All search engines curate results to show users what they need. Usually when users look something up on the internet they are looking for accurate information.
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They substituted “Russian propaganda” with all those articles saying Russia was getting crushed and the war wouldn’t last more than a couple of months because Russia was losing in a landslide.
Ddg users thank God they got all those unbiased quality news and not any sort of propaganda, right?
Do you have a source? I could link to DDG blogposts and other sources about their removal and downranking of russian misinformation, but I’m not sure that you could provide a source for your very random claim beyond some western news sources being overly optimistic about last year’s ukrainian counteroffensive. Happy to be proven wrong 
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Maybe. But look at it this way: the more in-fighting, the more people talk about it, the quicker the word spreads…shady marketing-wise its brilliant way.
That would be preaching to the choir. We are already drinking the koolaid.
There is no need for infighting because it serves no one in the community. This is wasting everyone’s time and effort when we could be preaching to our loved ones (or normies).
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Yeah, It isn’t a huge deal, but I think this is what frustrates me about these types of antics. Its zero-sum marketing.
It does nothing to grow or attract people to the privacy community as a whole, it is just one privacy company seeking to undermine another, trying to poach some users. It contributes to a divisive atmosphere within our little niche, without doing anything to attract newcomers to the privacy space as a whole.
The only people who will see these banners are people who have deliberately gone out of their way to install Brave Browser, and also deliberately gone out of their way to change Brave’s default search engine to DDG instead of Brave Search. Clearly this small group of users are already part of the privacy space, and have expressed an explicit preference for DDG search.
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Update: They now (quietly) removed the most “aggressive” stuff, instead emphasizing the advantage of their product.
Source:
The original 4 banners : Rotate search promotion for DDG users by simonhong · Pull Request #24057 · brave/brave-core · GitHub
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So weird seeing Brave and DDG fight each other when they both suck and should be avoided lol
Because ?
I strongly disagree with this perspective. Instead of infighting, privacy-focused projects should form a coalition and work together. They should focus on promoting their strengths without resorting to spreading unverified or misleading information. Each project should highlight its benefits without attacking others, channeling their energy into collaborative efforts that educate and attract more people to the cause of privacy and security. (Maybe also explore ways to extend end-to-end encryption beyond individual projects.)
The so-called “shady” marketing tactics have been a significant obstacle for newcomers to the privacy community. Instead of finding informative content about the merits of cryptography or why a particular protocol is superior, they’re bombarded with fear-mongering messages like, “If you don’t use a project based in Switzerland (or any other country), you’re being surveilled,” or “If you use X (their competitor, LOL), you’re being spied on.” This approach is not only ineffective but also harmful to the entire privacy community.
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Honestly they probably analyzed click rates and other metrics and saw it wasn’t as successful as they hoped, so they are switching campaigns.
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Imagine recommending Brave to someone who wants to switch away from MS Edge precisely due to this sort of behavior, and they immediately see this when they go make a search. 
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Very true. This idea of privacy-oriented market being a zero sum game is harmful. That is why I kinda liked how Signal’s President handled Apple starting to use post quantum encryption (Link). This is how you welcome competition while also showing how your product is different.
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Absolutely agree, Meredith. It’s a perfect example of handling competition gracefully without coming across as unoriginal or lame.
@Satoshi I know why Brave suck and am in full agreement here, but why DDG suck is unknown to me. Will you explain?
a while back, duckduckgo made a deal with microsoft to not block their trackers in their mobile browser. they eventually reneged on that deal, but still scummy.
for the record brave is also scummy as hell and it astounds me that pg continues to recommend their shit. “but its open source” and “the crypto stuff isnt that bad” isnt a valid excuse, not that they seem to care. bringing up these issues instead is treated and dismissed as “infighting” or “drama” as if pointing out the issue is more problematic than the issue itself.
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What’s worst is they kept this secret. They advertised that their “privacy browser” blocks trackers, but omitted that they whitelisted Microsoft trackers. They only admitted to it after an independent researcher broke the story. They lied to us. They betrayed us. Nothing Brave has done comes close to comparing to that.
I agree with this, but Brave is still the least bad Chromium browser. IMO it makes sense to recommend but the caveats and controversies should be stated somewhere.
(Ungoogled Chromium is good on some platforms, but even in these it wouldn’t fit the PG criteria as it takes a few days to update sometimes)
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Browsers and their web rendering engines ought to be more like “actually good” rather than “least bad” but this is the kind of world we live in.
What does it take for an “actually good” browser to exist?
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In my opinion, firefox derivatives (LibreWolf, MB, even Floorp), are good. Chromium derivatives though not so much. I like the QtWebEngine browsers but there’s the problem that they use older Chromium versions.