And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.

The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.

  • The Cuuuuube
    73•11 months ago

    I don’t think it’s coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they’ve really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don’t understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they’ve already made a decision, they decide it’s because we don’t understand the squeeze they’re under to make money.

    • Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing’s a disaster because that’s really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there’s some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
    • Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
    • Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they’re doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they’re doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They’ve learned the following lesson: if you’re big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it
    • fearout
      21•11 months ago

      That’s a good write up, thanks. I don’t claim it’s coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.

      Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven’t heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can’t not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it’s not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it’s a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I’m kinda curious now

      • The Cuuuuube
        5•11 months ago

        I’d be happy to hear that’s true. They were originally an aggregator until Google changed their api

    • @TheHighRoad@lemmy.world
      21•11 months ago

      I 100% would have signed up for Reddit Premium and payed monthly for Sync access if they had allowed me to hand them the money. Oh well ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

      • fearout
        14•11 months ago

        Right? I had a subscription for Apollo and am now supporting kbin on Patreon (btw, guys, here’s the link if someone wants to help out).

        It wasn’t that hard to offer a product that people would be fine paying for.

    • @Asafum@lemmy.world
      2•11 months ago

      Duckduckgo is a wrapper for bing? No wonder it sucks… I want to like it, but the results are usually pretty bad in comparison to Google. Takes me much longer to find what I’m looking for with DDG. :/

      • @alsimoneau@lemmy.ca
        9•11 months ago

        I’m using an anonymous browser and for me often DDG has better results than Google now. My Google-fu used to be on point but recently I can’t seem to find sites that aren’t SEO traps.

      • arglebargle
        4•11 months ago

        I have exactly the opposite experience. Google has gone to shit, and duckduckgo gets me there faster 90% of the time. Plus the results are short and concise, or immediately helpful.

        The SEO of the internet has really fucked googles algorithm. At least with duckduckgo I can end the search with !g to switch to google if I need a second go, but you cannot !d in google.

      • C_Spinoff
        2•11 months ago

        Startpage might be something for you, mixed bag though but I got nothing of substance to say against it.

    • deejay4amEnglish
      2•11 months ago

      Elon Musk wanted to drive Twitter into the dirt once he was forced to buy it. Criticism, jet tracking, rejection of fascist-adjacent opinions that are “logical” but only if you’re a heartless engineering robot.

      His hubris forced him into buying it, but once he had to, he might as well destroy it. How else do you think he got the Saudis in on it for another billion?

      I laughed about this theory at first, just memeing it like “ha could you even imagine?” But every single day it seems more and more like he does the worst thing possible to “monetize” and then gripes about it like the only reason his brilliance isn’t working is because big mean liberal woke mind virus society is trying to do cancel culture because they’re just jealous he’s rich.

    • halfempty
      1•10 months ago

      DuckDuckGo is not a wrapper for Bing, but is in fact a distinct and independent search engine. DDG does grab some results from bing. but it also grabs from other sources and it’s own crawler.

    • @Valmond@lemmy.world
      1•11 months ago

      DuckDuckGo seems, for me anyway, be crappier and crappier by the month. Am I the only one? Are there alternatives?

      • @salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
        2•11 months ago

        I used them for a long time before getting tired of appending !g after every search because DDG’s results were SEO garbage. I’m trying them again and they seem to be slightly better, but I’m not quite sure. Also it appears that the minus operator doesn’t work on DDG, and when I have to use it, I just do !s to search Google with Startpage (which I don’t use because it’s owned by an ad company and because its website is a little bit slower than DDG).