Good points, and I've made/discussed/seen these elsewhere as well, but one thing to add explicitly: it is still possible to get 'you go to stuff'. I don't have

Good points, and I've made/discussed/seen these elsewhere as well, but one thing to add explicitly: it is still possible to get 'you go to stuff'. I don't have the impression I changed how I do that. But: it does seem to get harder and harder and I'm actually not sure it will remain doable in the future (except perhaps by a small subset of hacker-ish people) because it gets indeed not pushed at all. Examples are things like LineageOS on your phone and/or not actevily using it as an extension but as a tool, illegally downloading content (still thrives), it actually seems a lot easier these days to download music from lesser known to virtually unknown bands (even if it's just via YouTube) and I still find this like I used to i.e. mainly by going to shows or looking at who's playing and finding related bands like that, choosing anything but Google/Bing/... as principal search provider and using multiple search engines, ... So, I'm personally not heavily affected by that steering but I do indeed fear that it might become a lot harder in the future. On the other hand we shouldn't forget that for a lot of humanity out there the previous decades they just got their information from 1 or 2 TV channels, radio, cinema, and a newspaper. If they wouldn't actively seek value they'd be basically in almost the same boat. Except that today's boat is a lot more pushy.