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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#521

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

A lot of what is mentioned in this article actually comes across to me as positives.

That said, one of the things that kept me from using Kagi much is their focus on A.I., which has been staring us in the face since Day 0. I hate A.I. Anything connected with A.I. carries a certain stain that is hard to articulate, but basically immediately makes me feel I have some insight into the psychology of the people behind it, and I do not like what I see.

I also think that a lot of people assumed that Kagi is privacy respecting without much evidence, it was never part of their pitch that I remember.

For those reasons I've just never used the service. This author's axes to grind beyond that don't concern me too much, but those two things are total deal breakers. Which is sad.

More variety in the search space is still good from my perspective. I still hope that Kagi succeed.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#522

Post by RagnarD »

Kind of long piece and yet practically nothing was said relevant to why I use Kagi: it's simply much better than using a Google that's ridiculously left-wing and provides ultra-biased results once you've wasted the time to filter out ads. The ability to raise/lower/block specific sites for future searches in Kagi is also a great feature. Regarding privacy, that is important and they need to be become more transparent about what they're doing in that regard. But it's certain that they're more innocuous than searching with Google.

AI will certainly be important to search. I don't think anybody's integrated it well yet, but not for lack of trying. I hope Kagi makes headway on it.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#523

Post by nojvek »

keiferski wrote: post #87

I am increasingly convinced that the successor/replacement to Google will not be a more clever, AI-powered search engine, but a hyper-curated collection of links, selected by people who understand what good content is. Sort of like Yahoo in the pre-Google days. I think this is only going to become more apparent once AI-generated content takes over the web.

I am convinced it won’t be human curated but AI curated.

All information well organized without ads and junk. Like a super glorified Wikipedia with excellent search to dig exactly what you want.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#524

Post by goldenpothos »

My two cents on Kagi raising the price of their subscription to cover their back taxes:

- Businesses that’ll eventually need to collect sales tax should add sales tax automation software to their stack from the beginning (even if they don’t expect to hit the threshold in a given jurisdiction anytime soon). Compliance can get really complicated really quickly -- and what founder wakes up and prefers doing taxes over actually building their product?

- Avalara is probably the most well-known one (Box uses them) but they have an implementation fee that we couldn’t stomach as a bootstrapped business https://www.avalara.com/us/en/index.html

- We ended up going with a fellow startup called Kintsugi because they had a free option that connects to Stripe and didn’t have an implementation fee. We probably won’t even hit any thresholds to need to file until 2025 (cross your fingers it’s earlier!!) but they said they’ll email us when we do, here’s their page https://trykintsugi.com/

- Anything related to compliance makes me anxious so this is great because I don’t even have to think about it until I actually need to, though hopefully not under the same circumstances as Kagi :)

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#525

Post by pcthrowaway »

sleepybrett wrote: post #434
gspencley wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take. It is valid and don't take my alternative interpretation as suggesting otherwise. I owned a business for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was my primary source of income. I valued feedback, tried my hardest to solicit as much of it as possible, and always took it to heart (though I had to always try and glean statistics from the sum of all feedback so that I was never spending resources on minorit…

.. and then the founder decided to harangue the author in email. Guy can't seem to stop stepping on his own dick. https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

Yeah.. I can understand where the author's coming from not wanting to be on a call or get emailed by the founder, but this is such an immediate assumption of bad "fatih" on their part, and a tactless way of communicating that, that I don't consider it a great look for the author.

I'm not even arguing people should assume good faith until proven otherwise (I don't think we should, generally). Just that being so steadfast in one's assumption of bad faith is unwarranted.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#526

Post by BlueTemplar »

shadowgovt wrote: post #316
catapart wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, my assumption here is that people who publish like this page are expecting users to use a "reader view" and they're trying not to introduce any styles at all, so as not to conflict with the styles that the reader view will apply. Otherwise, ' "reasonable default" for lots of text ' is something that browsers provide, using the "system" fonts. Applying a font-family to the entire html or body tags will do the jo…

But the default is objectively awful, at least in Chrome. Seriously: no margins on the images and the images all different widths. No human being would lay out a mixed-media document like this on purpose if they expected other human beings to consume it easily. (This reflects not so much on the author as on how fascinatingly bad the UX of unstyled HTML is. I remember when things looked like this and we were just used…

Let's not forget the issue that comes from Discord being a platform

(which results being hard to copy from)

that Kagi founders use it is a huge red flag that their values and mine do not align.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#527

Post by yesco »

_cenw wrote: post #473
andrewmutz wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This take feels more like being upset about one individual's (Vlad) personal opinions about privacy and politics. But in my opinion, it fails to realize that assigning one person's views to an entire organization is a fallacy. Even if they are the leader. And Vlad didn't even say anything that crazy from a political perspective. "News should not only be about politics" is super reasonable, and I found myself agreei…

It'd be reasonable if it was achievable. News are always colored by politics. And usually the people who want "apolitical" news are just defending the status quo they've internalized as the baseline (which especially in the US is by no means a commonly understood one).

Let's put it a different way, if Vlad wasn't apolitical, like all the haters seem to be complaining about, I wouldn't be paying Kagi any money, it wouldn't even be on my radar.

While no one can truly be unbiased, I want them to try. Arguments against this are just sophist nonsense, and I'm not convinced they are made in good faith.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#528

Post by akudha »

freediver wrote: post #258
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…

> 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…

This is a very weird answer. People who are paying for your service want you to succeed, they want an alternative to Google search. Many of them (like the article above) explicitly say they don't want a t-shirt, they just want a better search product from you.

After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, money and energy you spent on those t-shirts. Your customers are complaining because they want you to succeed. If they didn't care about you, they'd just cancel the subscription and move on. And your response to it is "nah, what we did was right" and not "yeah, maybe we shouldn't have spent all that resources on a stupid t-shirt that nobody wanted"?

I just don't get it. And what are you gonna do when you hit 50K members? Are you planning to send an entire wardrobe (from undies to a suit) to all your 50K customers (assuming IF you ever hit that many customers)?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#529

Post by [deleted] »

sleepybrett wrote: post #434
gspencley wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take. It is valid and don't take my alternative interpretation as suggesting otherwise. I owned a business for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was my primary source of income. I valued feedback, tried my hardest to solicit as much of it as possible, and always took it to heart (though I had to always try and glean statistics from the sum of all feedback so that I was never spending resources on minorit…

.. and then the founder decided to harangue the author in email. Guy can't seem to stop stepping on his own dick. https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

[deleted]

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#530

Post by Capricorn2481 »

akudha wrote: post #528
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…

This is a very weird answer. People who are paying for your service want you to succeed, they want an alternative to Google search. Many of them (like the article above) explicitly say they don't want a t-shirt, they just want a better search product from you. After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, m…

I don't think it's that weird at all. Nor did they say the "customer" needs to think outside the box (what a great misrepresentation). They were just explaining their thinking process.
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