit they would’ve made, and instead, PayPal/Honey gets it, despite the YouTuber doing the work. It will also inject their affiliate cookie if you click find coupons and it doesn’t find any, or if you click okay on their “We didn’t find any coupons, but this is the best deal!” popup.

Misdirection: They will show that they found the “best deal” while intentionally leaving off higher coupon deals; if a company has a partnership with Honey, they may, for example, have a 10% promotion running. With a honey partnership, they may ask Honey only to give users a 5% coupon and say it’s the “best deal” or tell users no coupons are available despite some being available (even if added to their database), so they pay a small affiliate fee to Honey in exchange for lowering the rates they give in coupons so they can still say they are giving them, but use them as little as possible.

Honey Gold cashback: This one, in combination with the above, gives you 1 1-2% of the order, but they make substantially more than they pass to the user anyway. This one is to be expected, but it is a reminder that they still do “normal” scam stuff on top of their notable scammy practices.

tl;dr: They scam you and your favorite content creators with misleading practice and affiliate injection; the only true “winners” with Honey and other similar services are the service themselves and the stores they partner with.

tl;dw:

Affiliate injection: When you click the “Find coupons” button, it will inject their affiliate cookie. This is… somewhat okay in normal circumstances, but they will overwrite other affiliates since they were the “last click.” If you visit via (insert YouTuber)'s sponsorship and use a Honey coupon, it will override theirs and use Honey’s. The YouTuber loses the profit they would’ve made and instead gives it to Paypal/Honey. It will also inject their affiliate cookie if you click find coupons and it doesn’t find any, or if you click okay on their “We didn’t find any coupons, but this is the best deal!” popup, despite them doing 0 work.

Misdirection: They will pop up that they found the “best deal” while intentionally leaving off higher coupon deals, if a company has a partnership with honey, they may for example have a 10% promotion running. With a honey partnership, they may ask Honey only to give users a 5% coupon and say it’s the “best deal” or tell users no coupons are available despite some being available (even if added to their database), so they pay a small affiliate fee to Honey in exchange for lowering the rates they give in coupons so they can still say they are giving them, but using them as little as possible.

Honey Gold cashback: This one, in combination with the above, gives you 1 1-2% of the order, but they make substantially more than they pass to the user anyway. This one is to be expected, but it is just a reminder that they still do normal company scam stuff on top of their notable scammy practices.

Thanks for sharing this, looked into it myself and that’s quite unfortunate.

Why does every piece of cool software end up having some reactionary midlife crisis behind them?

I can’t seem to get the cookie page to pop up on this one even if I turn off adblockers, but in most cases yes.

Some sites I’ll go to using my regular US-based IP address, and I’ll have to manually click through to disable cookies, sometimes by category and sometimes individually for dozens or hundreds but to accept all is one click. It’s heavily designed to pressure you to click accept all and move on.

If I connect to an EU country via VPN and visit the same sites on a fresh browser session, I’ll see a similar “No I don’t accept” popup.