Comment by 👻 darkghost
A few comments on this article. Yes, publicly traded companies value shareholders pretty much above all else. They're required to. This more than anything else is what causes the lousy ethics in public companies and is the principle driver of enshittification. I do honestly believe most founders want to build something cool and useful, but that doesn't drive insane growth or justify some of the ludicrous valuations stock prices demand. (Of course part of the reason stock prices are insane to begin with is wealth inequality but that is a bigger can of worms.) Hype can drive growth (or at least investment) and the author is spot on. Products are being released not for customers, but for stock holders.
This is far from a new phenomenon, but I can see it reaching absurd and ugly depths.
Aug 07 · 4 months ago
6 Later Comments ↓
Part of the problem is capitalism need for constant growth. Founders probably just want to build their thing (and get rich some of the time) but they take dirty money and that money means they need to focus on infinite growth or death, rather than having 10, 100, 1000 users and getting happily rich and maybe even helping people at the same time. Enshification is a requirement of constant growth
I am not sure enshitification is required for constant growth. But it is certainly a product of it these days.
Kagi is fantastic, far far better than any other mainstream search engine these days. Fortunately the "AI" stuff in it gets out of your way and doesn't force itself on you. You can end a query with a question mark to get a short summary of web search results WITH REFERENCES rather than just it making stuff up. Or you don't ask it a question and that's that. Redirections, RegEx based URL rewrites, etc. are incredibly useful. Being able to lower / raise search result rankings and block domains gets you out of a lot of slop websites or simply stuff you don't want to see. Image search has "Exclude AI" settings. It's the best there is.
I just wanted to mention, if you don't like some of the extra features that DDG may introduce/show in their results, just use the lite version, that's my default search engine: https://start.duckduckgo.com/lite/
I actually like AI quite a bit, but I like it when I want it, not when I'm not expecting/asking for it.
In a professional scientific setting, where details matter, I really find the AI useless and annoying. I should know, it mangles my own journal articles.
Well then you also should enjoy DDG Lite, not an AI in sight. :)
Original Post
Would you pay for search? — Arstechnica has a front page article about Kagi, a paid search engine. The argument is somewhat compelling to me at least. It's thus: (paraphrased) "...