cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
A good search engine would be nice to have (again). How come even duck duck go or other (free?) search engines are also so bad now?
Because operating a search engine is expensive. I personally use Kagi and love it, but that’s $10/month for unlimited searches.
Noooo no more subscriptions please. Can we please go back to one time payments for apps/services?
I understand hating subscriptions but in this case a one time payment would require Kagi to continually gain an increasing number of members for eternity or run out of operating money and shut down. You could hope for something donation-based like most Lemmy instances, but just expecting other users to cover your costs is selfish. There’s a difference between asking your users to at least pay what they’re costing you and rent-seeking with things that don’t or shouldn’t cost you a dime to provide. Subscription services have existed for a very, very long time (see: any government that collects taxes), it’s only recently and due to greedy trends that they’ve been becoming a nuisance.
If you want to empower your own sense of privacy and security, you’ll need to accept that you’ve been paying for services with your data or supposed ad views for decades, and some of those services cost money to run.
I tried the 100 free searches from Kagi and compared the results to DDG. In almost every search the results were the same. Even the order. I think the real benefit to Kagi is the lack of ads and tracking, tha’s all.
I think the real reason search sucks these days is the AI they put between you and what your looking for. It’s no longer searching for what you typed, it’s searching for what it thinks you want.
The huge benefit of Kagi is that they allow you to customize results and blacklist SEO spam or deprioritize sites you don’t care about in your results. Out of the box, I’ve had a similar experience with the results being very similar to DDG, though. Over time, I suspect it’d be a better overall experience, but that’s hard to judge in 100 searches.
I’ve been on the fence whether that’s worth the cost to me, but I’ve been increasingly leaning toward biting the bullet.
I’ve been giving it a go, too. It does seem to be a bit better overall, with customized site priorities being the coolest part.
I think I could get on board for 5 bucks, but a tenskee a month is something I’ll look at twice whenever I take a critical look at the subscriptions.
They have $5 for 300 searches per month
True. I get weird with caps, but maybe 300 would be reasonable. I’ll definitely consider that when the trial runs dry!
I thought i would use more, but i am averaging 2.5 per day which will be just fine. When/if you run out for the month you can always pass “!ddg” into it because its free and doesnt count against you.
What happened to DuckDuckGo?
DuckduckGo is basically a frontend for bing with some privacy marketing added to it. It still sends microsoft trackers. They are all so bad because of enshittification.
Google and bing are here.
Abuse users to benefit business customers
This is not correct. I think what you maybe referring to is an older dig by Brave and brave redditors when they noticed DDG were allowing MS trackers in specific cases.
DDG explained that it was difficult to resolve due to the way MS engages cross-site tracking but it has since been rectified.
Also, research has proven this was not some shady deal between MS and DDG.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-duckduckgo-gates-track-idUSL1N3792HE
This is not correct. While you may be correct about DDG not sending tracking to MS currently they do have a history of doing that. That does not change the technical fact that DDG is a frontend for Bing with a privacy focus, therefore they are just as subject to enshittification as Bing because their results are Bing results with a different User interface. DDG may be better from a privacy perspective than Bing but they are still subject to enshittification.
Why are you lying? I literally shared a well-researched article disproving your statement.
I am not lying. You are nitpicking a piece of my argument and then surmising that the rest of my argument doesn’t hold. The details of if they are currently blocking tracking is largely irrelevant to my point. I agree with you but you are misdirecting my words into your own ideas.
No that’s what you’re doing. I fucking posted evidence you’re wrong and you’re ignoring it.
The internet will always have many niche places, but overall it can’t escape late stage capitalism.
If you wanna fix this, there needs to be more incentive for people to develop open source software. It doesn’t have to be created by individuals either. Organizations and nonprofits can be used to make basic services for the Internet, like utilities. Or this could be a government agency. There is already talks of classifying Internet access as a utility instead of leaving it to private ISPs. This would be a step beyond that but could be done first.
What was censored at 9:50? What is he saying about pivoting? Was it a joke?
Anybody got a TLDW;? Or did all of you just comment on the title and the snippet?
Reposting from [email protected] in [email protected]
Here’s an AI outline because this was actually a good talk:
How Platforms Die The speaker introduces the concept of platform decay or “enshittification” and how it leads to the death of internet platforms. He defines platforms as firms like Uber, Amazon, and Facebook that connect users and business customers. He outlines a 3-stage process called enshittification where platforms: Are initially good to users Abuse users to benefit business customers Eventually abuse business customers to only benefit shareholders This results in the platform becoming a “pile of shit” that dies. Facebook Case Study He uses Facebook as a case study of enshittification’s 3 stages: Initially attracted users by promising privacy protections and custom feeds Then broke promises and sold user data to advertisers and flooded feeds with publisher content Finally, reduced value to users and fees for publishers to extract all value for shareholders This led to an angry user base and brittle equilibrium Causes of Enshittification Lack of Competition Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed consolidation across industries Companies can use predatory pricing to undercut competitors Mergers eliminate competition Example: Google relying on acquisitions rather than in-house innovation Unrestricted “Backend Tweaking” Tech platforms control the algorithms and systems behind their products They can arbitrarily change these to alter user experiences e.g. Facebook reducing visibility of publisher content in feeds Done without transparency, oversight or accountability Bans on Reverse Engineering Laws like DMCA 1201 and CFAA criminalize circumventing DRM and terms of service Makes it illegal to reverse engineer platforms to enable interoperability Tech companies use IP laws to prevent modding and adversarial interoperability e.g. Apple using IP laws to prevent iOS modding Solutions Strengthen Antitrust Enforcement Block anti-competitive mergers Break up existing tech giants Pass Privacy, Labor and Consumer Protection Laws Comprehensive federal privacy laws with private right of action End worker misclassification through gig economy Apply consumer protection standards to platforms Allow Adversarial Interoperability Roll back laws criminalizing modding, reverse engineering Use government procurement to incentivize open ecosystems Appoint special masters to oversee platform legal threats Keep Interoperators in Check Bind interoperators to the same privacy, fair trading and labor laws Determined through democratic process vs corporate policy Conclusion We need to prepare and spread these policy ideas to capitalize on the next crisis Efforts are underway to enable a better internet through this approach
We should get paid a portion of the revenue generated by our collective data along with the ability to opt-out completely. If they our data is a commodity to them we should be able to sell it.
they can keep my 42 cents and just stop their shit
I get the idea, but I also don’t want to go back to the days when BestGore and LiveLeak were around either, you know
Removed by mod
