After reading through all of the founders comments, going through the discord and looking at the context and conversations that happened _after_ the screenshots. This person is blowing this completely out of proportion with exaggerated language and cherry picked examples to fit their biases.
I Lost Faith in Kagi
501–510 of 639 posts
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#502[deleted]
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#503I am a paying Kagi user and it seems to me that the post is from an over-zealous user venting after their unsolicited advice was rejected. Reading through the post without finding a single mention of search quality is quite telling about its content.
There is no reason for Kagi to remain “pure” and avoid AI features as suggested by hardcore AI haters. I am not a fan of AI hype either, but I am pleased to see that Kagi has integrated some moderate capabilities such as the summarizer and search-based generation, which are natural extensions of a modern search engine. (I do hope they improve the expert mode soon, as it is currently far inferior to Perplexity, but that does not invalidate the general point.)
Email-based account management may not be perfect from a privacy perspective, but registering with a privacy email alias has mostly resolved my concerns. As for GDPR, let’s not pretend that it is disproportionately burdensome for startups. I value the way a company operates much more than the privacy theatres (banners, opt-outs, legaleses) enforced by GDPR.
Other criticisms regarding operational details range from nitpicking to trivial. I do hope that the founder was less insistent on arguing with and lecturing zealous users like the author.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? For the vast, vast majority of people, paying for search is insane. And that includes the people who pay for other services.
Judging from how often Kagi comes up here (HN), I actually thought they were far bigger than they are.
The percentage of HN users in their customer base is very probably far higher than the percentage of HN users in the general population. Many orders of magnitude ;)
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#505Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#506I subscribe to Kagi. Begrudgingly. I wish them well but it does seem all a bit fractured and when push come to shove and the money runs out what are they going to do to safeguard my information? Because it’s easy to talk high morals when things are fine but when it’s your last drop of life blood maybe the moral and ethic equation suddenly changes to get that one last infusion/injection.
Is there a common thread amongst search engine founders? The guy from you.com also gives interesting vibes. Here he is with 10 shill accounts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344999
Edit: I think Vlad is a true believer in what he preaches. I detect no subterfuge in him. But he takes negative comments personally as if people have a duty to love his vision and product. A true believer but seems like that would be a tough trait to have when you cater to a very opinionated audience.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps we live in different worlds, but there's a world of distanced between unhinged and roughly 3 emails to someone who wrote a peice targeted specifically at your business. If anything the replies in that Mastadon thread make the author and others appear petty, combative and immature imo, and I do not say that as someone who agrees with all Vlad's perspectives.
If someone tells you to stop emailing them after 1 email don't send 2 more. It's that easy
After posting a blog entry specifically targeting and naming someone, their business, posting it on the internet and starting a Mastodon thread.
I'm all for generally leaving people alone, and being civil, but context please.
You don't get to open a salvo against someone, while pretending you're above interaction with them, then play the victim when they respond and universally and unilaterally dictate terms while always trying to get the last word in.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your grasp of personal information management under GDPR seems to be lacking, particularly regarding the roles and responsibilities of data controllers and what personal information are under GDPR. If you're operating within this jurisdiction, I would strongly recommend consulting with a GDPR expert. Non-compliance can lead to significant fines. Additionally, if this user were located in Europe, and he already sounds…
You are correct and my confidence at the time came from the fact that we are not in the business of selling user data, do not collect it or ever need it so GDPR was not affecting us (in my mind). I had no business discussing sophisticated policy matters on a public Discord, and yet I did it in good faith open to learning something new like it happened many times on our Discord. People do this all the time. The differ…
GDPR is not just for business that "sells data". Like the above said, you would need a GDPR expert consultant to go through your whole process. It will also correlate to your country's law, not something "you can do what you think it's true".
You can check Mullvad's privacy policy to see how they are handling GDPR. It's not written in "corporate words" and is very clear to me. For example, they don't even need email address to sign up but once payment comes to the table, GDPR comes - depending on which method of payment, regardless of how you insist on "no data collect": https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy
The correct thing to do is transparenting that process with your legal/GDPR person.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#509I 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…
> 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…
Yesterday I realized I had 75 tabs open on my mobile web browser and decided to do some trimming. Anything I was confident would come up again and didn’t need to be held onto got closed, including a tab for Kagi. And now I find Kagi has come up again, and I really liked reading this message so now I’m opening the tab again and almost certainly subscribing
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like a great argument for not listening to anyone, or improving your product or messaging at all. Make the obvious observation that the complainers are a minority (ignoring that vocal non-complainers are also a minority), that their public complaints don't represent the opinions of one or two orders of magnitude of people who won't ever complain (just silently drop), are not ever influential, and that the…
What people say they want is usually something completely different to their purchasing behaviour, and as a business you should listen little to what people say they want and listen much to how they spend their money. For just about any business, if they were to ask their customers or the public at large what they want, the answer is usually "We want free stuff!". Cool to do if you're a politician, but bad business p…
>and as a business you should listen little to what people say they want and listen much to how they spend their money.
yeah well if I never pay money for kagi and never speak about anything how the hell is kagi supposed to know what they could do to get me to pay for them?