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!
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.
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.
They have $5 for 300 searches per month
True. I get weird with caps, but maybe 300 would be reasonable. I’ll definitely consider that when the trial runs dry!
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.
I’m test driving it right now too. The subscription cost is easier to spend when you envision taking that $10 away from Google and giving it to kagi.
But google doesn’t cost 10 dollars a month to search…
You’re saying search infrastructure and hardware is free like air?
Thanks for your comment. Those are some useful features that I would not have known about otherwise. I’ll give it another try.
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And since it doesn’t think, the results are predictably awful
Noooo no more subscriptions please. Can we please go back to one time payments for apps/services?
I understand hating subscriptions but in this case a one time payment would require Kagi to continually gain an increasing number of members for eternity or run out of operating money and shut down. You could hope for something donation-based like most Lemmy instances, but just expecting other users to cover your costs is selfish. There’s a difference between asking your users to at least pay what they’re costing you and rent-seeking with things that don’t or shouldn’t cost you a dime to provide. Subscription services have existed for a very, very long time (see: any government that collects taxes), it’s only recently and due to greedy trends that they’ve been becoming a nuisance.
If you want to empower your own sense of privacy and security, you’ll need to accept that you’ve been paying for services with your data or supposed ad views for decades, and some of those services cost money to run.
They could offer both 10$a month or a larger (ex 240$) lifetime buy and give people a choice
I believe Sirius did this and it was a huge boon to their cash flow
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.
That’s not my problem, change the business model away from subscriptions. I will never support the subscription model for literally everything now.
So don’t subscribe. It’s that simple. Did you pay a one-time fee for electricity as well?
Do I pay for Google? Do I pay for Wikipedia? Do I pay for Signal messaging? Do I pay for email? No, I pay for none of that. I pay for internet already, stop making me pay for every little website or app I use as well.
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.
Ah that makes sense, thanks!
Kagi currently uses Google and Bing in addition to their own index to serve you search results. They’ll likely only use their own index once it’s complete enough to be a replacement, as the API costs they pay to Google and Bing are not sustainable even with paying customers.
The advantage of Kagi being paid as opposed to being ad-supported is that you get unbiased results, or results with your own bias applied. You can set ratings for domains where you can set their priority in search results or even outright block them.
You can also setup redirects with regular expressions, so you could redirect youtube.com to piped.video for example.
And sure, you can emulate some of these features (like blocking sites from search results and redirects) using browser add-ons, but with Kagi this is integrated right into the search query, and as it’s all server-side it works on all your devices. It’s just very convenient.
Search always used to be free so I get that people find it discomforting having to pay $10/month for it (there’s also a $5/month plan with 300 searches instead of unlimited), but $10/month for something I use dozens of times per day seems like a no-brainer to me.
If it was better, which I do not think it is, I’d consider it. Actually I already did and got my hopes up BTW.
I am in my kagi free trial period and like what i see so far. I already added credit to my account to subscribe once i use my free 100 searches.
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).
While you are correct in that there is less real (people generated or organic) online content available to index, I think the search engines do harbor some of the blame because they push the content that is profitable. One only need to look for product recommendations to see this. If you search for ‘best waffle irons’ you will only get SEO generated contented as it is more profitable. You have to explicitly add reddit to your search to get something resembling a real opinion.
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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
This is not correct. While you may be correct about DDG not sending tracking to MS currently they do have a history of doing that. That does not change the technical fact that DDG is a frontend for Bing with a privacy focus, therefore they are just as subject to enshittification as Bing because their results are Bing results with a different User interface. DDG may be better from a privacy perspective than Bing but they are still subject to enshittification.
Why are you lying? I literally shared a well-researched article disproving your statement.
I am not lying. You are nitpicking a piece of my argument and then surmising that the rest of my argument doesn’t hold. The details of if they are currently blocking tracking is largely irrelevant to my point. I agree with you but you are misdirecting my words into your own ideas.
No that’s what you’re doing. I fucking posted evidence you’re wrong and you’re ignoring it.
Oh no :( not DuckDuckGo
Where do we go now?
Well, the thing that gets me all the time is that you can no longer “-” a word. I’m frequently looking for stuff that doesn’t contain a word. That feature is completely gone now.
Kagi is great, but is $10 a month.
Its $5 for 300 searches a month.
I love Kagi, it’s better than Google these days.
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I am look at Kagi but everyone is calling me crazy for paying for a search engine. I am using Bing at work right now because Google is fucking useless, so I might be out of options.
I tried it like some months ago and I didn’t get better results. Check it out its free for a bunch of searches (or it was).
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Big tech has really ruined what we all thought the internet would be
I remember when the Internet first came out in the '90s, you would occasionally read someone talking about how when radio and TV first started they were pretty cool and wide-open as well, but they gradually got taken over by large corporate interests and played/showed a lot of trash filled with advertisements.
The ideal internet was open and free if you could pay hosting and bandwidth costs - generally those who were associated with universities could
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s why you need digital signatures and authorship tracking. Copyright just by itself would already put an end to every P2P alternative or at least stop it from ever gaining any mass traction. On the other side if everybody put a digital signature under their published work, others could mirror it without themselves becoming responsible and you could have take downs of objectionable material via blacklists.
So far very few of the P2P alternatives implement anything like that and even those that do just have arbitrary accounts that don’t link back to any real person.
This of course goes against the whole anonymity and privacy focus that has been predominant in this field for the last 20 years. But if we actually want a real alternative to the Web, not just some toy app with a dozen users, I think it’s the only way to go. And of course you could also have a layer of indirection in there to provide some anonymity or pseudonymity, so it’s not like those things would be impossible, just reduced.
Search for Locutus, it’s very similar to what I’ve been imagining, only real (well, not yet, it’s a project).
Wolf 359 was an inside job
Is that a Star Trek reference?
It is, Locutus was a commander in the battle at Wolf 359.
The result you may get then is “I am… Locutus of Enshittification. Resistane… is futile. You life, as it has been… is over. From this time forward… you will service… us” which may make you go "Lock on and file all weapons on full!’
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 approachThe 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.
Thanks. Here’s a slightly easier to read on mobile non-monospace paste:
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
Just listen to the video itself?
It’s a 45-minute video. That’s a big investment just to engage with a Lemmy post.
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).
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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.
What was censored at 9:50? What is he saying about pivoting? Was it a joke?
