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DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.