How long do you stay on a platform before the outreach to new people is outweighed by implicit support of the platform?

It’s a tough call. It is difficult to reach out to outsiders and talk to them but it’s the only way to have a conversation with them.

Family member spends all day every day recording and editing videos for youtube. Never finds an audience. Never gets promoted. The service is too busy pushing AI slop. All that video storage for the long tail of content with almost no views must cost a fortune. Meanwhile big quality youtubers seem to not be growing for some time like they have hit a ceiling. I think Youtube has been in decline for some time. Instead of fix it, which would require investment and ideas, I think they pull the usual bad US MBA style management practice and attempt to maximise revenues on the way down until they finally kill it.

I am in Australia. Searches on local content and niche tech subjects don’t do very well compared with other engines. It might be lack of tuning more than index and I am sure it will improve. Latency might be due to lack of local servers or resources or my choice of browsers but Qwant breaks all the time. It runs a lot better if I keep ad blocking on. Noticeably faster and more reliable though still high latency on the first result showing. If you turn ads on to support smaller companies you immediately get punished. Ad supported businesses aren’t compatible with good quality service unfortunately, no matter where they are based.

It is amazing that Google was so usable for so long really. Their search people must have fought hard to balance out product quality against the demands of the money people for a long time. I think every service that follows in Google’s footsteps will inevitably repeat all their mistakes.

I recommend trying Qwant, Ecosia and others though. It is my default browser search at the moment, mostly because it isn’t US based. It might be all you need.

There are a few probs with qwant unfortunately and I assume ecosia might be the same. It isn’t available in all countries so it’s sometimes blocked when I am on a VPN. The performance is shocking on the other side of the world. Terrible latency. Often fails completely to return results. Then the search results aren’t really good enough either. Tends to return a lot of links from similar sources like it doesn’t have much of an index. Its ok for really simple mainstream searches but I regularly need to fall back to no AI ddg or udm14 google.

Unless I want a clanker response. Actually I never want a clanker response but web indexing has become so poor in the pursuit of ad revenue then AI that sometimes it’s hard to get anything useful out of search queries these days. It’s very frustrating.