Reconsider your partnership with Brave

WoundedMoose

scy Hysterics aren't helpful, nor is projecting your whims to the entirety of someone else's project.

Peter

scy
They're not "just as bad". There's a difference between tracking people and denying them healthcare, for example, or wanting them dead.

You too use the phrase "wanting them dead" (or something similar). Did Brave or Brendan Eich say something like that? Could you please show me the source for that?

And I disagree with your opinion that other API sources are not as bad. I'm almost sure that Yandex's propaganda involvement in the Russian invasion of Ukraine did cost quite a few lives. Can you really say the same about Brave or Brendan Eich?

scy

Peter You too use the phrase "wanting them dead" (or something similar). Did Brave or Brendan Eich say something like that? Could you please show me the source for that?

*points to the rest of the post of which you apparently have only read the first couple of lines*

Sure, Prop8 didn't say "we want the queers to be dead". But it leads to that. People who vote for it, and especially people who donate to it, either know that and want it to happen, or don't care about whether the gays die or not. Both is unacceptable in my opinion.

Peter And I disagree with your opinion that other API sources are not as bad. I'm almost sure that Yandex's propaganda involvement in the Russian invasion of Ukraine did cost quite a few lives. Can you really say the same about Brave or Brendan Eich?

Valid point. I was focusing on the argument that Google is as bad as Eich. To be honest, I didn't even know that Kagi is using Yandex until this moment. Are they paying for this service? I assume they do. In that case, I oppose this as well. Though there's still a difference: While I agree that Yandex is probably being influenced by the Kremlin, does Artyom Savinovsky donate to the military, voluntarily?

Also, I don't agree that "propaganda on Yandex" played a major role when it comes to the number of Ukrainian lives lost.

chris_20017

scy Sure, Prop8 didn't say "we want the queers to be dead". But it leads to that.

No, it doesn’t. It leads to people from the gay community not being able to marry. That is intolerant, small-minded and begrudging. Unfortunately, it was also the status quo for a long time. Supporting it does not mean supporting or condoning an act of homophobic violence. It simply does not.

Peter

scy points to the rest of the post of which you apparently have only read the first couple of lines

Oh, I did read your whole post. Maybe I didn't understand it fully.

chris_20017

scy For some of you, the whole issue is about whether Brave provides good technology or not. But for others, who are thinking a few steps ahead, it is about protecting their freedom, their physical safety, and ultimately, their life.
scy In a country where anti-LGBTQ hate crimes have increased almost 20 percent from 2021 to 2022 alone, curtailing gay rights directly leads to people getting hurt or killed.
This whole thinking ahead makes companies like Kagi complicit in a multitude of terrible things that, in the case of the person being criticised, only exist in the subjunctive.

The longer I follow this discussion, the more I realise how limited Kagi's options for action are to appease the critics here.

WoundedMoose

chris_20017 And they're never appeased. Bully in one thing, then keep pushing until the thing is a broken shadow of what it could've been. You can witness it daily.

carl

scy carl, I would appreciate if you could dial down the conspiracy theories and McCarthyism a bit.

There's no conspiracy. Witch hunts and mobs going after single victims is a constant aspect of humanity. McCarthyism is one of the famous examples! And here you are following the same patterns of persecution. Examples are found everywhere in politics, where usually a ruling party gets destroyed by inner strife once they've taken the route of letting an ideologically fuelled group take power by purging. One example is Mozilla.

I didn't. Please show me a few examples. Note that "I'm leaving" isn't a threat. "I'm not buying in your store" and "I'm not talking to someone with that kind of opinion" aren't threats either.

From the OP: "I refuse to financially support any organization that partners with an organization that tolerates such hate and ignorance."

A bit further down: "...but people are hesitant to finance actors who finance causes that reject their own identity."

And further down: "I'll gladly remove my financial backing of Kagi if they continue to support Brave."

These are meant as threats. Of course anybody can threaten to take their business elsewhere, and then do it. But most take their business elsewhere without public notice, and Kagi can loose many more customers if they don't take this into consideration. If the relationship is that bad already, there is no chance of further improvement. The people threatening Kagi in this thread will not be satisfied with any victory, and remove their support later anyway.

The exact opposite is true. Brendan Eich is being called out exactly because he is supporting legislation that threatens the life of people.

That's not true. He has not wished death on anybody or threatened anybody. You have arguably crossed the line of criminal slander in this thread, that Mr Eich could use in a lawsuit against you as the real individual behind the nick, if he was so inclined. One day you might look back at your words here and go "What the fuck?". It is completely disproportionate what Mr Eich is being the subject to. Some might think that by the virtue of his skin colour or ethnicity, that Mr Eich deserve no mercy and consideration. But he is a human being and has the same protection as anybody else, certainly in a court of law.

However, it's also the right of gay marriage proponents to oppose Brendan Eich in return.

You absolutely have no right to oppose his existence.

Well, it's not there, because Brendan Eich's views have not changed, and he's trying to weasel himself out of admitting that. People saw right through this.

This is what I mean when I write that Mr Eich is the victim of a witch hunt and a hate mob. By not accepting an apology and instead saying that the victim is "trying to weasel", you end all discussion and all civility. You are exhibiting the same kind of behaviour as the Chekist used against alleged spies during Stalin's purge and that the Lutheran priests used against alleged witches. Victims were forced to confess and apologise, even if they hadn't done anything wrong – and were of course killed after that anyway. Because the zeal and hatred made no apology acceptable. At least you are "generously" offering Mr Eich to pay for his forgiveness.

I think people are using this thread to blow off steam and their personal frustration from the holidays, and getting their "two minutes of hate" against a victim that has no way to retaliate. But I might be wrong - hell, maybe even Kagi will soon be the subject of a cyber hate mob, that will slander the company everywhere online because they didn't throw Mr Eich under the bus. That could even be good for the company, depending on how the wind blows.

Void7212

Valid point. I was focusing on the argument that Google is as bad as Eich. To be honest, I didn't even know that Kagi is using Yandex until this moment. Are they paying for this service? I assume they do. In that case, I oppose this as well. Though there's still a difference: While I agree that Yandex is probably being influenced by the Kremlin, does Artyom Savinovsky donate to the military, voluntarily?

This is really grasping at straws, in my opinion.

Yandex is a Russian company. At least a portion of the profit is paid in taxes there, which means indirectly funding the military invasion of Ukraine. And knowing how the power dynamic is in Russia, and the extent of Russian propaganda, it's not unthinkable to consider there might be some direct ties (but I don't know).
Google made so much damage to our society, that it's not even in the same scale compared to the Brave guy. Between privacy violations, the whole distortion of information in the web and the environmental impact of it all, it's incalculable.
Microsoft is probably not as bad as Google but it definitely is right there. All of this without even taking in consideration their taxes and the cooperation with the US military and similar orgs.

The only honest conclusion for someone who wants to play the "morally right" card in the context of not paying immoral supplier of services is not to use any of the APIs. Anything else is finding excuses or looking at this once again from the US-centric individualistic perspective where gay marriage is a more important issue compared to the systemic damages of those companies (or funding the Russian military, or cooperating with the DoD).

The problem is, this brings us to only one possible conclusion: Kagi should use only its own scraper or a bunch of minor scrapers, destroying the quality and with it, the chance of ever succeeding. Strategically, it means allowing Google to keep dominating the market, which is also a reactionary position which will keep the status quo.

I would say that Kagi is indeed a political entity, and I don't buy for a second the "tech is not politic" bit. Choosing to downrank links with ads and tracking is a political choice. Choosing to base its business on subscription and on free search, rather than on spying its users is a political choice. This does not mean that Kagi should have a position on all political issues specifically and also, of course, this does not mean ignoring who you do business with tout-court, but this specific issue is just not a case -for me- that should raise questions. And it is not because the relationship is indirect, and because the alternatives are as bad if not worse.

Vlad

Kagi feedback is a place to give Kagi feedback about its features and bugs. This discussion is unfortunately turning into everything but and this does not benefit anyone in our user community.

If we are to derive some kind of constructive action for Kagi to take, there needs to be a clear consensus that makes sense on a technical level and for the business. However, after reviewing the discourse in this thread, the only thing here is shifting arguments that we cannot possibly reconcile. We are locking the thread for the time being to give everyone time to think about how Kagi should approach this in a constructive manner given the circumstances we operate in.

These circumstances, our position, and next steps are posted below.

Vlad

(edit: This post has been edited to clarify the situation and our position.)

On Dec 26, Kagi started including search results from Brave search index, after we previously added Mojeek and Yandex earlier in the year. Brave has a public search api and we currently implemented it for about 10% of queries as a first test (same as any other API we use, there is no mutual development or anything of the sorts). This was announced in our Dec 28 public changelog. Approximately a week later on Jan 5 after several posts on social media about ‘Brave partnership’ the situation escalated.

I understand that this has affected many of you in a negative way, creating a sense of betrayal that's against the very ethos of Kagi. I want to address this and be crystal-clear: any semblance of support for discrimination is completely against our principles. The rationale behind our choice was purely based on technological merits and business strategy, including the quality and cost-effectiveness of the service, as well as a critical need for redundancy and diversification in our data sources. The decision was treated the same as getting results from Google or Yandex (to which different groups of users in our userbase object to for various different reasons).

Kagi is currently not in the position to be fully independent. Searching the web is incredibly hard and Microsoft spent 20 years and billions of dollars building Bing, and it is still, let's say, suboptimal. Definitely not at the level people would pay for it. It is very hard for a small startup with many orders of magnitude less resources to crawl/index/rank the entire web and for it to be so good that people would pay for.

So we have to rely on technologies other companies have built, and then leverage them to push our mission with a completely new business model for search that aligns incentives. We are constantly thinking about ways that could make expanding our capabilities and growing our independence possible in light of new technology that is becoming available.

One thing we are doing is building our own index for the part of the web that is people’s personal sites (which also advances our mission to humanize the web by surfacing them in our results), and this is what we are doing through Kagi Small Web initiative. https://kagi.com/smallweb

Today Kagi uses the best technologies available, our own index to increase the quality of the results, innovative search experience and a business model that aligns incentives. We are doing the best with the cards we have been dealt and resources we have available, and are still the only company out there crazy enough to attempt to do this. Chances are stacked against us already to begin with and reducing reliance on any single search source is a big deal for us. This is part of the reason we included these search results - now we have 4 search indexes to work with and are much more resilient to any one killing the relationship on a whim. This also allows us to optimize cost as we can use different indexes for different queries, which is another important consideration for us as Kagi is not profitable yet.

I do understand the concerns of our users and that to you it is about the degree of control where your subscription money is going to. On the other hand, if we stopped using all search providers that our users are asking us to, there would be none left, as there is no search provider out there that is liked by everyone. So we are currently between a hammer and an anvil here. And so while there are some negative implications, I believe that the benefits of the product and technology we are building greatly outweigh them.

We want to clarify the relationship between Kagi and its users:

Kagi exists to empower its users with all the information in the world, and one user's path of life in one hemisphere of the world may be very different from that of another Kagi user.

Choosing to focus on our mission to provide the best search results in the world is the only practical position we can have. This is not because we are ignorant to issues impacting societies across the globe, but because it is impractical for us to deal with them all. We cannot solve all of the world’s problems, human rights issues, conflicts and wars, but we have instead devoted our passion and energy to solving one problem that we believe is within our grasp, and that is the problem of web search, which is what Kagi is known and loved for. We intend to do that to the best of our ability.

We are still evaluating all the feedback we have gotten, and we'll need some time to consider options that are faithful to all our customers & the sustainability of the business. I extend an open invitation for a conversation if you wish to discuss this issue further or if you have suggestions on how we can do better and stay true to our shared values. Please reach out to me directly at vlad@kagi.com

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