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Kagi doubles down on paid Brave partnership despite losing at least 0.5% of users in 1 day. And invoking Godwin's Law (kagifeedback.org)

submitted 10 months ago by flumph@programming.dev to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml

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"Should we not be buying VW, BMW, Siemens and Bayer technology and products today because they participated in holocaust and directly collaborated with Hitler?" -- CEO of Kagi when given feedback re: Brave partnership

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[–] noodlejetski@lemm.ee 54 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (25 children)

their CEO also moderates the discussion on Kagi's Discord. he's been removing criticism by queer folks, while - the last time I've checked before I've left their group - keeping replies like "stop shoving LGBTQ down our throats".

https://nyan.lol/@zicklepop/111716138453426218

edit: also their response regarding a request to add a "don't do it" widget to suicide searches basically boils down to "but if we make a moral choice now, we'll have to do more moral choices in the future!", which is... suboptimal. https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probably-have-a-dont-do-that-widget-like-google/

[–] dmnknf@lemmy.ml 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wow, this topic in the edit is bad, and I wasn't aware of it. Just canceled my subscription. Now I have until 14/01 to choose an alternative.

[–] Aradia@lemmy.ml 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

https://searx.space/ works pretty well.

[–] Whom@midwest.social 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The best I can say is that it technically does the job, just slowly and not particularly well. There really isn't anything which even approaches the search quality and featureset of Kagi. I don't even have the strongest opinion on working with Brave even though they're clearly awful given how monstrous both Google and Microsoft are (who are both part of the core foundation of their search), but their approach to this whole situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I turned off auto-renewal of my subscription but I really hope they take a step back and realize how much goodwill they're destroying for a significant part of their userbase so I can resubscribe. There's no suitable replacement.

[–] Aradia@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

For me, it is doing a good job, and it's pretty fast. I think in the past was slower and with many issues, but it improved a lot. I never tried Kagi and I don't think it's rational to "login" and identify myself to be able to get results, even if it's working better, everyone should be able to get good results without needing to pay.

[–] sudneo@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

everyone should be able to get good results without needing to pay.

Until this stuff is funded with public money, it's not really doable for such a compute and storage intense task.

I am perfectly OK with paying for good software, until then. I also agree with the principle of aligning interests of users and the search provider by having the users pay. Other models (ads, sponsoring) creates incentive to favour those who pay. The other reasonable model is donation, that can work potentially, but it has its problems.

[–] Aradia@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But https://searx.space/ is like Lemmy, you can donate to those instances to help them to keep it on. It is not really a search engine, so the power usage isn't that big, it uses other search engines to get the results, the difference is that the search engines like Google, DDG, Bing and etc don't know who did those requests. The quality isn't bad neither, but I can't really say the difference as I never tried Kagi. 🤔

[–] sudneo@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

In fact it's not comparable, because this is a metasearch engine. Kagi has quite many unique features and besides that it's great in surfacing small websites (for which it mostly uses its own crawler) and downranking pages full of tracking. They are just different and the Kagi model is the most reasonable, in my opinion, for what it does (search engine).

[–] Sheeple@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Counterpoint. Kagi is run by a fascist which was the point of this comment chain

[–] sudneo@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

I saw no evidence of that.

Looking at the "evidence" discussed, I saw three points:

The refusal to disengage with Brave. It's totally possible to disagree with his position, but the overall motivations were legit and no "fascist" attitude was shown. Users screaming "cancel culture" were shut down

there was clear intention to discuss, and it has always been done in a respectful way.

The refusal to support the widget that prompts for suicide hotlines. Even here, I personally agree with the motivation provided, but it doesn't matter, it does not have anything to do with being a fascist. Moreover, the discussion about that was quite lengthy and definitely showed a good-faith engagement from their side.
Finally, the most ridiculous of all, which was part of the mastodon thread linked. Some user claims that "queer people" were getting censored in Discord (we have no evidence except for a private exchange which seems off-topic) and that https://greatcountry.org/ is apparently a proof that the creator (CEO of Kagi) is a white supremacist, because the countries on the top of the list are mostly white countries. I won't even go into details in this one, because it's such an idiotic statement that qualifies way more the user making this claim, which shows -in my opinion- a complete lack of a good faith and the desire to really find any angle to disqualify the person (possibly due to lacking ability to discuss the arguments). The other "proof" (the thread has 3 posts) is a paraphrased and reinterpreted (in bad faith) piece of a comment, which even includes an addendum that takes the distance from this statement. The guy mentioned that "politics into tech is the reason there is no innovation", and the Mastodon user rephrases it as "inclusion is the reason [...]", which is a completely different statement (it is possible that's what the guy meant, but that's not what he said).

If this is anybody's definition of fascism, then I personally consider that person's opinion on fascism completely irrelevant. Now, since my mother tongue has the unfortunate responsibility for having coined the term "fascism", I think I have at least an idea of what it means. It means -in a wider sense- discrimination, suppression of minorities and violence as a mean to shut down opposition. I see no such thing in this context, and if you do, I think it's time you provide some evidence for this claim, because just name-calling random people fascist on the internet doesn't help anybody, and it doesn't help in particular due to the fact that waters down the term and reduces its meaning.

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