psychadlligoat

Ive been around for a lot longer than them offering to let you pay for better service. Adblocking for quite a while was literally a malware concern

Then I paid a bit extra with my phone service to get the premium, which at the cost it was felt like proper value. Then Google took that perk away while charging me the same amount, demanding their price hiked Premium cost to keep using their service, or I could go back to ad blocking

Google did this to themselves, homie

That's a lot of words, I can simplify it for you:

Saxton Hale

Mods for one game vs basically every game

I could probably host the entirety of the mods on that site on my homelab, Nexus is exponentially larger and more complex

dark pattern

Nope, not at all. Its extremely forward, your local IP is listed first every time IME, and your lower-down comment has it backwards as it's your local IP that had "secure" written on it

it's not a dark pattern at all, people are just stupid and don't read (including me, I fucked this up too at first)

Someone else already said it and you've already swapped but I'll say it in detail:

when setting the server connection up you selected "ServerName (long string of numbers)" and not "ServerName (your IP - SECURE)"

this routes your connection through the Plex servers and makes it not a local connection anymore. this is extremely easy to do and forget you've done because it barely impacts performance

Steam has a bunch of runtimes that run in the background even if the main window isn't visible (due to being closed or in game or whatever) while Firefox is only open when it's main window is