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Comment by kajaktum | Hacker News Reader

In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.

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Yeah agree 100% - this is why I’m a happy kagi customer

It’s kind of cool being treated like a customer

New feature releases aren’t about ad placement or SEO or personalization / tracking

Instead, their product updates are targeted at me - cool nifty features that I can immediately try out

Like kagi or not, just the feeling of having devs care about my actual personal experience is a breath of fresh air

I know not everyone is an fortunate, but I’d happily spend on other software of this caliber

I recently signed up for an annual subscription to Kagi on their Starter plan and I couldn't agree more. Search quality with them has been great so far, and I realize their small web search and exploration features too.

I've been slowly working to find other paid services as alternatives to the free ones that I'm currently using (next big one was shifting away from Gmail and onto a personal domain for mail using Fastmail). Migrated away from Notion and using Obsidian with Syncthing running on my unRAID server at home. Generally just trying to find alternatives that aren't in the data mining and user lock in sphere and more about maintaining a positive user experience without taking advantage of their users and their data.

That’s awesome

Be sure to try the assistant if you haven’t and browse the settings page for all the things you can do, again if you haven’t

It’s my default on my phone through their extension it works well

I’ve contacted their support in the past and they always give me real answers to questions about he product or suggestions

Gl!

This. Please can we go back to the days where I simply pay for services or items instead of being trapped inside a maze of buy now pay later, credits, coupons, bonuses, gifts, tiers, etc

I am sure there have never been such a time, but I long for it anyway.

> At this point, we have to be actively be against free services.

Nah, GCC is free, Linux is free, Debian is free. What we need to be against is free stuff provided by for-profit entities, because the love of money is the root of all evil.

Linux is free as-in freedom. Linux is not zero-cost: it has taken tens of billions of dollars of investment from thousands of organisations over three decades - and countless volunteer hours - to make it what it is today; that the wider community gets Linux security patches and feature updates for free is a side-effect of the GPL license coupled with the low marginal cost of reproducing software once-written. I’m here to remind people that the bulk of Linux’ codebase was not written for free as an act of charity.

What I’m saying is that, hypothetically, if the entire business-world suddenly ditched Linux overnight and went back to IBM and Burrows like it’s the 1960s again again (and let’s pretend Android isn’t a thing either) then no-one would be funding significant Linux dev/eng work, and as much as we value the hacker-spirit of unpaid community/volunteer projects, I feel it isn’t enough to keep Linux viable and secure (especially in high-visibility, high-exposure scenarios like desktops and internet-facing services).

Much of Linux is provided by for-profit entities.

Which doesn't matter, precisely because those entities have no ownership over Linux and thus no ability to enshittify the product.

Eh, I heard lots of complaints from the Xen folks that the prevalence of RedHat in the kernel development community leads to double standards that makes their favourite product (KVM) get nicer and quicker reviews than the Xen related changes.

(I used to work with the Xen folks.)

They said service, not software.

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