DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow
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The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things b...

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!

  • pensa
    38•9 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      13•9 months ago

      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.

      • pensa
        3•9 months ago

        Thanks for your comment. Those are some useful features that I would not have known about otherwise. I’ll give it another try.

      • @[email protected]English
        3•9 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•9 months ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•9 months ago

            True. I get weird with caps, but maybe 300 would be reasonable. I’ll definitely consider that when the trial runs dry!

            • @[email protected]English
              2•9 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]English
                1•9 months ago

                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.

                • @[email protected]English
                  1•9 months ago

                  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.