Re: notifications - thank you! I've read several guides including that latest one, but did not go deep enough to find out about subscriptions, and it was definitely my fault for not putting in sufficient attention to make it work how I wanted. You definitely just improved my future experiences on this platform immensely:-).

Re: ease of use - I would also argue that TONS of attention has been put into making YouTube easy to use, down to extreme tinkering of the icons so that you know how to play/pause or fast-forward or whatever, and their intuitive nature makes it so that you don't even have to read a manual or guide or book or even watch a tutorial video in order to start. Instead, they "just work". Admittedly, Lemmy/Kbin aren't quite "there" yet, at that level:-). e.g., often you can click the image icon and things will show up, but not always, and also I see where some people are including pictures directly into their comments, but they seem to only be those that are hosted internally on kbin - so e.g. not working when pasting a URL - and also I noticed that the "From url" image option as you write a comment seems to be buggy, as it seems to do nothing (in Chrome on Mac OSX). Those kinds of things aren't enough to drive me away, but I can see for others how it would be.

Re: entitlement - I've found that older people are among the most entitled on the entire planet. Someone who is 70 or even 60 (or 50?) will attempt to use an argument like "why bother learning something when I'll only live for like 20 more years anyway", as if that somehow entirely negates the second law of themodynamics that things don't just happen without effort. Plus, if you learn one thing, that makes learning subsequent things easier. That said, Linux isn't for everybody, and I get that too:-). I gotta say that's one beautiful thing about Mac OSX (not iOS): it is Unix with a pretty candy shell, and it really has had a ton of effort lovingly poured into it in the past. Anyway, yeah then younger people inherit those attitudes, and tbf YouTube and Reddit and such have encouraged them further along those lines, so without thinking they have been molded into sheep. For those people, I honestly think that Reddit may be a better place for them? Things will "just work", there is more content still there, and like if they don't want to learn how to use this place, then they won't, so I guess then... just don't? There's a famous saying that you cannot fix stupid, but actually, YOU CAN - ignorance is easily curable merely by sharing knowledge, and there are whole entire classes offered by the likes of MIT, Harvard, Yale etc. entirely for free. What you cannot fix, I think, is obstinacy: if someone is flat-out opposed to doing something, then I have yet to find a way to get around that kind of a block, short of little-child antics like distraction or tricking them into it. Anyway, if they don't like this place, or linux or whatever, then nobody's trying to force anything onto them, we're just building up something that WE enjoy, and we're doing it at the pace that we as content creators and contributors and early adopters are comfortable with. If they want more, but are unwilling to build it themselves, that's entirely on them?

Speaking of, I might switch back to more lurking than contributing, if it keeps going this new direction where everyone simply whines that the fediverse is not identical to Reddit in every way. I cannot help them, but I can help myself to maintain my own sanity. Though for a little bit at least I'll try to offer rebuttals (like this one), and I'm so happy that as I do I get to converse with people like you who actually try to help others, have deeper thoughts, and make Lemmy/Kbin actually worthwhile for me to visit. :-)