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As many of you know, I posted recently about my experiences and outlook on Kagi, the paid search engine. It's gotten some positive press recently, ironically right after I made my blog post about why I no longer liked or trusted it. This blog post was called "Why I Lost Faith In Kagi" and was a pretty simple quick collection of my thoughts that I primarily wrote so it'd be easier to find again later to link to people when discussing Kagi versus making it a fedi thread I couldn't search for easily later. Across the four social media platforms I linked this blog post on, I'd say it got a total of about 40 likes and few reblogs.
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
I say this because this morning I woke up to an email from Kagi's CEO, Vlad, who had seen the post and was upset about it. I have an email address listed on my blog (which is why I didn't bother removing it from these logs), which is what he sent his emails to. I am posting this entire email chain in this thread and will briefly post my thoughts about it, but I feel like it's something that needs to be seen. Please take note of the subject of the email as well (EDIT: It got cropped out sorry, the subject is "Fatih [sic] can not be lost"). Also, since the alt text would get extremely long with some of the transcripts, I've provided a text dump of the emails here for screen reader users and will offer a more abridged description in the alt text: https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
You can use a search engine to explore the world wide web and find curious little pages made by real human beings. Google et al. and the SEO twats have made that mostly impossible without drastic measures.
For me instantly evoked the memory of using the internet from when I first got to access it (~92) until 2012…2014ish, years I could describe as “the party is emptying, not as big as earlier”, vs 2014…2016 which I’d describe as having definite “okay there’s only 3 people left on the dancefloor” vibes (and the downslope started being felt 2008…2009 already, but slowly, only later more pronounced).
It was a time when you truly could just randomly browse search results and find all kinds of interesting things. It’s hard to convey, in today’s ecosystem, what that felt like. The fedi scratches a similar itch, but it feels (and I don’t mean this as criticism) more “a diamond in the muck”, a glimmer of hope in a sea of awful. A general optimism was quite prevalent among the internet of then, even despite it also having its awful aspects
I have years of irc logs in multiple channels, filled with the shared experiences of years of people delighting and gaping and pointing at all kinds of stuff like this. And things rarely feel the same.
I will never forgive the walled gardens for what they took from all of us, for what they destroyed
Dunno if this is just poorly phrased or… Finding actual answers to queries is the only job of a search engine, what does “interesting” mean here?
You can use a search engine to explore the world wide web and find curious little pages made by real human beings. Google et al. and the SEO twats have made that mostly impossible without drastic measures.
For me instantly evoked the memory of using the internet from when I first got to access it (~92) until 2012…2014ish, years I could describe as “the party is emptying, not as big as earlier”, vs 2014…2016 which I’d describe as having definite “okay there’s only 3 people left on the dancefloor” vibes (and the downslope started being felt 2008…2009 already, but slowly, only later more pronounced).
It was a time when you truly could just randomly browse search results and find all kinds of interesting things. It’s hard to convey, in today’s ecosystem, what that felt like. The fedi scratches a similar itch, but it feels (and I don’t mean this as criticism) more “a diamond in the muck”, a glimmer of hope in a sea of awful. A general optimism was quite prevalent among the internet of then, even despite it also having its awful aspects
I have years of irc logs in multiple channels, filled with the shared experiences of years of people delighting and gaping and pointing at all kinds of stuff like this. And things rarely feel the same.
I will never forgive the walled gardens for what they took from all of us, for what they destroyed