DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow
DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow
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!
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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.
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.
I'm test driving it right now too. The subscription cost is easier to spend when you envision taking that $10 away from Google and giving it to kagi.
But google doesn't cost 10 dollars a month to search.........
You're saying search infrastructure and hardware is free like air?
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.
That’s a good option on using the bang search.
Ultimately, I just don’t want the overhead of thinking which search engine to use based on quotas. Bang searches would be a little annoying, but less annoying than going to a different site altogether.
Yeah, that is understandable. 300/31 = ~9.677 searches per day so as long as you don't search that much you are good. I thought i was using way more searches until i actually started tracking it. The quota concerned me too, but i now see i need not have worried.
Thanks for your comment. Those are some useful features that I would not have known about otherwise. I'll give it another try.
I didn't realize how good it was myself until I tried it for a few weeks. I think it's better than duck duck go at default for the past several months. The customizations are what make it amazing though.
And since it doesn't think, the results are predictably awful
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.
They could offer both 10$a month or a larger (ex 240$) lifetime buy and give people a choice
I believe Sirius did this and it was a huge boon to their cash flow
I agree that subscriptions for apps becoming the norm is pretty terrible. You should just be able to pay once and use the version you paid for forever, and optionally upgrade to a newer version for a price.
But Kagi is a service. You using their search actively costs them money, so they wouldn't only not gain any money from you after your one-time purchase, but actually lose money.
That's not my problem, change the business model away from subscriptions. I will never support the subscription model for literally everything now.
So don't subscribe. It's that simple. Did you pay a one-time fee for electricity as well?
Do I pay for Google? Do I pay for Wikipedia? Do I pay for Signal messaging? Do I pay for email? No, I pay for none of that. I pay for internet already, stop making me pay for every little website or app I use as well.
Have tried it and seriously didn't see any difference between it and Google or duck duck go...
How come Duck duck go was close to Google when Google was really good, bug now both of them are serving just crap? Are we sites getting better at climbing the ladder?
Duck Duck Go just uses Bing’s results. (Startpage uses Google’s.) There’s only a handful of search engines actually crawling the web so it doesn’t take much for all the search sites to suddenly suck at the same time.
Ah that makes sense, thanks!
Kagi currently uses Google and Bing in addition to their own index to serve you search results. They'll likely only use their own index once it's complete enough to be a replacement, as the API costs they pay to Google and Bing are not sustainable even with paying customers.
The advantage of Kagi being paid as opposed to being ad-supported is that you get unbiased results, or results with your own bias applied. You can set ratings for domains where you can set their priority in search results or even outright block them.
You can also setup redirects with regular expressions, so you could redirect youtube.com to piped.video for example.
And sure, you can emulate some of these features (like blocking sites from search results and redirects) using browser add-ons, but with Kagi this is integrated right into the search query, and as it's all server-side it works on all your devices. It's just very convenient.
Search always used to be free so I get that people find it discomforting having to pay $10/month for it (there's also a $5/month plan with 300 searches instead of unlimited), but $10/month for something I use dozens of times per day seems like a no-brainer to me.
If it was better, which I do not think it is, I'd consider it. Actually I already did and got my hopes up BTW.
I am in my kagi free trial period and like what i see so far. I already added credit to my account to subscribe once i use my free 100 searches.
Just want to add, people are also not putting much content online in the way they used to. Between the want to monetise (which leads to ad-filled SEO sits or YouTube channels), or the dopamine-hit of getting likes, content is getting harder to find as well (the latter tends to be in walled gardens that search engines don't get to index).
While you are correct in that there is less real (people generated or organic) online content available to index, I think the search engines do harbor some of the blame because they push the content that is profitable. One only need to look for product recommendations to see this. If you search for 'best waffle irons' you will only get SEO generated contented as it is more profitable. You have to explicitly add reddit to your search to get something resembling a real opinion.
Perplexity AI has been awesome for me so far, I think someone will take over searches with the current state of the internet. I'm sick and tired of only finding ad filled sites with non-answers on Google.
Kagi is great, but is $10 a month.
Its $5 for 300 searches a month.
I love Kagi, it's better than Google these days.
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.
In other words, I hear and agree with the facts of what your saying but disagree with the implied conclusion of the facts. I am now disengaging as it is clear you are acting emotionally to my rational argument.
Oh no :( not DuckDuckGo
Where do we go now?
Well, the thing that gets me all the time is that you can no longer "-" a word. I'm frequently looking for stuff that doesn't contain a word. That feature is completely gone now.
I initially didn't like DuckDuckGo but it feels like they improved on it. I use it as an alternative to Google with no issues whatsoever (and often it's already better).
I am look at Kagi but everyone is calling me crazy for paying for a search engine. I am using Bing at work right now because Google is fucking useless, so I might be out of options.
I tried it like some months ago and I didn't get better results. Check it out its free for a bunch of searches (or it was).