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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#381

Post by dotnet00 »

nebulous1 wrote: post #37
smcleod wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Vlad did a pretty sane, human thing reaching out and offering to discuss. The authors replies seem pretty rude (or at least somewhat aggressive / dismissive). Kagi is Vlads baby and I could imagine he would care and try to explain when he thinks someone has the wrong idea. However to the author - it’s just another service he doesn’t use anymore.

You can make that argument for initial approach, but it falls flat on its face after the author told Vlad that they didn't want to communicate with them and Vlad responded with a lecture. Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.

This feels very similar to the trope on X, where someone makes an inflammatory or stupid comment, people angrily respond calling them stupid, and the original person then claims they're being harassed/were just joking, and ultimately neither side actually communicates. The people who like the original poster continue on believing that they were being harassed, and people who thought they were being stupid continue on believing they're being stupid.

I feel that Vlad is justified, even if I personally would've just considered it to be a lost cause and just kept receipts in case it became necessary to publicly respond, similar to how the Apollo dev released receipts when Reddit tried to make him out to be in the wrong.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#382

Post by jlund-molfese »

piafraus wrote: post #363
sumeno wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone says "please don't email me about this anymore" and you continue to email them you are being combative

If your intention to stop communication - you can block someone. Or if that's the words that would've been chosen - I would agree to you. But if you mix those words with extra message, then no. A reply to this new message is warranted. E.g. if you add a reason and that reason is unreasonable - it's warranted to address that and reply to you. Either do a request without attached strings, or block. Don't write extra co…

Sure, or if you're being polite, or even short in a reasonable way "I'd rather not discuss this privately," that is fine.

Lori's emails are deliberately designed to goad Vlad into replying, just to act indignant when he does.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#383

Post by andrewmutz »

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…

> 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 agreeing with him much more than the person he was talking to.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#384

Post by gspencley »

swatcoder wrote: post #322
recursivegirth wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. Your gut got you this far, but to be a profitable company you are going to need to consider the advice and concerns of your stakeholders. Based on your current description, you have two stakeholders (yourself + customers). If the venture fails, you will ask yourself if you listened enough. Be proactive, address concerns, do not put yourself in a defensive position. E…

This is a forum where people respond well to practical explanations from thoughtful founders. I don't know if the OP got what they needed from this reply, but I assume I'm not alone in being impressed by the humility and candor of the response and developed much greater affinity for Kagi from some of the specifics of what were said. I want more companies to have communicative, principled management that invites a sus…

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 minority opinions).

What I read from the user was that the company created an optics problem. It wasn't whether the company was losing money or not, it was just that the user is choosing to support that company because they want a really good search engine, and the optics of divesting the company's resources into multiple projects makes it appear as if it could be the case that not enough focus is being spent on what really matters to that user.

What I read from the founder was that the optics issue went completely over his head and a complete dismissal of the user's concerns and feedback, along with a doubling down of the decisions made.

It's not a good look in my opinion. Even though the founder was polite and didn't say anything inappropriate, I would NEVER have responded to a customer of mine like that.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#386

Post by fckgw »

drunkan wrote: post #323
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a second there, I thought you were talking about Vlad! Based on the exchanges, Vlad is both extremely combative and unwilling to accept the possibility that he is wrong (which he is here). Being aggressively wrong is no way to go through life. Vlad should be more humble, and open to being wrong, rather than being unnecessarily belligerent.

If someone say "please don't email me about this anymore" after writing a hit piece on someone and there company without giving them an opportunity to respond they are being provocative, goading and a troll.

It's not a hit piece, it's someone's personal experiences on their own personal blog.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#387

Post by AirMax98 »

> But I cannot stress enough, they did not just spend money on 20,000 tshirts to give out, they set up a whole new business entity in Germany to run their own t-shirt printing operation, with its own building and warehouse and employee(s? I get the sense it's one guy but I don't know). And this cost them 1/3 of their $670k funding round. One, fucking, third. For t-shirts.

Holy shit

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#388

Post by rjbwork »

silviot wrote: post #361
kerkeslager wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.

> ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers. I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here. I assume many people are on the same boat, so I wouldn't be so sure about that.

FWIW I'm a customer and had never read about it on HN until this post. I learned about it from a private Discord programmer community.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#389

Post by croisillon »

nottorp wrote: post #341
skydhash wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe customers were wary of having 1 ton of steel barreling down the street. And there's no ergonomics in phones. Their prime quality is portability. Ergonomics has been sacrificed to convenience.

Iirc it was said that speeds over 30 km/h will kill you too.

worldwide over 1 million deaths a year...

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#390

Post by sianemo »

catapart wrote: post #282
sumeno wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone says "please don't email me about this anymore" and you continue to email them you are being combative

This comment, taken as a response to the parent or just as general advice about life, is so entirely bereft of anything objectionable, and is so intrinsically reasonable that its status as 'downvoted' (assumed from the grey text color) is a blemish on HN's commentariat. Put more simply: it takes a weird, broken logic to find fault in the idea that a person who won't stop emailing you, after being told to, isn't "comb…

The further responses from Vlad may be ill advised, and maybe he should've realized those emails were going to be unproductive, but they aren't combative.

The email Lori sends explicitly asking him to stop emailing is then followed up with some last-wordism "for the record" nonsense. Only on the extremely online internet do people consider someone the aggrieved party after they write a screed against a product or business, then close the conversation with representatives of that business with essentially a don't @ me and some last-wordism. It's terrible journalistic practice. It's a net negative in social and community engagement. I don't see why doing it over online spaces gives the author a pass here.

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