I’m in a forum where some person claims that the sealion is actually the reasonable one.
It’s proof to me that this throwaway comic is such a good summary for certain online behavior that there’s an entire subculture built around trying to subvert it.
I swear I knew these fuckers were dodgy when I saw how UX designed their website was. A better search engine would sell itself even if it looked like craigslist.
vlad should’ve stopped at the first time lori told him to stop, definitely, but this whole thing just turned into something else.
and, what surprises me the most, is this attitude of “either you are completely defending lori or else you are a transphobe, queer hater, dehumanizing piece of shit”. my opinion goes, not to defend the actual piece of shit ceo, but to defend our opinions against anyone, and lori failed to do so. lori’s attitude comes closer to throwing a stone and hiding the hand, even though i agree with lori’s point.
by no means the poster is forced to debate, i recognize that. and if lori did not want to, perfectly fine. respectable. but the action (and public posts) are still subject to criticism; like mine, that goes against the fact that saying something controversial and then proceeding to be shocked like “omg, how odd, is people being critical of what i said? outrageous!” is funny.
and the mod banning and removing what he feels are apologist crap is the cherry on top. authoritarian vibes all around.
Maybe I’m the crazy one but I read the full email thread and his responses didn’t seem deranged or unhinged as the author claims. Weird a tech CEO gets into it like over email with a blogger but I just see a guy defending his product. (I haven’t seen the stuff he’s posted on discord though, as another commenter mentioned)
Copy-pasting the alt-text from one of the screenshots because I can’t be assed to type it out myself:
Discord convo from 07/15/22, Vlad: people who really need anonymity are very rare. Probably less than a 100 in the entire world. Definitely not typical Kagi users. Unless they are criminals, in which case we don’t care they don’t have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
yikes, double yikes and triple yikes.
I guess he doesn’t care to help women find a safe way to have an abortion in 14 out of 50 US states (source), for starters. Nor to help the doubtlessly more-than-100 queer folk in places that outlaw homosexuality.
Or maybe he’s such a genius that he knows how to keep them safe without actually keeping them anonymous - and in that case, he should start selling such a technique as its own product /s
It seems like he was rude to email you specifically when you told him not to, but the rest is just standard CEO behaviour.
It seems like he had answers/responses to a lot of what you said so I’m still kind of with him (though guardedly). Mainly due to lack of a better option; I do think paid search is the way forward.
Probably what he should have done is a response blog-post that we could have also discussed publically, and at our own leisure.
Reading your article I get why he would have got defensive (regardless of if he’s covering his ass or has genuine counter-arguments).
I read the whole transcript and I came to conclusion that the author is , to put it gently, bad faith.
Of course if you’re going to give negative opinion on the product made by a single man he is going to want to talk with you. The opposite would be strange, and denying its right to answer is disrespectful and childish.
Doesn’t mean you have to apologize or concede anything, but giving the man a quick and sincere talk about it is just basic level of dignity.
I mean, I think the harassment is unwarranted and clearly the CEO thinks he’s too important to be ignored. But the content of the email itself seems to make sense to me. Am I missing something?
I’m with you on this, it seems he reached out, then just addressed the points raised in the blog? It feels like doing it this way is better than writing a shit-post blog rebuttal? The blogger then reposted their emails as well without asking permission, which, depending on jurisdiction might be questionable.
I feel this whole post/scenario has been elevated to nothing from nothing.
I didn’t see anything wrong with vlad’s emails. Nothing wrong with trying to talk things out with someone who doesn’t like your platform. Kind of like how I think this post is shit and you don’t want to talk about it lolol
First time this community came up on my feed and it’ll be the last time I read it, as I’m filtering it out. Seems like a couple permanently-online perpetual victims looking for attention. Here’s a tip, kids: getting emailed by someone who wants to refute your assertions is not abnormal. In the real world, people will try to defend themselves when you make allegations about them or their work. Receiving an unsolicited email is not harassment and it does not cross any boundaries.
Burying your head in the sand and yelling “you can’t argue with me because I’m not listening” is how a toddler interacts with their world.
actually, i don’t think possessing the ability to send email entitles you to “”“debate”“” with anyone who publishes material disagreeing with you or the way your company runs, and i’m pretty sure responding with a (polite) “fuck off” is a perfectly reasonable approach to the kinds of people who believe they have an inalienable right to argue with you
I am coming from cold on this, I knew kagi existed, It was on my bucket list to do research before even considering any trial, well kagi is not for me since I will never make an account to search web.
That being said, I read through both the blog and the email chain, and I was still so confused on whose side to take i read through OP’s other articles and comments and oh my god. Only thing i concluded is Vlad may have crossed boundaries in terms of emailing someone against their wishes, but the email chain wasn’t enough for me conclude he is narcisst, OP however is definitely pot calling the kettle black.
I’m just trying to use independent search engines with their own index/crawler. I used DDG for many years but the fact that it’s basically a front end for Bing and Microsoft started to bother me, particularly since they put ChatGPT into Bing.
I only know of Brave Search, Mojeek, and Kagi to be independent and private at this point. I don’t want to pay for Kagi, Mojeek has its uses but I wouldn’t use it as my main engine, so that left Brave Search. The company and CEO is sus, I don’t use their chromium browser, and their search results seem to emulate and optimize ranking based on the big guys (Google and Bing) but in 2024 search is hard to come by and it’s more important to me to be fully independent of big tech.
I saw this post earlier that mentions some other search options, along with plenty of other suggestions in the comments. Hopefully you can find something you like in there! I haven’t checked them all out myself yet.
Tldr: I like your ranking algo. Feels like a breath of fresh air reminiscent of the old days of search and internet
Long version: When I want to get results for a query, not for an intent per se, I use Mojeek.
It works best for certain types of queries. When I want to get out of the commercialized, centralized, sanitized, SEO-ridden bubble that is every other search engine, Mojeek let’s me find way more potentially obscure, unique, and satisfying results per query that likely wouldn’t rank favorably with the modern page quality criteria used by Google. Plus, compared to the same 5 websites you’ll see for every query on other engines because of that very criteria, Mojeek has way more diversity in sources.
With all these corporations incentivized to further commercialize and consolidate the internet and with the rise of AI as a source of knowledge, Mojeek is one of the places I hang onto to explore a web of humans instead of a web of reputation and money.
Thanks a lot for sharing such a detailed rundown of what you find Mojeek to be useful for. I’ve shared this with the wider team.
This being said, if you have things that you’d like to wing our way in terms of improvements, or feedback on individual results, our inbox is always open (aloe at mojeek dot com) and there’s a submit feedback button on results pages. Mojeek thrives and grows off of feedback, the good and the bad 🙏
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