(#jfstoxa) I guess there might be an alternate world where corporations decided to instead of repeating echo-chambers, to base their platforms on finding new and cool stuff, keeping the engagement through cool facts and showing off skilled people, instead of seeing the same gif/theory/whatever content for the 200th time that year

(#jfstoxa) @jan6 have you ever seen any of your colleagues or family members doing this? I have not! And I am working in a shop with 10 people. They all use Google and just form sentences like "when was barack obama born" "where was the last outbreak of ebola in africa" or "who was playing that weird guy with the grey hair in that movie about cars driving from west to east" etc.

(#jfstoxa) @jan6 is right here about the echo chambers that are created and controlled by these companies with advertising based business models. Information wants to be free, however if it is manipulated with corporate interests then it becomes quite biased 😢

(#jfstoxa) @jan6 Fully agree to this. I love DDG bangs and the ability to search somewhere else fast and easy. For the "normal non-tech-savvy people" Google is the *defacto standard* as it is the default engine in many programs. Even in Firefox and other browser or apps. **Searx** is a small and self-hosted solution, which many people don't even know. And for others, Facebook is the Internet.

(#jfstoxa) @david It should not be up to the search engines to actively police its results and judge the content of the sites it finds subjectively. DuckDuckGo just buys those results from Bing anyway, so a lot of the times the quality of those results really is far from what I'm looking for, but for an entirely different reason.

(#jfstoxa) @jan6 The solution is not more centralized alternatives thay exhibit the same problems. I need to continue to decentralize and remove the incentives for misuse and abuse.

(#jfstoxa) @jan6 problem I see is until we get rid of and ban targeted advertising and profiting off user data and metadata, controversy and conflict make a lot of money for these scrupulous companies 😢

(#jfstoxa) @thecanine > Maybe the biggest problem of them all is the idiocy of the average reader. If people could develop basic critical thinking skills, no conspiracies would ever have to be suppressed and no “walled gardens” created. I actually do think this is one of the biggest problems in modern society. But of course if you actually allow too many people to have critical thinking and good education then you don't really have anyone to manipulate and control and therefore sell all your shitty products to 😆

(#jfstoxa) @prologic there's a great quote about it > think of how dumb the average person is. now realize that half the people are dumber than that. what internet has done is just given those people a worldwide presence and allow them to confirm each other's broken views, and group together on platforms which prioritize making money over truth, discovery, or mental health

(#jfstoxa) also I tend to use more bare sentences and still get good results ;p e.g. "python inline for" instead of "how to write for loop in one line in python" (correct answer would be list comprehension), or "prime minister of lithuania" instead of "who is current prime minister of lithuania", a lot of it it just fluff that's discarded anyway