I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts points. I also eventually realized t…
(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-…
You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of least astonishment, your explanation comes off as deceptive. You are making a value judgment on truth and working that into the product while claiming you are not making a value judgment.
Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.