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>but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda

Have you met the US media?

If you don't look at this massive coordinated effort and smell something fishy, I just don't know what to say.

So like, what, everyones keeping this big secret and its just schlubs like you and me kept in the dark?

It's not a conspiracy (few things are because they just don't scale well). It's more what I call "assholes with similar motives/incentives." It has a lot of the appearance of coordination without needing secret meetings in smoke-filled rooms.

That said, sometimes it actually is coordination. Just look at the JournoList scandal.

Isn't the "JournoList scandal" just "There was a Google Group that lots of journalists on the left subscribed to?"

Journalists have always talked to each other. The fact that we have an auditable mailing list of one instance of it just tells us something we already know.

>Isn't the "JournoList scandal" just "There was a Google Group that lots of journalists on the left subscribed to?"

No, they were coordinating messaging to get the results they wanted. That's the scandal, because they were simultaneously presenting themselves as Objective Journalists.

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them – Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists"

Yes, that sounds like journalists just "talking to each other."

It definitely sounds like off-the-record talk.

Oh course, they forgot that everything on a mailing list is definitionally on-the-record.

I don't think it's some kind of backroom secret that most media, US, Russian, or otherwise, is utter shit. It should be pretty evident from looking at its coverage of any subject of which you have a better-than-average understanding of, or from contrasting how media produced in different parts of the world looks at the same exact events. Or even from applying a little bit of critical thinking. From looking at what it gets right, what it gets wrong, and to what degree it is wrong.

Unfortunately, the alternatives to mainstream media (Q-idiots, Zero Hedge, Info Wars, random dude with an opinionated blog, some pot comedian's podcast, viral memes on facebook, etc), tend to be even worse. And for every time they may occasionally be right about something, there's another dozen times when they are laughably, pants-on-head wrong.

There's no easy solution to being informed... That you can just passively consume on your smartphone.

>Unfortunately, the alternatives to mainstream media (Q-idiots, Zero Hedge, Info Wars, random dude with an opinionated blog, some pot comedian's podcast, viral memes on facebook, etc)

The alternative to one source of dubious information is not another source of dubious information. The alternative is to have access to all sorts of information, and piece together what you think is true, using your own critical thinking skills and ability to sniff out BS.

That used to be the Internet. It is not the Internet anymore, since the Internet has, for the first time I can think of, decided that This One Particular Country is uniquely bad, for Reasons, and should therefore be unpersoned; and also has the ability to squelch any dissent because so much of the Internet has become siloed in big corporations. It's really weird, and I find it suspicious.

> The alternative is to have access to all sorts of information, and piece together what you think is true, using your own critical thinking skills and ability to sniff out BS.

This strategy is vulnerable to supply-chain attacks on your information sources... which is exactly what Russian information warfare carries out.

The credibility of American and European "mainstream media" is oft-maligned but rarely actually demonstrated to be suspect at a large scale in the news departments. Editorial choices of what to cover and when are the most common complaint, which is a far cry from astroturfing and falsehoods made out of whole cloth that Russian sources typically engage in.

>This strategy is vulnerable to supply-chain attacks on your information sources

There is no single strategy, there is no silver bullet. I certainly didn't intend to imply that there was. One can only make their best effort. Any strategy is going to have flaws.

>which is a far cry from astroturfing and falsehoods made out of whole cloth that Russian sources typically engage in

American mass media has historically done exactly those things. There never was a time where The News was trustworthy, unbiased, and disinterested in politics. This continues today. You can look around the Internet--at least for now--and find where people have compiled examples of mainstream American news flat-out staging a scene for the TV to give an impression that is not true, such as a long-distance zoomed in shot of a crowd that makes the few dozen protesters seem like they fill a large area.

I wouldn't downplay the editorial decisions that you mention either. That is a hugely powerful lever of control. Yanking RT or whoever from search results is exactly that, only this time it is exercised by corporate tech companies.

Finally, one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway. This line of argumentation rarely impresses me.

> I wouldn't downplay the editorial decisions that you mention either. That is a hugely powerful lever of control. Yanking RT or whoever from search results is exactly that, only this time it is exercised by corporate tech companies.

The costs of letting disinformation flow freely are far greater than the costs of downranking sources known for disinformation. One only need look at the antivax movement to confirm this.

> Finally, one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway. This line of argumentation rarely impresses me.

Good thing the responsible parties have no interest in or duty regarding impressing you, then. Whatabouters don't impress me, personally.

>The costs of letting disinformation flow freely

As I said, "one can always find a reason why this thing is worse than this other thing, and one is therefore justified in doing whatever it is one wanted to do anyway." Simply slap a "disinformation" label on it.

I hope you are similarly motivated by these airy principles when the next government employs these same tactics to do things you do not agree with, but I rather suspect you will not be.

I would be interested in seeing perspectives of North Korean leadership and current events shared by their state media apparatuses purely for educational/entertainment value.

In general, however, truthful and accurate information is more valuable for learning about a topic. I’m not going to rely on getting that from a regime that imprisons people for sharing data and analyses that challenge the regime’s narrative. It’s inherently more untrustworthy than a society that protects free press.

When these regimes target their media for foreign audiences like you and me, it’s in their best interest to mask the origin of that content. Becoming more informed becomes harder when this context is unavailable to us.

Ranking those sources lower specifically improves the end product and results in a better informed user.

I think you're conflating "large coordinated action" with "the Internet." They look similar, but it's more that a critical mass of not-Russia is deciding to stand up to Russia because Russia's political action in this situation is some seriously beyond-the-pale early-20th-century war of conquest stuff.

There is some consolidation happening (mostly around the fact that a lot of the companies we regularly use are "Western" and most of the governments of the West have imposed sanctions on Russia that those companies have to comply with), but it's also a that the meme has taken hold that (a) Russia deserves to be opposed and (b) sanctions and cutting-off are an effective way to oppose them.

The advantage of getting information from a diverse set of random sources is that they're often pretty good at exposing the misinformation of other sources.

Mainstream sources keep talking about a particular bill and then you read, "hey, that's a misrepresentation, here's the text of the bill and it doesn't say that." They link to the text on the government website and it turns out, they're right. The bill doesn't say that.

Then the same guy starts talking about vaccines and you have to go somewhere else to see the debunk of that.

If you compare mainstream Russian media to mainstream US media and come to the conclusion that they're equally "utter shit", then you have no idea what you're talking about.

I didn't say they are equally bad, but they are both, objectively, quite bad. They can also both be worth reading, but you need to both know the history, and think about what you are reading, why it was written, and who it was written for.

It doesn't need to be a secret. If you have a megaphone that everyone hears all the time, you will simply have more influence than people who whisper quietly.

6 companies dominate the media [1] which together make up at least 90% of all media [2]. Note that this isn't limited to just news.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/c...

[2] https://tacomacc.libguides.com/c.php?g=599051&p=4586162

Also, you might find this video either amusing or alarming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

That's just dull contrarianism: suspecting "something fishy" just because everyone's opinions happen to line up. (As opposed to, I dunno, an obvious collective response to a nation doing something incontrovertibly wrong?)

>As opposed to, I dunno, an obvious collective response to a nation doing something incontrovertibly wrong?

Can you explain how this is incontrovertibly different than other foreign war entanglements from the past few decades?

What was the last war that had such an overwhelming and unanimous international response?

That is question-begging of the first order, and also circular logic. "A unanimous response is not fishy, because it is incontrovertibly wrong; it is incontrovertibly wrong because the response is unanimous."

Very odd reply.

Not really. It is hard to get disparate nations to agree on anything, unless you suspect there is a secret, central party coordinating the response. Consensus of this unusual sort gives credence to the claims.

When was the last time a sovereign, democratic, western nation invaded?

You have to squint pretty hard to call Ukraine a western nation.

Is it the "western nation" part that makes this different?

You realize there was also a massive coordinated effort by the media to defeat Nazi Germany, right?

I know it's rare nowadays, but sometimes, gasp, large groups of people across organizations and industries can coordinate for a mutually beneficial and morally virtuous cause. At this point, I'm sure someone could start another massive genocide with HD livestreams of the gas chambers and some people would still be like "hmmm, this coordinated effort to stop Hitler 2.0 sure seems fishy".

I've lost all hope.

> but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda?

This is a very strange strawman. The implicit assumptions in this question are:

- That DuckDuckGo 'defaulted' to RT or to some other Russian media, which is hardly the case. It is the task of a search engine to infer, from its users' behaviour, which resources they find the most useful in providing answers to given queries.

- That other sources do not have a clear agenda :-)

If I am interested in Flat Earth Theory and search for that then I expect to get results that Flat Earth believers are interested in. It’s that simple.

If you're actually interested in flat earth theory you'll search for "Flat Earth." If you search for "Charting a Flight", You're probably not looking for flat earth content.

To me that has to do with search results being tuned for relevancy, not due the the perceived quality of the information.

Maybe, but you could also argue that bad information is irrelevant. If I search for "cancer treatment", it's not necessarily helpful for "black salve" to pop-up on my search results.

And a Flat Earth take on how to chart a flight path isn't relevant because...?

The announcement makes me suspect that it's down-ranking results not for what they are, but who it's from. That is, penalizing results based on their being from a disfavored source.

That's been a valid approach ever since expertsexchange.com dropped off the radar. It's one of the many tools in the toolbox for dealing with SEO games.

The free market will decide what's a valuable search result or not, and I trust the freedom and liberty of people over any kind of curated, mutated ranking system.

Is people choosing which search engine they use based off the results it returns not the free market in action?

It is not transparent what kind of curations take place to return the results. You cannot have a free market without transparency, and while DDG are announcing this now, they have no obligation to in the future. Previously the status quo was "we don't curate", now it's "we curate but announce it". What's the chance that they will no longer announce it in the future?

> It is not transparent what kind of curations take place to return the results.

This is true for all search engines because it's literally impossible to return even half decent results if everyone knows your algorithm. It'll just be pages and pages of SEO nonsense. If you believed for even a second that search engines can exist without curating you haven't been thinking very hard. Not curating would only ensure that you see nothing but propaganda.

> you haven't been thinking very hard

Please ensure you're following the HN Guidelines[1] when leaving replies :^)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Could it work?

A search engine based on popularity is the basis of google 2004.

What no one has done is a search engine where you can select who's version of what's popular to use. What do people in my area.. My age group.. My shared interest visit when they search 'eye blush'

> You cannot have a free market without transparency

I've not heard this before. So I need to know the wages of the workers, what the CEO had for breakfast, the favorite color of all employees, the inventory and sales, etc for every single company in order for it to be a free market?

I'm not arguing that knowing these things would be bad but actually curious of the boundaries you would draw when you say "transparency" such that it would encompass the exact algorithms used in a privately-owned search engine.

The more mature a market the more you would know. Transparency material to the market transaction. Knowing what employees ate would rarely provide value to whatever transaction you have. Understanding their selection process for the content they provide to you would be.

What the hotdog vendor dreamed of last night doesn't inform my buying decision like the fact that it fell on the floor earlier would.

Maybe I want to know if the employees are all vegan or something before I support that company. I guess I'll frame the same question in a different context: if all needs are subjective, how do you objectively determine which information is important for a transaction?

Free markets require competition. Are there other search engines of similar quality that don't do this?

> I trust the freedom and liberty of people

"Trust" is usually earned. On what basis have "people" earned your trust?

There are many problematic aspects of DDG's decision, but here are just a couple of angles.

Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation. DDG desides to downrank only results related to disinformation from one side. This makes it a decision based on a political bias and not search quality bias (which would cause all disinformation to be downranked - which is OK and actually a desireable thing in a search engine). By not downranking disinformation from the other side, which is equally bad content, this steps out of the scope of what a search engine should be interested in doing.

Secondly, how in the world would DDG have the resources or capabilities to determine what is disinformation in the first place? Much larger companies like Facebook failed at this. It is generally considered that the 'fog of war' is a real thing and there is no single source of news on this planet that did not spread some disinformation at some point. DDG would probably have to downrank half of the sites in its results, and probably every site that ever published any information about this conflict, if they were to be consistent. Something like this is basically unenforcable from an engineering/algorithmic standpoint.

So basically from a business perspective, this has to be a bet that the publicity from this act would net them more users than they started with in the markets they care about.

> Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation.

One of them does not have free press and kill journalists. Both cases are not even remotely comparable.

But a general purpose web search engine should not be in a business of determining which side has a higher moral ground in a human conflict?

The west does imprison journalists because at least there is enough public pressure that it would never be accepted, even if the result is comparable.

But it is specifically not a question about who the good guy is. This is about hiding certain information.