OpenAI had the same playbook.

Shareholders need ever increasing value or they will sell their shares. In the US at least, it is illegal to not provide shareholders with value. The only way to reliably get value is to fuck over your customers at every turn and fire half of your employees every few years

In the word of Jim Stephanie Stirling, "They don't just want a lot of money. They want all the money."

When you're a Trillion Dollar company, you don't need MORE money. You make enough to make everything run without additional income.

But obviously a trillion dollars is still not enough. We need more.

They've gotta pay the bills somehow. If you're not paying for it, someone else is, and that mean either selling ad spots, or selling your info.

Yes. I miss the days when the Wikipedia article was the first result. Now, even with ddg, to get to the Wikipedia article I have to add wikipedia to the query... This is so sad...

DDG allows you to disable ads and AI in the settings!

laughs in Kagi

SearXNG is really easy to self-host

Back when humans cared about humans instead of money.

And no Kubernetes cluster needed to serve a search box. 😉

Unlike Google, Lemmy (and Mastodon etc.) are FLOSS, so if one instance enshittifies, we can move, even to different ones, fediblock that instance, and continue on. This is the problem with Bluesky: You cannot (realistically) self-host all the ATProto infrastructure, or federate with anyone while not using some service from Bluesky.