Thanks :)

I never saw any evidence in anyone’s post histories. Everyone seemed like they were typical Lemmy users.

I wouldn’t have hidden my disclaimer in a spoiler if I had seen anything that suspicious, but I also wouldn’t have been suspicious in the first place if I didn’t get a weird gut feel. As I’ve said in an earlier thread, I myself have sounded like an ad before - there is a non-zero chance every single post about the surface I have ever read has been 100% legitimate. Genuine enthusiasm for a product can be entirely distinguishable from manufactured enthusiasm.

I did use the trial, and it is legitimately an excellent experience. It’s not like, oh wow, the results are so much better than Google’s, but the results are better than every single provider except Google, plus you don’t feel dirty when you use it.

There’s a chance this is the last time I complain about this suspicion I can’t prove. After all, I’m rooting for them.

Semi-tangential: The status quo is more or less acceptable today, but if price discrimination kicks in hardcore someday thanks to data mining, it will cost a lot of people a lot of money, and by then it might be too late. (That’s probably my big fear. Advertisers don’t care about you or me specifically, I’m not paranoid in that sense, but they do salivate at the thought of learning enough about us they can do custom pricing on everything and charge each of us the absolute maximum we’re willing to pay.)

My issue with the news sites is that they often want as much or even more money for their subscription than they charged for their newspaper. A newspaper had to be set, printed, boxed, distributed to a drop off point, and then folded up by a kid who would drop it on my doorstep at 6 am. The cost of running a website has got to be pennies on the dollar compared to all of their previous overhead. But do they pass those savings on to people? No! They decided they need to make 10x more money because of a technology that made their jobs way easier. So yeah, fuck them. Especially now that half of their content is just opinionated muckraking, and posting screenshots of Twitter. I do have some magazine subscriptions, and a subscription to the NYT because I feel like they actually perform quality journalism, but most of these news companies aren’t worth shit.

I wish I was getting paid for this.

Me too!

Apparently people simply don’t like mentions of subscription services

That’s true, especially for news it seems. Of course my suspicions didn’t arise from simply seeing mentions, but suspicious patterns. (Again, not to the level of anything provable.)

Using a Google proxy isn’t going to make Google’s results any better. But by all means everybody, keep using Google while complaining about how shit it is and then downvoting anybody who mentions any options.

Proxying it certainly isn’t sustainable (see adblocking & YouTube, or Nitter the Twitter proxy that was crippled). Options are good. Didn’t personally downvote you btw! And I can tell ya, SearXNG image search is inferior to Google’s for my needs… but Kagi’s seemed equivalent. Do believe voting with your wallet for paid search seems a sustainable and sane move. Good on you.

Also I wish the only conceivable options for reducing [suspicions of] astroturfing weren’t all so horrific… like submit your Social Security Number to a third party verification service, and let them try to dig into all your relationships with companies or something before vouching for your online accounts. Even that wouldn’t eliminate the problem though (can pay cash to strangers you meet via encrypted messengers). For now hope the reasonably suspicious amongst us can be regarded as appropriately skeptical.

Simply hating every single paid service for having the gall to charge slightly more than it costs to operate, though, is definitely a little too much :)