This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The internet will always have many niche places, but overall it can’t escape late stage capitalism.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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 bet they sold your info to cambridge analytica for a bit more than that.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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.
Monetary donations help a ton. Even a few bucks. I always pay for FOSS projects I enjoy and use.
Antitrust and privacy regulations are all nice and good, but I think the core problems of the Internet is a technical one: We don't have peer to peer connectivity on the Internet anymore.
The whole reason for the Internet to exists in the first place was to connect computers, but for whatever reason, that feature of the net never made it down to the average user. Dynamic IP addresses means you can't find anybody and firewalls/NAT means you can't connect to them even if you do. Even trivial tasks like copying a file from one computer to another have no standard solution on the Internet. This means everybody is forced to services like GoogleDrive or Dropbox as an intermediate. Same is true for chat, video calls and so on. Everything has to go through another service to be usable. The majority of those services don't even use standard protocols, lock the user in, which in turn empowers them to use enshittification.
Until peer to peer connectivity is solved I have little hope for the Internet to get better.
If someone wants to host something, NAT won't stop them. IMO the bigger problem is that most folks have neither time, skill, nor interest to make p2p a reality. I'm a pretty savvy admin, host a lot of services for myself and family, but I don't pretend to be good enough or vigilant enough to run anything public, i.e. mail server, lemmy server, etc, without major security concerns.
It'd be stupid easy for assholes to hack or swat you if that was implemented though.
Part of it is the war between security and privacy vs open architecture. The moment you leave your car unlocked some creep will rob you.
We need more than this.
We need a way to make sure that the internet can't be owned, physically.
We need some kind of easy to use and fast and robust open source alternate internet that we can all use.
Something that somehow costs nothing to run, that has enough storage and bandwidth for everyone and everything.
Something that has interoperability built in. Every platform should confirm to openid or openauth or activitypub or something like that.
And you know what? we have the technology!
We all have spare devices lying around. Old PC's, old laptops, old phones - they could all be running some kind of node in a distributed platform of some kind of open source AWS equivalent, and let anyone host anything and post anything without getting ad-raped or data stolen.
It's a pipe dream of mine, and I'm sure others... but with a will and a movement we could just take it all back, all at once.
and let anyone host anything
That's how they'll spin the legislation to ban it:
Pedophiles and terrorists use that service!
Side note -- I wanted to use 'X' instead as a variable above, but Musk ruined that.
Search for Locutus, it's very similar to what I've been imagining, only real (well, not yet, it's a project).
That was such a great video. I highly recommend everybody listen to it (there is no visual presentation so listening is enough). Great content, great delivery.
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
The steps to fix this might as well say have Jesus come to life and fix it all... It's depressing, but there is zero chance of any of that happening... Nevermind all of it.
Our best bet is for consumers to fight back with their wallets, but people are on average too stupid to even understand how they are being fleeced. We're fucked.
While I don't know how well it will work, nor if the implementation is even fully possible, I like the idea of Yep.
I tried to find the video on PeerTube, from the end users perspective I think we should encourage others to choose community over corporate and use platforms like PeerTube to post these videos instead of YouTube (Alphabet).
To stop enshitification we have to kill all advertising and marketing of products online. Make the net as hostile as possible to people trying to capitalize on it.