lori (@lori@hackers.town)
hackers.town
Attached: 4 images As many of you know, I posted recently about my experiences and outlook on Kagi, the paid search engine. It's gotten some positive press recently, ironically right after I made my blog post about why I no longer liked or trusted it. This blog post was called "Why I Lost Faith In Kagi" and was a pretty simple quick collection of my thoughts that I primarily wrote so it'd be easier to find again later to link to people when discussing Kagi versus making it a fedi thread I couldn't search for easily later. Across the four social media platforms I linked this blog post on, I'd say it got a total of about 40 likes and few reblogs. https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html I say this because this morning I woke up to an email from Kagi's CEO, Vlad, who had seen the post and was upset about it. I have an email address listed on my blog (which is why I didn't bother removing it from these logs), which is what he sent his emails to. I am posting this entire email chain in this thread and will briefly post my thoughts about it, but I feel like it's something that needs to be seen. Please take note of the subject of the email as well (EDIT: It got cropped out sorry, the subject is "Fatih [sic] can not be lost"). Also, since the alt text would get extremely long with some of the transcripts, I've provided a text dump of the emails here for screen reader users and will offer a more abridged description in the alt text: https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    note: tech sociopath apologists in this thread will be removed and banned for everyone’s best interests

    edit: or just acting like a pointless dipshit. jfc you people

    • breadsmasher@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Can I ask a sincere question? whats a tech sociopath apologist, could you demonstrate an example?

      Again, im sincerely genuinely asking

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        Someone who takes it on themselves to act as apologist for the words/actions of tech sociopaths

        Often seen as “weird nerds coming to defense of $x” (such as musk, or in this case the kagi dudebro)

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          7 months ago

          (And then I glanced at your post history and noticed a trend of JAQing off so I now doubt whether you’re sincere in asking)

            • Crazazy [hey hi! :D]@feddit.nlEnglish
              0·
              7 months ago

              Short for Just Asking Questions. Where people ask loaded questions that act as a veneer to their actual statements. If you want to accuse them of the fact they are talking shit, they’ll say they’re “just skeptical” and “asking questions”

  • MetaCubed@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    Can I sincerely ask what we’re supposed to use instead?

    Kagi has given me the best search experience ive had in at least a decade, I’m not going back to the enshittification engine, and everything else is just bing in fancy wrapping paper. Is there something else like Kagi? Is there something like DDG or Searx that arent just slightly better bing?

    • AlecSadler@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Also looking for answers. I’ve been a Kagi convert for 5 months now and it has absolutely saved me time and effort.

      I was looking at Perplexity but it isn’t exactly the same.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Feel entirely free to use Kagi, just remember that it’s run by an idiot and could blow up at any moment.

      • MetaCubed@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        Apologies, my question wasn’t rhetorical, I was genuinely looking for suggestions. I don’t want to use kagi if this is who is running it… BUT all the alternatives that I’m personally aware of are not options for replacement.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          basically the whole area is gallopping enshittification. Until this blowup, I had seriously been considering Kagi too.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      I’m in a forum where some person claims that the sealion is actually the reasonable one.

      It’s proof to me that this throwaway comic is such a good summary for certain online behavior that there’s an entire subculture built around trying to subvert it.

      (also Wondermark is great in general)

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    Seeing how successful Kagi is when run by someone who actively sets their own money on fire for no reason almost makes me want to try and start a search engine company. I mean I couldn’t do it any worse right? And there is a market for it.

  • inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    I’ve never had anothee CEO mansplain his company to me

    🤣

    Slayed me.

    I haven’t paid Kagi much attention up to this point, so I’m coming in cold to this. But gawd Vlad (makes himself) sound like a huge dork.

  • Jayjader@jlai.luEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    Copy-pasting the alt-text from one of the screenshots because I can’t be assed to type it out myself:

    Discord convo from 07/15/22, Vlad: people who really need anonymity are very rare. Probably less than a 100 in the entire world. Definitely not typical Kagi users. Unless they are criminals, in which case we don’t care they don’t have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)

    yikes, double yikes and triple yikes.

    I guess he doesn’t care to help women find a safe way to have an abortion in 14 out of 50 US states (source), for starters. Nor to help the doubtlessly more-than-100 queer folk in places that outlaw homosexuality.

    Or maybe he’s such a genius that he knows how to keep them safe without actually keeping them anonymous - and in that case, he should start selling such a technique as its own product /s

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    I literally learnt about Kagi like a week ago from a Cory Doctorow’s post. I was like oh, cool, someone there to fight google.

    • shadow@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Ah man, same. Thought I’d give it a go after reading about if from Cory…

      Honestly, for what I search for, DDG is sufficient, and it’s not gonna hassle me about subscriptions.

      What I’d really like to find is something like a pihole for search, where you have your blocklist, cache of things you’ve searched already (your own mini search engine?), and then a fallback engine (DDG, bing, Google, whatever) for things it doesn’t already know.

      I dunno. Search and AI botshit is everywhere, and it’s gonna keep getting worse. Self-hosting tools seems to be the only way to take control back.