this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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At this point I’ve been using DDG for 7 years as my main search engine. It’s gotten better while Google has become a joke.
Can confirm. I didn't think it'd be like that but it do be like that. DDG gang, where you at.
I switched to DDG recently due to the manifest v3 changes and AI junk and have been really liking it. It feels like what Google used to be when it was good.
You didn't switch to FF due to the manifest v3 changes? You switched search engines?
Hah yeah I guess I combined those confusingly. It was both of those things hitting around the same time, I switched to FF and DDG.
So, you're saying Bing got better.
I don’t know the full story about how Microsoft is developing Bing, but I do know that Google made a conscious decision to make their search results worse, simply so that you’d search more times, which for them translates to additional ad revenue. But, my sense is Bing hasn’t gone this far yet.
DDG does add their own spice on to – or so they claim, and Bing doesn't have bangs so I'd never want to use it.
Personally I just use the better in-browser feature instead of bangs
Fair. I could with Firefox, but I'm too lazy to configure all of that for myself.
Fortunately it takes like 2 minutes.
But doesn't work on mobile
DuckDuckGo: The coolest way to use bing and apple maps.
(I do use it though)
It's not only the results, though, but other features too
Can't wait until they enshittify, the way I see it, everything will eventually, even Lemmy. It's up to us to not settle too hard in one place
The fact Lemmy is open source and federated makes it almost impossible to enshittify. What are you gonna do, show ads? Third party clients are first class citizens here
it still can enshittify, but we can save it with the help of git and the fork button
Unless corporations start ruling it somehow, it really can't enshittify.
One scenario is that normies join en masse and influencers/marketers follow them, and the quality of conversation goes to zero like on all big platforms. You can't solve this with software.
So that's "getting shittier" but not "enshittification". The latter is explicitly a profit-motive driven phenomenon, coined by Cory Doctorow in 2023. Here's the original post he made about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979
That's called eternal September.
That's not enshittification. Enshiification doesn't mean "gets shittier".
Enshittification is this very specific thing where services are initially good to attract users, but eventually turn to making things shittier for user in pursuit of profit growth - where they can't really grow the user base any more, so the only way to satisfy wall street's need for exponential growth is to add user-hostile changes to squeeze more out of existing users.
That's not a thing with Lemmy unless it goes corporate somehow.
Edit: missed that someone else already called this out
They get a large enough audience for disinformation campaigns
Once you see people start defending Russia it’s over
If that's what you are looking for, the .ml server has you covered already...
Yeah, Lemmy is just a worse version of forums. The federation really hurts it
No, I don't think that's sustainable, nor is it sustainable to act as if it were true. Given the lack of resources we have compared to Google or Meta et al., the only way to make it work is to stick with something for the long run, and bake in protections in both the technology and the organisational structure. Being opensource and federated goes a long way there, there's no real reason why something not for profit would have to enshittify. But people won't put in the effort to keep building it if they think that's inevitable.
The core of what you're saying has been my approach for many years. Never go "all in" on anything.
Convenience is one thing (to me, but it's everything to so many), but it's just one factor. And if it means I am (or my data is) the product, it costs too much.
They need to fix the minus syntax/feature. That's my singular complaint.