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!
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?
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I am saying Google doesn’t cost me 10 dollars. So how am I taking 10 dollars away from Google by switching to a different search engine? I could write a script that HAMMERS google search every second and it would probably cost them a few pennies in dealing with me.
It’s not what it costs them, it’s what they make off you. Your search traffic is their revenue stream. Remember- If a service is free, you are the product
That’s assuming you’re logged in and providing a fingerprint, which you don’t have to do.
Fair enough, though they still serve ads, and even if you block them they still get referral fees (that bezos tried to dodge with smile)
I’d actually gotten in the habit of only using Google search incognito, I had to enable kagi in private tabs.