“Should we not be buying VW, BMW, Siemens and Bayer technology and products today because they participated in holocaust and directly collaborated with Hitler?” – CEO of Kagi when given feedback re: Brave partnership

  • @sudneo
    2•1 year ago

    In fact it’s not comparable, because this is a metasearch engine. Kagi has quite many unique features and besides that it’s great in surfacing small websites (for which it mostly uses its own crawler) and downranking pages full of tracking. They are just different and the Kagi model is the most reasonable, in my opinion, for what it does (search engine).

      • @sudneo
        1•1 year ago

        I saw no evidence of that.

        Looking at the “evidence” discussed, I saw three points:

        • The refusal to disengage with Brave. It’s totally possible to disagree with his position, but the overall motivations were legit and no “fascist” attitude was shown. Users screaming “cancel culture” were shut down

        there was clear intention to discuss, and it has always been done in a respectful way.

        • The refusal to support the widget that prompts for suicide hotlines. Even here, I personally agree with the motivation provided, but it doesn’t matter, it does not have anything to do with being a fascist. Moreover, the discussion about that was quite lengthy and definitely showed a good-faith engagement from their side.
        • Finally, the most ridiculous of all, which was part of the mastodon thread linked. Some user claims that “queer people” were getting censored in Discord (we have no evidence except for a private exchange which seems off-topic) and that https://greatcountry.org/ is apparently a proof that the creator (CEO of Kagi) is a white supremacist, because the countries on the top of the list are mostly white countries. I won’t even go into details in this one, because it’s such an idiotic statement that qualifies way more the user making this claim, which shows -in my opinion- a complete lack of a good faith and the desire to really find any angle to disqualify the person (possibly due to lacking ability to discuss the arguments). The other “proof” (the thread has 3 posts) is a paraphrased and reinterpreted (in bad faith) piece of a comment, which even includes an addendum that takes the distance from this statement. The guy mentioned that “politics into tech is the reason there is no innovation”, and the Mastodon user rephrases it as “inclusion is the reason […]”, which is a completely different statement (it is possible that’s what the guy meant, but that’s not what he said).

        If this is anybody’s definition of fascism, then I personally consider that person’s opinion on fascism completely irrelevant. Now, since my mother tongue has the unfortunate responsibility for having coined the term “fascism”, I think I have at least an idea of what it means. It means -in a wider sense- discrimination, suppression of minorities and violence as a mean to shut down opposition. I see no such thing in this context, and if you do, I think it’s time you provide some evidence for this claim, because just name-calling random people fascist on the internet doesn’t help anybody, and it doesn’t help in particular due to the fact that waters down the term and reduces its meaning.