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.
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?
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.
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
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.
They get a large enough audience for disinformation campaigns
Once you see people start defending Russia it’s over
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.
