Seriously what the f*ck makes Gabriel Weinberg think that myself, or anyone else, gives a damn about his personal opinion on what I should and should not be reading. The arrogance of these people is astounding.
Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is, and why one would have to be careful reading it. Those people may well exist, but they would be using Google. This move makes their disdain for their users obvious.
There is now no reason to be using Duck Duck Go over startpage.com, which also doesn't track you, but gives you the results straight from google, which are always much better than duck duck go.
> Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is
DDG advertises on billboards, on the radio, on TV, etc. They are absolutely trying to attract an audience who doesn't all know what RT or Sputnik are.
Edit: Retracting my advocating for using Bing directly. As ColinHayhurst pointed out elsewhere in the comments, Bing is also excluding results, specifically RT and Sputnik (see the "Protection from state-sponsored disinformation" section):
What? Do you do this in other elements of your life?
“I’m not going to drink this veggie smoothie because they started adding honey and I don’t think sugar is healthy. I’m going to drink soda where at least they don’t try to hide that you’re drinking sugar.”
Yes, I do this with other parts of my life. One of the most frustrating experiences I ever had grocery shopping was when I tried to buy "fancy" mayonnaise at whole foods. I was trying to cook something "nice" and wanted to get the good stuff, so that's where I went.
The package said in bold letters, "Mayonnaise!" or some such, and what I didn't realize until I got home was that it wasn't actually mayonnaise, but some sort of vegan/literally not mayonnaise alternative.
I wanted mayonnaise, I asked for mayonnaise, and I got something whole foods thought was healthier.
Now when I'm shopping at WF (rarely), I am extra vigilant about making sure that what I am seeing on the label is actually what I am getting in the container. In fact, I try to avoid "fancy" alternatives to normal foods, because I find that they often replace normal ingredients with things they think are better for me.
But I don't want that! I just want mayo, just give me mayo!
I've also had this where I buy sour cream, or cottage cheese, and get home to find out that it has, in tiny letters, "reduced fat sour cream!" - NO! I want the fat in that sour cream or cottage cheese, that's literally why I'm buying it!
edit: interestingly the mayo was actually called "just mayo", but that's newspeak. It literally is not mayo at all, it is a substitute for mayo that they think tastes similar. So "JUST MAYO" actually contains nothing that is mayo.
This is interesting. From Wikipedia on "Just Mayo" [0]:
"On October 31, 2014, Unilever (parent company of competing brand Hellmann's/Best Foods) filed a lawsuit against Hampton Creek for false advertising, arguing that Just Mayo cannot be marketed as mayonnaise because it does not meet the definition of the product specified by the Food and Drug Administration.[citation needed] The FDA requires that "mayonnaise" contain 65% vegetable oil and at least one egg yolk-containing ingredient; Just Mayo contains ingredients such as pea protein, beta-carotene, and modified food starch, none of which are used in mayonnaise according to FDA standards.[19] Unilever also noted the use of egg-oriented imagery in its promotional materials, and stated that its false claims were "part of a larger campaign and pattern of unfair competition by Hampton Creek to falsely promote Just Mayo spread as tasting better than, and being superior to, Best Foods and Hellmann's mayonnaise." Hampton Creek CEO Josh Tetrick denied any wrongdoing, believing that Unilever's lawsuit was meant to solely hinder competition.[13][20]
"On December 18, 2014, Unilever dropped the lawsuit so Hampton Creek could work with "industry groups and appropriate regulatory authorities" on resolving its labelling, while also complimenting the company for its "commitment to innovation and its inspired corporate purpose."[21] In August 2015, the FDA sent Hampton Creek a formal warning that Just Mayo's labeling was misleading due to the product not meeting the standards for "mayonnaise", and because of wording on the packaging and promotional materials that contained an "implied health claim that these products can reduce the risk of heart disease due to the absence of cholesterol," which cannot be included as it contains too much fat to be promoted with such statements.[19]
"In December 2015, Hampton Creek announced that it had agreed to revise its packaging for Just Mayo in order to comply with the FDA's recommendations. The new label contains more prominent statements surrounding the nature of the product, and contains an explanation that the word "Just" in the product's name is defined as being "guided by reason, justice, and fairness."[22][23]"
So you think it‘s better to use a search engine openly spewing propaganda than one that tries to curb it?
It sounds like the Putin fans who seem to like him „because he‘s a strong willed man who does not change his mind“ as if that was some kind of qualification.
This is a weird stance to take about a search engine which is "tell me what to read as a service." Like you're literally using them to surface the wheat from the chaff. The algorithm that ranks results is already biased as hell and sometimes it's going to get it wrong. Google surfacing lots of stackoverflow spam sites isn't "unbiased" it's junk and manual correction is totally fine.
This word keeps coming in this comments section: "spam." Spam was never mentioned in the Tweet, the source of this discussion. In fact no one in the comments section is talking about spam either, unless its a pathetic debunking attempt. They are talking about genuine results being down-ranked based on their ideological, even morally unscrupulous content, and why that is harmful to intelligent people who don't need their information retrieval service helping them form thoughts.
I just used spam sites as an example of "site that's highly ranked by the algorithm but are uncontroversially recognized as an error."
Define a "genuine result" for a search engine that isn't the result of a process that arbitrarily ranks sites by certain metrics? Like it's humans all the way down, you can't escape that search engines are a large scale system representing "what a group of humans thinks the best results are." There's no unbiased algorithms in search, it's all curation.
As I said - nobody here is confused what spam entails. I'll remind you again the Tweet did not say it it targeting spam - and your conflation of spam with misinformation is a useful bit of ignorance for those who want control narratives. Slippery slope, friend.
Is propaganda a "genuine result"? Yeah yeah, one person's truth is another person's propaganda and sometimes the lines are blurry. But cases like RT are pretty clear cut. Sometimes people actually do lie, and those lies are verifiable. Verifiable lies, and the sources who create them predictably and consistently, should not be considered a "genuine result" for a query regarding things that are happening right now.
Pretending that both sides are equal is not always helpful. Bad actors do exist, and pretending that everything is equally indeterminate is a fatally nihilistic and dangerous view. Sometimes we actually can tell when something is a lie, and we should treat it appropriately. For a tool that retrieves genuine results matching a query, that means down-ranking them.
For the purposes of current event queries, disinformation is certainly spam. The purpose of spam is to fool you into doing something you probably wouldn't otherwise do, usually based on false pretenses. Disinformation is the same. The action it promotes is more indirect - it seeks to influence beliefs, and therefore voting patterns and soft power - but it is still spread with a purpose that is disingenuous. It disguises it's true intent and is dangerous to the user. It is effectively spam applied to the domain of politics and current events, and should be treated as spam is. It should not be a valid result in an information retrieval service.
I agree that this ranking could be the start of a slippery slope. But DDG is being transparent, and you can still get to RT if you disagree. This is a good measure for people unfamiliar with Russia news sources and propaganda networks, who are the people most likely to be susceptible to Russian propaganda.
I think there is a conflation of literal fake news and propaganda. Propaganda can be subtle and not involve outright lies. A lot of propaganda consists of unsubstantiated rumors or speculation.
Sometimes it is helpful to read unsubstantiated rumors or speculation because it is notable. For example, the United States recently claimed that a foreign power was targeting its diplomats with a high powered microwave weapon. Substantial evidence was never produced, but American news media reported the story uncritically. I think that much of the reporting on this topic was disinformation or propaganda. At the same time, if I wanted to read about it, I would expect search engines not to make the editorial decision to censor this reporting. Even if it is disinformation, informed people should be aware of these accusations. In this case, I don’t expect the search engine to return the “truth” but rather “what is being said on this topic.”
Cases like RT are clear cut to you. Others have other opinions. I think that the Russian claims that Ukraine is harboring neo-nazis are significantly bunk and are poor excuse for the invasion, but I also think you can't deny that the Azov Brigade exists, and I want to hear the Russian take on that even if I think it's half lies.
Then you can still go over to rt.com and check that out for yourself. With your knowledge that it is half lies, you can be actively engaged and discerning. But those lies should not be easily accessible for the uninitiated who are just casually curious about current events.
Intelligent people are better off not patronized - and fighting disinformation through censorship rather than rebuttal is a pathetic reflection on the state of society. This type of censorship makes it harder for intelligent people to make clear rebuttals and reinforces a culture of tarring people taking the first step of looking into the other side for this purpose.
This is always the line but it ignores that it's more vastly more effort to correct disinformation and propaganda than it is to spew it. Don't patronize intelligent people by making them have to spend literally their entire day having to fight this garbage rather than doing useful work.
> This is a weird stance to take about a search engine which is "tell me what to read as a service."
If users don't like the change in the search engine algorithm (for whatever reason), they'll stop using the search engine. It's not a weird stance to take.
At the very least this HN submission is surfacing search engine competitors like Startpage, Brave, and Kagi.
People can want a search engine that does stuff without running it through a Politburo filter. For a very long time that was the social norm in search engines. DDG marketed itself as "we follow the old norm, pick us and not the other bad guys." Now they are adopting the political censorship norm, contrary to their earlier marketing.
Of course, the right way to do it is to survey the common elements of sites whose politics you don't like and then add an "unbiased" content-agnostic rule punishing those elements.
“ Seriously what the f*ck makes Gabriel Weinberg think that myself, or anyone else, gives a damn about his personal opinion on what I should and should not be reading.”
he doesn’t care, he’s just another rich baby that needs to project his own stupidity onto the workers whose labor creates his upper class lifestyle
> Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is, and why one would have to be careful reading it.
You sure about that? I keep hearing about the Jan 6ers being big DDG users. They seem like the types that aren't too savvy when it comes to misinformation.
Exactly. The qanon conspiracy nuts have been pushing DDG as an alternative to Google for a while now, and they most definitely don't have that awareness. In fact, they tend to get ridiculously defensive when offering the thought that RT is no less "big bad MSM" than their usual targets.
I'm curious what you think the value of this comment is.
You aren't trying to convince the person you responded to.
The rest of us in the "I really liked DDG but am upset by this decision" bucket aren't the targets of this either.
Even other users who are less opinionated on this move inherently want DDG to care about them as users!
Do you think there is some squad of super pro-corporation folks your point is selling to? "Ah yes, well, if it helps DDG make a buck, it doesn't matter how I the user feel..."
The poster threw a temper tantrum so I wanted to point out their ironic arrogance.
It's also a bit tone deaf considering current events in Europe right now. This goes a little further than merely down ranking different opinions- these are weapons in a war that's currently being waged.
Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is, and why one would have to be careful reading it. Those people may well exist, but they would be using Google. This move makes their disdain for their users obvious.
There is now no reason to be using Duck Duck Go over startpage.com, which also doesn't track you, but gives you the results straight from google, which are always much better than duck duck go.