I don’t see people “forming a cult”.

• Apple does a walled garden that I don’t want but some people are fine with. If you give them a bunch of money and these days entrust them with a bunch of your data, they will give you a pre-set-up environment that works well. That’s fine for a lot of people.

• Valve does a successful electronic storefront that has synergized well with the Linux world. God forbid Microsoft were in their position. They aren’t DRM-free, but you can use GOG if you want that, and the commercial game world was not going to go DRM-free.

• Kagi takes money, provides privacy for a search engine and some perks; they let their customer be a customer rather than the product. I use it myself, am happy with it. That’s a tradeoff that I’d wanted for a while, and would like Google to provide with YouTube.

• GitHub wouldn’t be my own choice for source hosting in the Microsoft era, but so far they seem to be getting along reasonably well. They provide functionality that’s needed, source hosting plus issue tracking, and their system is pretty usable.

• Mozilla does Firefox, which is much more customizable than Chrome. I use it!

• I don’t know what 404 Media does. Some sort of tech reporting, looks like. Okay, fine.

If you don’t want to use any of those, you can probably avoid all of them, other than maybe GitHub if projects you use are hosted there.

I decided in the late '90s, when Apple killed the Mac clone market and took things towards a single-vendor platform, that it wasn’t where I wanted to be, but for some people, it’s fine. Other than 404 Media, which I don’t know about, I don’t have any problem with the others here, and some are companies that I’m fairly happy with.

Valve? Mozilla?..

With Apple it’s just sunk cost fallacy / Stockholm syndrome. Maybe you like apple products, that’s fine. But when you’re later confronted with almost £1000 for a monitor stand the mind needs to choose between i) I’m a mug and these people have clearly taken advantage of me or ii) no, this is a superior product, I’m a superior consumer, those poor chumps just can’t see it.

There isn’t really an in-between.

Why are people willing to sell their kids to defend the above companies?

I don’t really see this happening.

As for why I recommend some things, it’s usually because my recommendation is better than the alternative.

Perfection is hard to find, but in the meantime I’ll recommend something good over something bad.

What’s wrong with 404?

And the answer is marketing. Exploiting our subconscious is down to a science these days.

I think you should reframe the thinking. All corporations are profit driven, and exploiting a devoted fanbase is very profitable. Innovation, customer service, commitment to quality, these are things that cam build loyalty, but capitalism demands growth. If you run out of ideas or saturate the market, the only way to grow profits is to cut costs. Customer service and commitment to quality might be the last things to go, but they will go eventually.

A sense of community and tribalism.

Apple used to be the underdog in comparison to Microsoft before the iPhone existed.

Mozilla, well I tend to defend FOSS organizations, but this particular one isn’t very easy to defend.

Apple and microsoft have each a market cap value of 3 trillion dollars (3.000.000.000.000). That’s 3 times 1000 billions. A billion is 1000 times a million. There’s a million millions in a trillion. With about 1000$ or even less a month you can pay someone to shill for your “cult” 8 hours a day.

Because branding exists.

Where?

I am not willing to sell my imaginary kids for Kagi but I sure as hell love them. People can have good experiences and people also like to share them. Evangelicals are always going to be for anything or for anyone. What you should be asking is why are people willing to sell their kids to defend what they have strong feelings/beliefs about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification