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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#271

Post by freediver »

figassis wrote: post #256
freediver wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is a shame that a project so attractive feels like it's abandoned. Can you clarify what makes you say that? Orion development is very active. Here is Orion's changelog in case you missed it: https://kagi.com/orion/updates/orion-release-notes.html

I installed it sometime (end of last year/ beginning of this year, can't recall). Was setting it up and imported bookmarks. Then tried to edit them and found out that renaming bookmarks and/or changing links messes up the bookmarks, they don't save/get reset. Some very odd behaviors and I have a hard time believing that they were not picked up by the team or other users. I think setting bookmarks with icon only was a…

Is it fair to say that building a browser from scratch is very hard, multi year process, and that one interaction with it half a year ago and encountering some bugs does not mean the project is abandoned?

I use it as a daily driver and many other people do and while there are many issues still (we have over 2000 open issues on oriofeedback.org) Orion has never been better and I encourage you try it again.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#272

Post by neurostimulant »

infecto wrote: post #8

I still pay for Kagi for its search but this has kind of been the problem from the beginning with their org. - Search has been a breath of fresh air, I wish they dedicated more time to it. - Orion...is ok? I use it off and on and it is fine but would rather have better search. The premise of the browser is nice but it feels like this could probably be a whole separate company or a purely open source endeavor. It has…

I'm actually looking forward for the t-shirt...

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#273

Post by freediver »

mda wrote: post #268
freediver wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in their org. The way I look at it is instead of making their products better, they flushed a bunch of money down the drain for t-shirts and its offensive to paying customers who are paying because they enjoy the product and want it to become better, they don't want a t-shirt. Kagi founder here and I want to clarify the train of thoughts around Kagi printing an…

"Kagi does no paid advertising" I remember Daniel King's PowerPlayChess channel recently started promoting Kagi, doesn't this count as paid advertising or is this deal something else?

You are right, we started doing that last week so technically we are doing marketing now.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#274

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

alemanek wrote: post #245
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combative in this case means treating the exchange as combat: a fight to win; rather than an opportunity to be humble and listen to others and learn. The exchanges all read like Vlad derives a lot of self-esteem from being right, which isn't as good as deriving it from ability to learn when wrong.

Wouldn’t the same apply to Lori in that exchange. They just put the company on blast and aren’t willing to even hear the other side of things. That email exchange made me lose a ton of respect for them. But, Vlad definitely should have stopped when Lori responded that they didn’t want to have a conversation at all. If for no other reason than they were a lost cause.

The one who "needs to hear the other side of things" is rarely the customer, and this is a good case study in why: no matter how much this customer "hears", they are right and Vlad is wrong with regards to the GDPR. By insisting that the customer needed to "hear the other (wrong) side of things" he looked worse than if he had just listened to the customer.

The customer isn't always right, but often is, like in this case. If you're a CEO, best to just pipe down, be humble, and listen to customers. Being open to being wrong is a nice plus, but either way, people will like you more if you appear to listen instead of argue. Even when you're right!

tl;dr: this isn't an internet argument between two otherwise-equal random strangers, this is a CEO talking down to a customer while being objectively wrong, which is 2x bad.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#275

Post by lolinder »

danpalmer wrote: post #237
emushack wrote: post #227

I really don't understand why people are so upset about the T-shirts. Like in the grand scheme of things, who cares? If I invested money (I didn't) in Kagi, I would expect some of that money to be spent on marketing. Marketers often do experiments, some of which go well, and others that don't. Only time tells. This take feels more like being upset about one individual's (Vlad) personal opinions about privacy and poli…

Sending t-shirts to existing users is unlikely to be an effective marketing strategy to grow/maintain the business. The way they did it was also inefficient and high-risk. It may reduce churn, but with 20k users there's a very low cap on how good a churn reduction can be vs bringing in new users.

As a counterpoint, nearly all of Kagi's growth so far can be directly attributed to word-of-mouth marketing from those 20k early adopters. I can see a rational case to be made that making those vocal early adopters feel appreciated will pay off in the long run as they continue to advocate for Kagi in places like HN.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#276

Post by JohnFen »

mbStavola wrote: post #248
JohnFen wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All search engines are problematic in terms of privacy.

One of the main selling points of Kagi is privacy. It's featured on the main landing page, they have a page dedicated to it, and it's mentioned in pretty much every sales pitch they will make. Kagi's audience is also comprised of people who have that value as paying for a search engine means divesting from adtech surveillance. So, it does not matter that "all search engines are problematic in terms of privacy"-- this…

Sure, I get that. I'm one of the more privacy-sensitive people you're likely to meet.

The complaint is about the marketing for sure. But that's not so different from the other "privacy-oriented" engines I'm aware of.

I'm not saying Kagi is (or is not, I don't know) being a good actor here. I'm just saying that if you want to use a search engine at all, you're effectively having to choose the lesser of evils.

Kagi may not be a saint, but since there aren't better options, I'm willing to settle with a search engine that actually gives me useful search results and isn't totally egregious on privacy issues.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#277

Post by danpalmer »

tqwhite wrote: post #255
danpalmer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Claude3 was trained on Hacker News comment threads – read the first 3 paragraphs and believe you've got the gist of the whole article.

I read a lot more than three paragraphs before I delegated reading the rest. For most of the article, his complaints were distinctly not relevant to my interests.

I wasn't necessarily saying that you had only read that much, rather that it's a common issue here on HN, and that Claude3 appears to have done the same thing. Stepping back a bit, it's concerning to me that Claude isn't able to read a document with multiple different themes and then represent the fact there were multiple themes, instead taking the first and "assuming" that's what the whole document is about.

I thought this article was actually quite varied – there are issues about personal interactions and communication style, AI hype, marketing and business blunders, tax issues, privacy issues, politics. Some of those matter more to me than others, but I'd imagine most Kagi users would care about at least one of them, given the product is pitched at users who care about some of these.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#278

Post by danpalmer »

lolinder wrote: post #275
danpalmer wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending t-shirts to existing users is unlikely to be an effective marketing strategy to grow/maintain the business. The way they did it was also inefficient and high-risk. It may reduce churn, but with 20k users there's a very low cap on how good a churn reduction can be vs bringing in new users.

As a counterpoint, nearly all of Kagi's growth so far can be directly attributed to word-of-mouth marketing from those 20k early adopters. I can see a rational case to be made that making those vocal early adopters feel appreciated will pay off in the long run as they continue to advocate for Kagi in places like HN.

That's fair, but many of them may also prefer to see the money spent on the service (or other marketing). If I was paying $20 a month for a service on the basis of creating a sustainable paid search business, I think being sent a "free" t-shirt would call into question the sustainability and make it harder to justify the cost – can I pay $15 for a service that doesn't send t-shirts?

More generally though, word of mouth is a good place to start but it maxes out quickly, especially for niche products. There will need to be some support from other channels. Even just putting the name of the company on the t-shirt would have supported it a bit.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#279

Post by freediver »

yreg wrote: post #29

I've read the first third of the article and I didn't get what's the author's problem with Kagi. What do they care how many employees Kagi has or how much they spend on t-shirts. Then I scrolled through the rest of it and read the very last screenshot. That one looks pretty bad. > people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than a 100 in the entire world. definitely not typical Kagi users > unless t…

Kagi CEO here.

I'd concede that it was a bad choice of words but also the screenshot was taken out of context. What I meant to say is that anonymity and privacy are two different things and that most people really need just their privacy respected, not be truly anonymous in life.

I also had a narrow view back then of what people considered by anonymity (for example considering VPNs as something giving them anonymity online).

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#280

Post by freediver »

Closi wrote: post #217
freediver wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very hard to build a browser from scratch. Yes Orion is still in beta and buggy, but there are hundreds of people who paid $150 for a lifetime license for this browser, which makes me hopeful that there is a space for a browser we pay for and is built with users' best interest in mind. That is incredibly important for Kagi's mission.

Yes - but why do it is the main point? Why not focus on doing one thing properly? Although you seem to obviously be attracting enough money so it's up to you how to spend/burn it :)

Because I think you can not succeed as a search company without a browser. And I think that both and Orion and Kagi have proper focus. There are bugs yes, but they are not there due to lack of focus, otherwise every product out there has lack of focus.
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