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

Continuing the email chain:

Last bit (as of now):

My reaction to all of this has been pretty straightforward:

1) If there's one thing I know about online interactions, it's not to let someone take you to Crime Scene Number Two. Having a private debate with Vlad about this would mean no witnesses and no accountability, meaning he could claim anything about the discussion. Even moreso when done through a call instead of text.

2) I repeatedly told Vlad I would not engage with him and he continued to come at me, increasingly so even

3) This is the CEO of a company getting extremely twisted up because one nobody posted a blog post that barely got any engagement or shares that said they didn't trust him or his company.

4) This subject line that implies...what, that this can be fixed? "Fatih (sic) can not be lost"? It's a bizarre thing to start with.

Based on the type of posting I do, you may think to yourself "so, you're going to go through his rebuttal post, right?"

But no, I'm not. Because, as I told him, I'm not debating this with him. And that includes not debating his points away from him either. I'm not engaging with this bullshit, because I explicitly told him I wouldn't be and he vomited it out at me anyway. He does not deserve it. And frankly, 90% of it isn't even saying I'm wrong.

I think this is petty and sad behavior from the CEO of a company and I think this is a man that does not understand boundaries at ALL.

And you know what I truly believe? I already thought this before based on seeing his responses to feedback, but I believe it a thousand times more now that I've been on the receiving end: I think it genuinely eats him alive that someone doesn't agree with him or doesn't think he's doing great work, and he also truly believes that if he can just keep explaining himself to them they'll OBVIOUSLY see it his way. He cannot accept that someone might think Kagi sucks, to the point where he has to reach out to someone like me to try to argue them into Thinking Correctly.

Anyway, unless I get anything else in my inbox that's it, but I think it's such absolutely unhinged behavior that people should know about it. I don't want to hear a single other fucker tell me "but the search is good!" Use that line on literally anyone else but me, no other search CEO has shown up in my email inbox to mansplain their company to me.

Just for some perspective, if you want to know how little reach the fedi post with the link to this blog post got: the first post in this thread already has more likes and boosts after less than a hour since posting it than my blog post ever did that he felt the need to confront me over.

@lori nothing sets off more alarm bells about a company, group or project than the founder/ceo/lead throwing down "u said WOT m8?" And demanding to debate u in person at the bike racks after last bell. That's so.... High school.

If you're convinced that your product, co or mission is solid, why are you so brittle about negative public commentary? Perhaps it's not and you're afraid anyone will spot your new clothes for what they are.

How do people give people like this money?

@lori he clearly needs to google... excuse me, KAGI... the phrase "Streisand Effect". 🤦🏼‍♂️

@lori also top marks for textifying the email thread

@lori I don't understand why he'd email you... surely he could just send his query to a chatbot and ask it to tell him what your reply would be?

Feeling better both about ditching Kagi during the whole Brave thing in hindsight.

RE: https://hackers.town/users/lori/statuses/112255132348604770

@lori I personnally have a free teeshirt from google

@gkrnours @lori I eventually disposed of both of mine (they don't exactly fit me any more), but I kinda liked the one from '07 at the time. Can't say I feel the same way about the company these days either, but shrug - they must've hit 20K on those by now.

@flippac @gkrnours I like shirts like that more as ephemera after the fact than when they're actually new. I should start wearing my Lineage The Blood Pledge preorder shirt again in my 30s. It says BRITISH IS BACK really big on the back because Lord British was involved in bringing the game to the US lmao

@lori @gkrnours Yeah, but Richard Garriott isn't exactly Google/Alphabet!

@flippac @gkrnours very true, I guess my point is that like...I'd love to wear an Ask Jeeves shirt now, but not a Google one until Google is dead and it becomes campy

@lori @gkrnours So the thing about the Summer of Code ones is that while neither students nor mentors "worked for Google" directly, by participating we still helped them buy goodwill (and in my case, the Haskell community its first "we need to use two major versions in parallel" package management problem).

Sooner or later, some of that stuff shouldn't be campy. That's not actually what's going on with the leather community either, for example: the generation that had that kink imposed in a WW2 context are all dead, as are the original nazis, and the subculture doesn't go in for actual nazi memorabilia.