Comment on There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business
nixus@anarchist.nexus 1 day ago
There are plenty of weird blogs, just look up The Small Web. There are less weird blogs that make money, but I can’t say that I’m overly sad about that.
The headline is a little misleading: This isn’t really about small blogs, but more about how Private Equity harvests smaller companies, and leaves their husks to rot. That is a very legitimate problem that needs some serious solutions.
In this case, private equity isn’t the only villain.
Print journalism has been decimated over the last generation as it has become the expectation that the articles should be free. The money that used to support journalism is mostly gone.
The writer is focusing only in their own experiences, but the industry as a whole can’t support many people who blog as is it is their job.
Shout out to https://piefed.social/f/smallweb
Lots of great communities there. And rss is still king ;)
Totally! I keep hearing about the “death of RSS”, and yet, that’s how I follow most of my online media.
Yeah Ive seen those articles too. Yet even new social media like blue sky supports rss without an account. Everything on the fediverse does too. Its fantastic.
RSS support is absolutely my favorite old-web thing that’s still around. It truly is fantastic to have your own curated RSS feeds.
The Fediverse specifically lets you create them really granularly as well!
Maybe this works:
!smallweb@piefed.social
Its a feed, a piefed specific feature. So its not going to work with lemmy.
I wan’t aware of feeds. I noticed the F in the link
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 1 day ago
Kagi has a great little feed you can use to randomly explore smallweb blogs. I’d recommend it!
https://kagi.com/smallweb/
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
I have so many reasons to not use Kagi.
d-shoot.net/kagi.html
web.archive.org/web/…/112255132348604770/
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 1 day ago
There’s a lot of issues with that analysis.
The linked article literally states that they partnered with a small print shop, not that they own it. It says they bought warehouse space to store and fulfill orders. Now granted, yes, spending that much money on T-shirts can be a bad idea financially, but they do act as marketing because they get people talking, even if the brand name isn’t on the shirt. This recoups the cost over time.
Kagi also heavily relies on organic marketing, so it makes total sense.
The AI tools are easily deployed and based on standard open-source tooling. Not that hard to maintain, yet their AI integrations are genuinely much better than the competition, which draws in a lot of people who pay for their higher-priced plan just for heavy AI users.
Orion is a fork, with minimal additional bloat. Again, not terribly hard to maintain.
Their entire business model is based around a subscription. No individual service is “profitable,” it’s just “part of what you get for your subscription.”
Granted, though the hardest part for this is just making a frontend, which they’ve already done. There are many free and open source backends for hosting email services. They haven’t promoted it heavily, and my assumption is because they’re keeping it more on the down-low until they fix bugs, build out more features, and are sure it’s something they can more heavily advertise.
And they later explained it’s because there’s a threshold of buyers you have to pass before paying sales tax, and they did not know if they would ever pass that mark, and later had to scramble due to new user growth to make that happen.
The vast majority of my answers from Kagi’s AI were right, when other search engines were all wrong. (yes, I did actually check real sources to confirm) This is just a strawman of reality. Kagi even shows you what % of the LLM’s response was derived from which source, whereas others leave you in the dark.
Oh, is that why Kagi said in the post also linked by the author of that post: “Large language models (LLMs) should not be blindly trusted to provide factual information accurately. They have a significant risk of generating incorrect information or fabricating details”, “AI should be used to enhance the search experience, not to create it or replace it”, and “AI should be used to the extent that it enhances our humanity, not diminish it (AI should be used to support users, not replace them)”
I’m not gonna keep going through every single thing point-by-point here since that’d take forever, but a lot of this is basically just taking minor issues, like the CEO posting about hopeful uses of AI, or talking about completely normal expectations to have of privacy when you trust a company with information, then blowing it out of proportion and acting as though this is a death blow for the service.
The author of the post quite literally talks about how “Kagi’s dedication to privacy falls apart for me”, saying they don’t seem to actually care about user privacy… when just a few months later, they released Privacy Pass, which allows you to cryptographically prove you have a membership without revealing your identity, and to continue using Kagi that way. Not really something someone who doesn’t care about privacy would do.
Overall, this just reads to me as:
1. They could be doing bad financially because of these decisions I didn’t like them doing
2. Okay so they said they were profitable currently even after all that but now they’re doing too many things (which could all bring in new users that would pay them)
3. Okay so people are paying for and using the things but there’s no way they could possibly use AI in any good way
4. I’ve now ignored anybody saying the tools are actually better than others or are working well, but just in case you’re not convinced, they don’t care about privacy!
5. I know they explained the ways in which companies are going to get data on you and there is going to be a degree of trust when using a service that requires things like payment information but I still think they don’t actually care about privacy!
I’m not saying all the points are completely false or don’t mean anything, but a lot of this really does feel like just taking something relatively small (giving out a bunch of T-shirts during a time the company is primarily trying to grow its user count via organic marketing), acting as though it’s both the current and permanent future position of the entire company and will also lead to the worst possible outcome, then moving on to another thing, and doing that until there’s nothing left to complain about.
Kagi can have its own problems, but a lot of these just aren’t it.
As a person using Kagi myself:
1. The search results are the best I’ve ever had. period, full stop.
2. The AI models are commonly correct, good at citing sources, out of the way till you ask for them, and feel secondary to the search experience
3. The cost is more than reasonable
4. Regular small updates with new tools have been incredibly nice to have (such as the Kagi news feed, which is great at sourcing good news from a variety of sources, or the Universal Summarizer, which is great at providing alternative, more natural sounding and accurate translations compared to Google Translate or DeepL)
I haven’t really had any complaints, and contrasting it with this guy’s post, it just reads like someone complaining about something they’ve never even used. Yes, you can complain about something you haven’t yourself used, but the entire post is just “here’s anything even minor that I think could be an issue if it were taken to the extremes”
Crotaro@beehaw.org 1 day ago
You briefly mentioned in your user-experience-list that the AI answers are only there when you want them to be, but I just want to emphasise it, since to me it makes a world of difference in comparison with other Search Engines like Google. You only receive an AI answer if you press a specific “Gimme AI answer”-button (which is very unobtrusive) or add a question mark at the end of your search query!
I rarely jump to the defense of some company, but I only know of this one lori-person who tried to lay out reasons why Kagi is bad and, as you showed very well, @AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social, most of their reasoning/arguments aren’t really all that good when you look at them in more detail. And when they just plain refused to take an interview with the lead of Kagi, by burying their head in the sand and going “I don’t care if you want to clear up misunderstandings, I don’t want to talk to you!”, it kind of sealed this person as not being a trustworthy source of criticism and more of “I’m mad that a new company is doing something different than other companies in the same sector”
I’ve been using Kagi for about 3/4 of a year now and I will certainly renew my annual payment to them. Of course it’s not a magic bullet without any flaws at all, but currently it does the things it offers much better than any competitor I could find and all they want is around 10€ per month. They won’t spam you with advertisement nor will they suck up your (arguably infinitely more valuable) private info to sell to the highest bidder. For now, Kagi has been doing and still is doing more good than most other tech companies.
RalfWausE@blackneon.net 1 day ago
I would also recommend wiby which caters to the really small and old parts of the net.