I don't like ads either, but they are the only functioning way of paying creators outside of direct payments, especially with economic inflation and competition from streaming services eating away at people's budget for media. No one else has a solution that works under capitalism.
The two options for compensating a creator for their work online are advertisements or direct payments. There are no other functional alternatives. In a better world, more countries would have grants or universal basic income, but that's not the world that exists right now.
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I don't think I've had issues with reddit, as long as you use the link to the reddit comment thread, not one of the shortlinks or the video link or something else.
Technical data includes information about your Firefox version and language, device operating system and hardware configuration, memory, basic information about crashes and errors, outcome of automated processes like updates and safebrowsing. When Firefox sends data to us, your IP address is temporarily collected as part of our server logs. IP addresses are deleted every 14 days.
There's a lot of people on here that see literally any telemetry or analytics as evil, even though it's a necessary component for any software at the scale of Firefox (especially automated bug reports). Mozilla makes it clear they collect as little data as possible: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
Telemetry is not privacy-invading, it's pretty well anonymized. It's also a lot easier to change the search engine than it is to download a completely different web browser.
"Gentleman's NDA" is not a thing. It's either a legally-binding NDA or it's not. It's within Valve's right to ban him from the game but saying the game shouldn't be covered at all is silly.
If every news outlet avoided a topic because the company wouldn't outright confirm its existence, we would never have reporting based on leaks and rumors. That's dumb and would make journalism worse for everyone.
If Valve wants to be shitty about it, that's within their right (unless they want to sue, which would be difficult to defend in court without a written legal agreement). It is also true that other outlets are free to do handshake agreements to not cover the game. The Verge didn't break any rules, and Valve already maintains a minimal relationship with the press, so not talking to The Verge probably wouldn't change anything.
Good news, there is a subscription service to prevent that and also still pays the creators.