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The Real "Big Lie" Is That Billionaires Are Tolerable - Great wealth should be seen as deranged hoarding. inthesetimes.com/article/jeff-

@dynamic @varx @human_equivalent The MetaGer website also has links to some open source search work, IIRC.

@dynamic @varx @human_equivalent I think we are at a point now of ineffective search engines. An effective search engine should be company agnostic, non-tracking, open, relevant (topical and up to date), and thorough (all results). Unfortunately, users are stuck with Google and Bing. Both fail the company agnostic, non-tracking, open, and relevant aspects. Aggregators can fight the non-tracking, but all the other flaws exist. Open source search is badly needed.

@varx @human_equivalent @dynamic I thought there were effective search engines before Google; I was happy with Alta Vista. My choices in browsers were limited, being an OS/2 user, and search engines are driven by browser inclusion.

@varx @dynamic I agree; it can be used in some places and not others.

@dynamic It was never more portable than those, but it did seem to have better spam filters. Anti Microsoft kept some people away from Hotmail. As far as Yahoo! <shrug>...for me Yahoo! always seemed kind of pushy and advertising driven. Way more than Google twenty years ago. Google did have the appearance of less evil back then; certainly way less than Microsoft or AOL.

@dynamic firstname.lastname was started by Microsoft Outlook. Who would have thought that Microsoft would introduce such a privacy/security concern?[sic] Corporate norms before Outlook were 8 letter user names composed of letters from your name.

I think people abandoned pseudonymity with the rise of Facebook. You wanted friends and family to find you. I really can't say it was ever an internet norm. On Usenet, it was mostly spammers and trollers.

@dynamic "the web as it used to be"...when? In my mind, the (accessible) web as it used to be is newsgroups, irc, email, and web pages.

Newsgroups was my social media of choice. Categorized, threaded, open (depending upon your ISP), and possible to filter out the bad (spammers, trolls, and off topic). IMO, what killed newsgroups was that most people didn't know how to filter well, and they were text only (ignoring uuencode/uudecode). The right tools could remedy both.

@dynamic One thing that the unified services have over distributed services is the ease of finding people. You want to find work colleagues? Go to LinkedIn. Want to find family? Go to Facebook. Want to find celebrities? Go to Twitter.

The fediverse has a lot more anonymity, and even without anonymity, it is harder to search. I was anonymous on Twitter, so employers wouldn't use my politics against me. Many of the questions you can't ask in interviews can be found on social media.

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