Data on search engine market share is available, but I wonder what that looks like for Lemmy users in particular, who I would assume lean more technical than the average user, so probably use DuckDuckGo and alternates more than Google.
I use a mix of DuckDuckGo and Kagi. I’ll also use ChatGPT, which can be good if you’re careful to verify the answers it gives you as a check against hallucinations. It’s useful for short, direct answers without ads or SEO bullshit.
This article on Ars (and if you’re not a subscriber, you absolutely should be, as they are the best tech journalists out there) inspired the question: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/google-admits-reddit-protests-make-it-harder-to-find-helpful-search-results
Fucking Reddit. Enshittification ruins everything.
Can we stop trying to coin cute terms like “enshittification”? What that term describes is just capitalism working as intended.
There is a term that describes this behavior that we’ve been using for at least decades (to describe behavior that has happened since the inception of capitalism): rent seeking.
“Enshittification” has quickly become commonly used after it was described here: https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979
It’s a specific process that tech companies seem to go through, and differs from other things, such as rent seeking.
“Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.”
None of which have anything to do with a tech company purposefully dumpstering usability in favor of profits.
Enshittification is the otherwise poorly-described process by which a company establishes itself with a new service or product and immediately begins finding ways to further monetize said product or service that in no way adds to their offerings.
Look no further than Reddit for a prime example. “We’re totally a bastion of free speech and user-generated content, okay not that speech because the advertisers don’t like it, but nobody likes Nazis so fuck 'em, but also we need more revenue so we’ll allow SOME Nazis, and now we need to offset the lost advertisers so let’s add gamification and awards and avatars you have to pay money for oh by the way we’re getting rid of tits because advertisers don’t like those, look you plebs are too costly and our precious advertisers are the ones that actually make us money so everything you do has to fall within their restrictions, fuck you all how about you just die in individual car fires, we were never about free speech, I am Spez, hear me r/oar.”