I try to avoid the place where I can. The only places I check with any regularity are niche, like r/roguelikes, or r/ironscape; I think they escape the worst of it as a result. I'm sure the bot stats on twitter would be even scarier though, and there's no real escape from the noise there.
I'll remove the particulars to avoid anything partisan, but:
I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked Popular and stumbled upon a national subreddit post with a 'chad meme', starring a particular political leader, whose unpopularity is hard to adequately convey to foreigners.
It was not just that this post had been so severely upvoted, but the comment section itself had a mantra more or less, with very little actual conversation, just echoing the same sentiment; and all those comments in turn upvoted to the point of drowning out the lone comments at the bottom (not downvoted, just not upvoted) expressing "???". I don't know if I'd ever even written the word 'astroturfing' before expressing my bafflement at a friend, so I don't think I'm very tinfoil hat about these things.
It was just utterly bizarre to see someone who can barely get a single win in public discourse being heralded -- monotonously -- like he was the second coming.
Google's "don't be evil" motto already felt ironic over a decade ago, long before they even replaced it with "do the right thing [for shareholder value?]".
Arc is still great on macOS (not so much the Windows build, essentially an abandoned beta) even if it's not getting active development anymore.
I'm defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using "chrome alternatives", or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attention through its wonderful UX/UI.
The basis of so much of Microsoft's complacency (and why the MB Neo was such a nuke to the entry-level laptop market).
It's pretty terrible how much this kind of dynamic rules over tech. I'm not a 'capitalist', but god damn if competition isn't the most important thing to prevent total enshittification.
I definitely feel less a product on macOS than anything Google-orientated. I don't know where Windows fits into that exactly, given "paying for Windows" is not really how it's even seen, given major updates were 'free' (with extra ads).
(I miss Arc, such a shame it only gets security/chromium updates now ...)
And I think Codex's desktop client has a built-in browser now? At least I've seen someone using something like that. Nevermind Atlas is a thing now too. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/
I try to avoid the place where I can. The only places I check with any regularity are niche, like r/roguelikes, or r/ironscape; I think they escape the worst of it as a result. I'm sure the bot stats on twitter would be even scarier though, and there's no real escape from the noise there.