Reconsider your partnership with Brave

carl

Seirdy This campaigning against Eich is not reasonable in any way. It is a form of mob justice, where a victim is chosen and terrorised in order to make an example for others. And I mean literally that you are terrorising him, seeking out business partners to smear him, decades after he made a political donation.

A victim is chosen by the mob, then dehumanized, and then you justify for yourself that it is right to try to break him – even more than a decade after his supposed crime. It makes you feel powerful and righteous. It is a pattern all throughout humanity, especially when groups with very little coherence or a lot of internal conflict are trying to keep themselves united. The victim mechanism is one of the most powerful ways to unite people, because they forget all rhyme and reason when they are presented with a victim they can direct all their hate towards. And if you can choose a victim that is no threat to you, then even better, because they will not strike back. Eich is a human being just like you, and he is not involving politics in his Brave projects, so they should be judged for what they are.

Dustin

I feel that @Vlad really clearly laid out a reasonable, thoughtful response to the topic here and I appreciate that very much. Considering that the original post appears to be a hit & run made by a new account and the poster never returned to elaborate or respond perhaps this issue can be considered resolved.

Vlad

Seirdy Thanks for constructive feedback. Can you make this a seperate feature suggestion?

Vlad

I am closing this thread because discussion inveitably tends to go outside the scope of search, which is not what this forum is for, and I feel I explained our position to the extent it is humanly possible.

If anyone feels this needs to be reopened, ping me on Kagi Discord.

hrbrmstr

I'll gladly remove my financial backing of Kagi if they continue to support Brave. It's bad enough Google and Bing are being helped by Kagi search results, we don't need to encourage unethical crypto nutjobs while we're at it.

Vlad locking a forum post with many replies in support of removing Brave kind of tells me all I need to know about Kagi's true motives.

I guess this will be cowardly locked after one post, though. Or, just deleted outright.

I did not expect search results from avowed, deliberate, unethical entities in my results.

WoundedMoose

I don't like Brave either, but this is a very odd line in the sand to make.

dtbell91

Came here to see if there had been a response and change in stance before cancelling my account.

You can already see on the stats page that there are 102 fewer members today compared to yesterday. This will continue to hit kagi's bottom line, as it should if they want to support Brave.

user41

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

WoundedMoose

I have yet to see any reason why Brave is worse than Google.

protospork

WoundedMoose I'm not a fan of Google or Microsoft either but the fact is that they provide useful services that Kagi pretty much can't go without. Brave, on the other hand, is a subpar search engine run by a company that's known for being extremely shady as well as being helmed by a bigot. There's no practical reason Kagi should have been doing business with them.

I've already cancelled my payments. There's a chance I would re-subscribe depending on the response to this debacle, because I've had good results with Kagi and I genuinely think something like this needs to exist. But this mess has seriously damaged Kagi's image with pretty much everyone I know who would have been inclined to pay for a decent search engine. I don't know what kind of course-correction could possibly be good enough.

Vlad

After we had time to think about this we updated the 'best answer' post to clarify the circumstances, our position and next steps. See here https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave/76

I am also unlocking this thread in the hope we can have discussion how to approach this complex issue using all of our collective wisdom as a community of Kagi users.

chris_20017

protospork There's no practical reason Kagi should have been doing business with them.

As users, we simply cannot evaluate this. As going into business with another provider inevitably required resources, we can only assume there is a benefit for Kagis business. Why this is the case has been outlined by Vlad.

protospork I've already cancelled my payments.

Whatever good this serves. If anti-Microsoft, anti-Google and anti-Yandex users try to push Kagi in similar directions, there will be no Kagi, something you “genuinely think (...) needs to exist”. A company which keeps a multitude of communication channels open and does business with another company whose CEO supported legislation against same-sex marriage, is an easy target for criticism. At the same time, there are likely millions of people in California who – incomprehensible to me – still oppose same-sex marriage, will support measures against it and will vote accordingly. As someone who was born into an Eastern bloc dictatorship I can only recommend this: Choose your battles wisely.

Whom

I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. It’s weird to me that Brave is a line too far for people when the scale of evil that Google and Microsoft has brought to the world is so much larger and Kagi was already sourcing from them, bothering no one who chose to use the service. Don’t get me wrong, Brave sucks ass. I’m queer and homophobia is of course a very close issue to my heart, but I can’t find any framing that makes Brave a bigger issue than Microsoft. That said, I’d ideally like to see a response focused more on a pragmatic look at different options than a blanket “we won’t get involved in politics,” as a service which acts as one's portal into the world of information has an extremely political job and simply ignoring the political ramifications of your work doesn't make them disappear, it simply means you side with whatever is the default in a given scenario, in this case chosen by financial convenience.

Granted, there's another angle to this. Relying on Google and/or Microsoft is pretty much a requirement for having good results, and so swallowing the pill of indirectly supporting them is something I'm willing to do as the alternative would be one of the completely independent crawlers which...are not great. The same can't really be said of Brave, and the benefits are not really passed onto me as a user. On your end you gain a bit of redundancy and cheaper API usage, but my subscription costs the same and the search quality is practically identical to how it was before it was added. I'm willing to accept that there are necessary evils for you to do business with to make the product meet the level of quality we all desire, but I'm unconvinced Brave is one of them.

I'm not immediately compelled to cancel my subscription, but the responses here have been unsatisfying and I'll have to see how this all shakes out before I make a decision. I'd like the decisionmakers to not underestimate the power of an act of goodwill. Is whatever Brave offers you really worth making queer people and motivated allies second guess their support of Kagi? There is a massive amount of friction you have to overcome to make people even consider the option of paying for search, and choices like this only add more. In other words, if you're going to ask someone to pay for something which has always been free on the strength of a more principled approach to the web, you'd better make sure your hands are clean.

Peter

I don't quite understand the focus on Brave. Google has done much shadier things than Brave (that's why they had to pay billions of dollars of EU fines). And nobody seems to talk much about Yandex, where the (now former) CEO is even on the EU sanctions list because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yandex is by far a much shadier company than Brave.

Where should Vlad draw a line? He'd have to remove everything but Teclis (Kagi's own index) and maybe Mojeek. And nobody would pay for that and Kagi would cease to exist.

And if Kagi would start with removing just your evil pet peeve company, then other people would get mad because Kagi didn't remove their evil company as an API source as well.

The best solution in this circumstance is probably an option to select the search sources for yourself, and that's already planned.

Porente

Peter I think the solution idea is pretty good.
However, I don't see how Google and Yandex are much shadier than Brave yet. I haven't found as much criticism about them with a quick search, could you please elaborate on this a bit more?

BeNice

Porente
Google's (legal and illegal) large scale invasion into our privacy for example. Just a year ago they had to pay 392m$ for secretly tracking people's locations

I think the best start would be if users could decide which backends they want for themselves and which not. As others have written there may be only Mojeek and Marginalia whose associates have never done anything (we/you consider) wrong publicly

Peter

Porente
The Wikipedia articles Criticism of Google and Antitrust cases against Google by the European Union are good starting points for Google. And remember, Google also owns YouTube, which is, according to this investigative journalist, the worst social media company (and I now, it's almost funny that this link is a YouTube video).

And about Yandex: the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin seem to exert significant influence on Yandex. This is a summary of a good article (the article is in German but we can use Kagi's Universal Summarizer to translate the content).

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