As someone who worked at a park district, this is 100% true and such a big problem. Those fuckers grow to be like 18 inches long and have thousands of babies.
Someone dumped a couple they got at a fair into one of our ponds and within a few years they were nearly the only life left in the entire pond. They eat anything and everything in their path and decimate local ecosystems. They’re the freahwater equivalent of locusts.
We ended up electrifying the entire pond, scooping them all up, and rebuilding the whole natural ecosystem back up from scratch. You can’t do that with a lake tho
IIRC it was mainly backlash for them integrating Microsoft ads without tracker blocking. They did walk it back after public backlash, though they still use Microsoft ads, just anonymously.
That and their recent generally AI-positive messaging has alienated anti-AI people, but they seem to be walking some of that back too.
To me it feels like they are generally good, but somewhat out of touch with their userbase, which causes a blunder here and there. They’re also a US-based organization, so make of that what you will.
Personally I still use the NoAI version of DDG because no EU-based alternatives have feature parity yet.