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Comment by cuu508 | Hacker News Reader

Please reconsider Kagi's partnership with Yandex.

Yes, please do. Your support of Russia is the only reason why I stopped using Kagi and paying for Kagi. I really want to like you and use your product.

If you consider supporting a Russian company equivalent to “supporting Russia”, then I assume you are happy to be supporting the United States by using US services… like the one you are on right now.

Also, people seem to be oblivious to the existence of the neo-cloud: Nebius whose services and servers, a lot of western AI companies use. Nebius was spun out of Yandex 2 years ago to assuage the "supporting Russia" allegations and is still run and managed by an ex-Yandex crew. By that measure, I suppose using a lot of western AI tools is also equivalent to "supporting Russia".

Yandex is especially tightly coupled to the Kremlin from what I've gathered. It seems less like supporting some American indie game development studio and more like supporting Palantir.

Gathered? Where?

Articles like:

* "The Sad Fate of Yandex: From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool", from the Centre for East European and International Studies - https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...

* "Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic", from the NIH - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/

* "How the Kremlin Subjugated Yandex", from GWU's Russia Post - https://russiapost.info/articles/yandex_kremlin

There's lots and lots more out there too on the topic, just a Google search away.

Good thing we have Kagi in the middle to firewall it from us, then. It does genuinely return better results for westerners due to not being subject to western censorship. I assume Kagi is smart enough to, say, down-rank or ignore Yandex results when the search is about Ukraine

The criticism is that a share of the money which goes to Kagi goes to Yandex.

I don't see what's wrong with paying Yandex for a good product.

Some people have trouble paying a company that's tightly coupled to the Kremlin

But companies tightly coupled to the White House are fair game? Seems pretty inconsistent.

No, there's a reason there's a pretty large "buy European" movement in Europe right now and why I compared Yandex to the US white-house-adjacent Palantir.

It is not really inconsistent. Despite all the flaws of the current US government, USA is still a relatively free democracy. Russia is a full-blown fascist dictatorship. Russia is also a much more acute threat to me than Trump's USA, because I am from central European country formerly in Soviet Union's sphere of influence, that would be next on the chopping block if Ukraine falls.

That is incorrect. There's actually very little difference between the two countries. Except that one is next to you, of course.

> There's actually very little difference between Russia and USA.

Ridiculous statement.

Odd attempt at whataboutism, since I think many would also be upset if Kagi was found to be paying Truth Social, for example.

Sigh. This kind of whataboutism derails all discussions online.

First, there is no requirement for "consistency". Every person chooses where to draw their moral line. The world is not black and white, but the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and subsequent (ongoing!) murdering, raping, and bombing of civilians is pretty clearly on one side of the line in my world.

Note that this in itself says nothing about the United States or any other country. You may consider every other country and choose not to support its economy, and this in no way makes the above point weaker.

Ouch. I was not aware. Cancelled.

It's rough that it's so hard to be an ethical consumer these days. Mullvad gone, Kagi gone.

Google? Microsoft? AWS?

Damn, what did Mullvad do?

Founder and CEO funded a Swedish far right party. They stood for roughly 72% of what that party took in.

https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.h...

Mullvad has tried to paint it as, "this does not represent Mullvad the company, this is a private political donation" and stuff like that. I don't buy it. Funding Mullvad funds the CEOs.

FWIW I don't think anything Kagi is doing is unethical. If I did - if I did feel it was unethical to spend money at a company that is in a country that does war crimes - I'd also have to feel that almost all spending was unethical, including things like buying lunch.

On a secondary point, if we want more ethical things to exist, we have to create them. If we want an ethical alternative to Mullvad it's on us to do it.

I think the situation you're in affects what you can reasonably do and hence what can be considered "ethical". You cannot opt out of paying taxes (and buying lunch), but it is possible here for me to avoid funding this war and try to seek better alternatives.

Did you go out of your way to buy a non-Chinese-made phone? You technically have a choice there, but not much of one. About as much of a choice as you have in the search engine business.

Like I wrote, and what you seem to say again here, I agree that it is unfortunate how tough it is to be an ethical consumer these days.

"there is no ethical consumption in capitalism"

Were there the days when it was easy for you? Do share the memories, please.

Chinese phone-makers and Yandex are behaving pretty differently. China and Russia are also behaving pretty differently.

There's no clear reason why someone couldn't have qualms about one but not the other.

This comment is just unbelievable. With Kagi "canceled" you're back to use your regular search engine powered by the sociopaths destroying the world. But hey, at least your 5 bucks didn't go to Kremlin!

What’s wrong with Yandex? How is it any different from Bing, Google etc?

It happens to be Russian. So people boycott it.

You may note that when US goes to war nobody boycott the US.

Plenty of people boycotted (to some extent) the US before that, when it started its trade war(s).

Fair. I should have said that the boycott is totally on a different level.

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