Philip DeFranco. I watched him for over a decade then after covid I started picking one or two stories from the video to read about and I was pretty disappointed by how often it was mispresented. After a bit its obvious its intentional by what's being left out. Even though we still had the same politics I dont want to watch someone who intentionally skews the stories by leaving out key facts. I can arrive at the right conclusion with the whole story.
Thats not what I'm arguing. I'm saying most people dont care enough either way and based off research and polling ive seen that most people do use the features. So if most people use them and only a tiny fraction wants them gone you should keep them default and give those people a toggle.
When I'm saying 175k out of 100m I'm pointing out that its a tiny % of the user base. The people who were engaged enough to vote in that poll were the anti AI people. It was posted to all the anti AI subreddits and twitter feeds. It was a big call to action to try and prove no one wants it.
Its obviously where search is heading which is why ddg mentions in their blogs that they are working heavily on AI features. They have always been receptive to users so unlike google so they do give users the option to disable. If they had data that most were disabling we'd see that be the default.
This stat is people who use llm chatbots for search. It excludes summaries. I think that had 60% saying they did read the summaries 10% saying not sure and rest saying they didnt.
Can someone articulate what is wrong with this? It intrinsically feels wrong to me, but when I think about it I dont really have any good reasoning why this would be bad.
We expect a standard price and it feels bad when we find out someone else got it cheaper.
But the consumer should be operating the same, they review the deal and if its a price they are willing to pay they go through with it.
Not sure how long "a long time" is so im just going to say 5yr +
A lot of the youtubers I watch are new ones. The old ones either dont post anymore or I dont watch them anymore. These are the only ones I could find out of hundreds of subscriptions.
In nz its generally 22-32$ an hr. Shifts are 6-8hr 5-6 days a week.
For US I'd say whatever wage is required for them to make close to the median wage with 35-40 hr work.
I see median wage at $1200 per week (dam Americans are fucking rich) so id say they should be on $25-30 which puts them at around $1000 a week with 30-40hr work.
If we are just looking at median food/service wage its at $700 a week. So I'd say $17-$23 to reach that $700 a week with 30-40hr work is fair wages. A slight increase for most food/service roles compared with their current median. I'd expect it to be high in the expensive places like NY.
Maybe im to tech-brained but I dont think its a technical barrier. I think that they just dont care enough. One search of "how to remove AI from DDG" would bring it up but they never care about the issue enough to take that first step.
I sometimes observe this with my family members, who will complain "oh I dont like how it does X" and I say you can turn that off in the settings and then they dont. It was a minor complain they had but not an actual complain they wanted to solve.
Maybe DDG should do the firefox route of a popup to disable all AI for new users.
Yes that is a good sample size but its biased by the people weighing in caring most about the issue. If it was 175000 users sampled randomly from the DDG user base then yes it would be a good predictor but it wasnt.
I checked again to get a more up to date report and so that we actually have something to go off instead of my memory of some random reports. Pew finds 50% of people use chatbots and the most common use is searching for information. Also in the report the have a stat for reading AI summaries at the top of a search and that is 60% say that have, 10% dont know and 30% dont read it.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/
So its fair to say I was wrong and its not over 50% but its close to 50%.
He made it though. He escaped the city and got a farm. He clearly only posts to get a bit of ad rev