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> I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ a mon

by erklik 6y ago

> I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ a month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different, even if I never signed into it. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/donations/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/do... They seem to want you to enable their ads. Is that something you would ever do?

danShumway 6y ago
Unfortunately no. Different people have different reasons for disabling ads. Some people only care about egregious ads and privacy violations, that's fine. I am against ads in general, I noticed a sharp quality of life increase when I started blocking ads universally everywhere I could, regardless of whether or not I was on the web. That's a longer conversation, I'm not going to get into it now. I respect that other people have different opinions, but I also feel reasonably strongly about my own. I do spread DuckDuckGo to other people, but I also spread uBlock Origin, so I'm not sure I'm a net positive there either. :) It's again, an interesting question. I've been pushing pretty hard in my personal life to financially support Open Source software that I use, projects that I really care about. DuckDuckGo is one of the few companies that I really like that I haven't ever really supported in any tangible way. I do feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to allow myself to be turned into a product. There is likely no company where I would ever feel guilty enough to turn on ads. But given that DuckDuckGo isn't going to allow donations any time soon, I could see a lightweight 'premium' DuckDuckGo product effectively being a way for me to just give them money without it feeling to them like it's a donation. Actually, what I should do is to look into some of their merch and see what they offer and if they actually make a profit on it. I thought at one point DuckDuckGo sold shirts or something, but I don't know if they still do. Again though, this all kind of ends up being a messy proxy for donations. I'm not super-jazzed about walking around as a living billboard either, even for a company I like.

by erklik 6y ago

danShumway 6y ago

Unfortunately no. Different people have different reasons for disabling ads. Some people only care about egregious ads and privacy violations, that's fine. I am against ads in general, I noticed a sharp quality of life increase when I started blocking ads universally everywhere I could, regardless of whether or not I was on the web. That's a longer conversation, I'm not going to get into it now. I respect that other people have different opinions, but I also feel reasonably strongly about my own. I do spread DuckDuckGo to other people, but I also spread uBlock Origin, so I'm not sure I'm a net positive there either. :) It's again, an interesting question. I've been pushing pretty hard in my personal life to financially support Open Source software that I use, projects that I really care about. DuckDuckGo is one of the few companies that I really like that I haven't ever really supported in any tangible way. I do feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to allow myself to be turned into a product. There is likely no company where I would ever feel guilty enough to turn on ads. But given that DuckDuckGo isn't going to allow donations any time soon, I could see a lightweight 'premium' DuckDuckGo product effectively being a way for me to just give them money without it feeling to them like it's a donation. Actually, what I should do is to look into some of their merch and see what they offer and if they actually make a profit on it. I thought at one point DuckDuckGo sold shirts or something, but I don't know if they still do. Again though, this all kind of ends up being a messy proxy for donations. I'm not super-jazzed about walking around as a living billboard either, even for a company I like.