Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results

I think we’re broadly in agreement: the more private options we have (with different levels of privacy), the better.

It’s possible, in theory, to use Privacy Pass to allow e.g. using credit card to pay for the whole subscription without associating the account with the payment. (E.g. one payment gives you 1 “pass”, and it can be used to extend your account validity for one month.) In practice, it’ll probably be fairly easy to correlate a payment with an account extension, as those would happen almost simultaneously, so a couple more levels are needed here (e.g. doing this through resellers, and maybe breaking up the subscription payment into, say, 30 “day passes” which are used in random order to make it harder to track).

Posteo’s “one-time code system” is a fair bit weaker than Privacy Pass btw: when they get a payment, they can still associate it with your account (so if you’ve paid using, say, bank transfer, they will know your name, and you’ll have to trust them not to store the link). But it can be used together with Privacy Pass :-)

I similarly stopped subscribing when I realised they were paying money to Musk for grok, and I refuse to fund that man in any way. I hadn't seen the Russian data usage. The Kagi founder above states that using these services doesn't imply support of the governments or owners behind them, but that's a crock of shit. Using their services is, at best, an indicator of a complete lack of principles to a degree that I can now never use their service. He asks for respect for his moral line above, but no-one owes him that - not every viewpoint deserves respect.

Being principled in your choice of services as an individual these days is challenging, as so many companies pursue money over all else. It is doable, however, and Kagi won't feature in my life again no matter how many cool features they add. The internet has become such a cesspit that it warms my heart to know there are still other people who believe in being good and principled, not just making money.

Why don't we have a pre-paid wallet that I can pay for each article across websites? it will be the alternative model to ads.

> Not to mention the problematic nature of trusting any data coming from a country known for state-sponsored deception, trolling and organized operations in informational warfare.

What, like the United States of America?

I find it so odd that people think Kagi's commercial agreement with Yandex is more offensive than theirs with Google or Microsoft, both of whom have contracts with the US military. Surely they're equally as abhorrent, particularly the use of their AI models for combat warfare purposes.

> (to the inevitable whatabouters: yes, this can also be applied to other economies/countries, everyone makes their own moral choices on where to draw the line, but the line should be drawn somewhere)

Genuinely curious: on the correct side of your personal line, what services do you now use that replace Kagi? Presumably they'd be EU-based, like Qwant or Ecosia?

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that the model for journalism is actually broken. For some unknown reason, people do not want to subscribe to news media, but they'll happily pay for Netflix, Disney, HBO and Spotify.

The comment is always: I want to be able to pay for this one article, but streaming doesn't work like that. I can watch a movie on Netflix and pay €25 per month, then watch what ever else I want. Or, I can pay €13 and watch just that one movie on AppleTV and nothing else. Newspapers are more expensive, typically, because their subscriber count is way lower than that of Netflix, but their cost remain roughly the same.

You can't say: I want to pay $1 for an article, unless that article is massively popular, that's not going to cover all the other less popular, but important news for that day. Journalism requires a stable income to produce things of value. Investigations may that months or years. Using the cost of the Netflix/AppleTV example you should either subscribe, or pay around half the monthly subscription per article.

So no, the revenue model for journalism isn't broken. Our ability so recognize the value of good journalism is. It's easier and more profitable to write an "article" about Kim Kardashians oatmeal with a few dusin ads slapped on, than it is to do a multiple page article about the governance problems of the UK, which you need to sell, because advertisers don't want to be associated with politics and the target audience big enough anyway.

So, we can't have good, independent journalism, because the amount of people who care aren't enough to cover the expense or they want to shop around and only pay for the topics and views they care about and agree with. Micro-payments is the complete wrong way to go, we need more people to start subscribing to newspapers again and the papers needs to take that money and funnel that money directly into actual journalism.