Happy to report that this definitely isn't a paid ad. The Home Assistant team did this on their own. I helped out by building uv for some of the architectures they needed: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/pull/2417
Astral is a company but that doesn’t make this an ad without evidence you didn’t include. Do you personally know that this was anything other than organic praise from a happy user?
Totally agree, the options that iOS gives you to attempt to control spam are basically either pathetic or non-existent. I get tons of spam calls from one country, presumably doing a "missed call" scam trying to get me to call back and pay crazy rates. I don't see any reason why implementing a "block everything from country code x" feature would not be completely trivial, and it would instantly solve the problem. Yet my stupid smartphone can't do it.
Did you start to notice things getting worse around the new year when they added Brave to their search results? That was the turning point for me, I was a huge advocate but then quality went downhill and then a few weeks later they proudly announced that they had spent a third of their funding on...t-shirts. Between that and this huge push towards being just like Google and Bing with LLM hallucinated nonsense, I'm not sure what their aim is anymore.
I had to scroll through over 24 hours of posts before hitting anything political, an article about abortion in Texas. Definitely not the majority of the content and it took way more scrolling than a couple of screens. I still haven't seen anything else on your list yet.
While that guy obviously has an axe to grind, if you visit the main page of that URL there's plenty of tiresome politics all over the place: https://social.lol/ It seems to be coming from different instances, though. I have no idea how Mastodon chooses what content to show on that page.
Gee. When I just go to https://social.lol I see this as the first thing: "These are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today. Newer posts with more boosts and favorites are ranked higher."
(Background: I'm currently using Fly for some hobby apps. I like it.)
It is still wildly unstable right now because they're basically still building the platform and figuring out how to run a business. Earlier this year there was a migration to their "Apps V2" platform [0] which was supposed to be simple but it was extremely poorly communicated which led to a lot of users hitting issues along the way and being forced to make forum posts to try and desperately figure out how to keep their production apps up. None of the migrations worked for me either, I didn't complain as a freeloader - but seeing the support requests from paying customers painted a really bad picture.
Same as every project that involves cryptocurrency - the advantage is that the scammers who promote it can make money from badly reinventing an existing system.
Oh really? I just commented about how this misconception made me change my behavior. Wish that was more clear, or that I had higher reading comprehension.
In general, assume that we pass down the savings to the user whenever we can.
Redirecting a bang costs us basically nothing, so it does not count as a search.
Also reloading the same search within a short time (~2 minutes, for example coming back in browser after clicking through a search result) does not count as an additional search as we served cached results.
Another tip: We have decent documentation (that is also open source and editable) and you can access it quickly from Kagi with the !help bang, for example
> In general, assume that we pass down the savings to the user whenever we can.
This is great to hear but it doesn’t really address the point you’re replying to:
> Wish that was more clear
As someone who is just seriously noticing Kagi because of this HN post, I have no brand impression that tells me you’re trying to pass on the savings (most companies don’t) and the marketing material even makes me think you’re targeting a premium price point with healthy margins.
I’m also going to suggest a do not do: Do not make cost savings a public-facing core value. Racing to the bottom usually erodes the value prop while simultaneously opening the door for low-quality competitors.
I would suggest (and caveat: I’m not a marketer, just someone who has seen a lot of brands come and go) either of these directions:
1. Be clear about the cost savings when talking about the specific features. Example: Add a new heading to kagi/features/bangs.html that says “Bangs are Free” and talks about how bangs do not count towards your searches
2. Remove it from being part of your public values altogether. Lean in to the value prop of having a cost and let users self-discover what’s free. If it’s the right choice, highlight it privately: make it a line item on the monthly invoice with something that describes why they are free or put it in onboarding material.
