Matthew Miner's Pretty Reliable Product Recommendations

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Website Recommendations

Aside from my own creations, I also have reccomendations for other great websites people have made.

Games
AntGame
Visit: https://antgame.io
Q&A
Codidact
Codidact is a more open, community-focused competitor to Stack Exchange. They have Q&A sites on a variety of topics. Whether you have question on programming, cooking, religion, or photography, I recommend Codidact to get your answers.
Visit: https://codidact.com/
Reviews
Air Purifiers
HouseFresh
Visit: https://housefresh.com/best/
Beds
Sleep Like the Dead
Visit: https://www.sleeplikethedead.com/
Computer Components
AnandTech
AnandTech is the place to go for computer part reviews. They go super in-depth and run tons of benchmarks to give you the best idea of how a part will perform. Their articles are super detailed and several pages long each.
Visit: https://www.anandtech.com/
Earbuds
Scarbir
Visit: http://www.scarbir.com/
Crinacle
Visit: http://crinacle.com/
TVs and Monitors
Rtings
Rtings is the best place to go for reviews on TVs and monitors. They review most offerings, and they cover most technical aspects of screens to help you make a good decision.
Visit: https://www.rtings.com/
Search Engine
Google
Google is the classic search engine. It's almost genericized searching as "googling" something. I feel like it's gotten worse and not adapted to listicles and SEO spam abusing its algorithms however, and Google definitely does not have your best interests at heart.
Kagi
Kagi is a paid search engine in beta. I have not tried it, but I've heard great things from others. I would recommend trying it if you're willing to pay for a better search engine.
Visit: https://kagi.com/
Bing
Bing is not quite as good as Google, but it's almost annoyingly similar. The upside is that Microsoft will pay you to use it, so it's worth considering.
Visit: https://www.bing.com/
Brave search feels like the only search engine currently innovating. Its results are close to as good as Google but not quite there. But in a few years, I definitely seeing this being the best search engine on the market. Two of its best features are its prioritizations of "discussions", pushing actual people having genuine conversations and sharing their real opinions over the usual blogspam, and its Goggles feature, allowing you to write your own lists of sites to block and promote. As Goggles expands to allow tweaks on things like keywords or links, this would easily become a killer feature shooting it to the top.
Visit: https://search.brave.com/
Swagbucks
Swagbucks eventually uses Bing's results, but it's not definitely not as good as the other options. However, it is the highest paying search engine, so it's worth considering.
Visit:
Mojeek
Mojeek is a new, independent search engine that actually seems to be making improvements to its algorithms. It's not always up to par with Google. Frankly, most of the time, the results are useless, however it definitely beats Google at other times, so it has some value.
Visit: https://mojeek.com/
Social Media
Civilloquy
Civilloquy is a Lemmy instance with probably the best rules and goal of any instance. If you don't know what Lemmy is, it's basically a federated Reddit clone. If you don't know what federation is, don't worry about it. You can use the site as a standalone site just fine. Civilloquy is still growing, but it's a great place to have discussions without the toxicity of other sites.
Visit: https://civilloquy.com/
Surveys
Prolific
Prolific is by far the best survey site currently. It asks you profile questions to filter the surveys you actually qualify for ahead of time, so you don't waste your time answering the same questions over and over just to be told you don't get anything. It also pays very well and tells you surveys' rates ahead of time. It even guarantees minimum payments if a survey goes longer than the researcher estimated. Payouts are a breeze to just send to your PayPal. It's hard to find anything to criticize. I suppose the number of surveys can be lacking if you are really active, but it is definitely the quality survey site.
Visit:
SurveySavvy
To be honest, SurveySavvy is not the best site for surveys. It's not the worst, but it's hard to find surveys you qualify for and you have to be choosy in only trying the surveys that will be worth your time. Its real value is in the SavvyConnect program, where you get paid like $3/month for installing its browser extension. It's not much, but it at least does not take any time or conflict with other options, though I would not use the mobile app which routes all traffic through its VPN.
Visit:
Amazon Mechanical Turk
MTurk is the classic site for finding any kind of quick job. It has about everything, from surveys to data entry to image labeling. With so much volume, pay ranges from pretty good to basically nothing. You have to put some work into filtering jobs to find the good ones, but it can be a good place for some extra surveys. It admittedly used to be far better 10 years ago when there was more community support and better tasks, but the site itself has not changed much since then.
Visit:
YouGov
YouGov is a solid survey site. It does have some disqualifications but you will qualify for most surveys. The pay is okay, and there are some extra ways to earn. The volume is fairly low, so you can't spend hours on it, but it's a good site to have in your rotation.
Visit:
Web Design
CSS-Tricks Guides
CSS-Tricks feels like it has 90% of the actually helpful CSS articles. Where other sites feels like they're written a new programmer writing meaningless stuff to try to get clicks from people solving simple problems, CSS-Tricks writes comprehensive, high-quality guides on cutting-edge features largely undocumented otherwise. Specifically, its flexbox guide is my \#1 most-used resource when I'm laying out a site.
Visit: https://css-tricks.com/guides/
Gradient Generator Tool by Learn UI Design
If you want to make a gradient, you're going to run into the gray problem. Simple RGB interpolation means that most interesting blends of colors just become a drab gray in the middle. If you want to avoid this problem, you have to do so using a different color space. The best color space to use is the new LCH model, which is designed to blend smoothly and intuitively. However, no browser permits this. You always have to just use the gray method. Learn UI has made a great workaround (beat me to it, in fact) of generating many interpolatory steps manually, so the browser has little to mess up. It therefore creates beautiful gradients between any colors. If you're making any gradient, you have to use this tool.
Visit: https://www.learnui.design/tools/gradient-generator.html
Web Hosting
Linode
Linode is the highest-quality, easiest-to-use, affordable VPN provider I've found. They have servers in tons of locations. I use them on multiple sites and highly recommend them.
Visit: https://www.linode.com/
Vultr
Vultr is also a very good deal. It's often more affordable, just it doesn't seem as fast, available in as many locations, or as polished. I do still use it some and enjoy its price and quality.
Visit: https://www.vultr.com/
Netlify
Netlify is basically the de facto king of static site hosting. If you want a free way to host your static site, Netlify has your back, and they make it easy. I use them extensively to host most of my sites.
Visit: https://www.netlify.com/