I think it depends a lot on the user. I never found DuckDuckGo to have good results, I think because it's based on Bing, and that remains laughable to this day (I have recently had to use it a bit and holy hell it's shit). I am comparing to startpage, which is I guess a more anonymous Google.
Kagi is at least as good for my day to day use, though I can't say it's obviously better. What it does have that I find useful is more ability to rank forum posts and the like higher, where they often have the real answers. Along with the "lenses" which let you kind of say what sort of stuff you're looking for - like only forum posts.
Right now, they also added to the Ultimate level a bunch of AI models you can chat with, which actually have pretty up to date knowledge it seems, and wider knowledge. For example, Claude 2 via Kagi was able to both help me as a DM with making a D&D 3.5e NPC (GPT4 can't do that alone, or at least didn't for me, and the plugin I tried to use that was suggested just didn't work at all), all the way to actually quickly finding JunOS commands and giving useful info about various outputs and clarifying what to do - which so far seem to be correct.
But the actual value to me is I can also ask GPT4 from Kagi, and Google Bison, so I don't need multiple subscriptions. I don't actually know how long this will hold true, but for now Kagi does a lot of stuff in one place that's pretty useful for me.
I typically use search engines not to answer questions but to search for things, like for example, maybe I want to find an old Qt Quarterly because something on HN made me think about it, or I'm looking for really deep MSDN documents about Text Services Framework to research something about how IME works on Windows. My biggest issue with Kagi is that whatever indices it seems to pull from seem less deep than both Bing and Google. Now, I could be wrong and maybe it's actually bigger or it uses one of them for some of its results, but my experience was that I was able to get results on DDG when Kagi couldn't return any for a given query.
Generally, I find that Google is a bigger index with a better ranking algorithm on top of it. However, DDG/Bing do generally seem to have an impressive index, and one of the biggest differentiators for most search engines that are not Google is that most search engines that are not Google will generally allow you to search for what you want to search for. I feel like with Google, it's very difficult to force it to always include all of the exact terms I'm specifying; it wants to search for something else. Sometimes I'm not even sure it's able to differentiate between two similar looking terms!
With all of this said, Kagi definitely was nice in terms of the fact that it felt like it was doing a good job of searching for what I asked for and an alright job ranking them. I gave it my best shot. But, alas, I never got to the point where I felt comfortable not searching Google afterwards. Even as much as Google pisses me off, it feels like their index is just far and away the largest, and it's not even really close.
I find that the issue with "Produce something better, and make it something that non-tech folks will love." is just that you get the "Twitter to Threads" sort of thing where you still have the centralized / walled garden / new boss same as the old boss problem.
Or you inherently can't make it "forget about it UX and extremely high quality" as most non techies define it. Because you have the issue that even if a company self hosts a meeting tool, they likely can't get the backbone connections Zoom etc can get. They at least need someone to use a URL to get there. It can be made mostly simple, but then you're back to some company running it - works for corporate use maybe, not for your home user. Even Signal lags compared to Zoom. And people really dislike Signal's phone number requirement, but it's what makes it somewhat possible to route connections for users.
What's a system that a home person could use that's not going to get them routing through one companies servers, but is actually simple enough to use?
The place where I do get somewhat exasperated as a techie is that the equivalent of asking for a phone number or address in any program that isn't an e-mail website is seen as "too hard". This makes pretty much any privacy respecting design impossible to scale beyond nerds.
It used to be for standardization, but I've seen more commercial tools provide Debian / Ubuntu support than Red Hat lately, since the late 2010s. I also think the amount of changes and the issues with licensing here mean that more people might up and convert to Debian than before. But IDK. I also hear that more ML work is done on Debian, and yes - with the containers becoming big - less need to run any particular linux, so I could see swapping out the underlying Linux.
And from a company perspective, Red Hat has already done a big swap out from satallite to Foreman / Puppet to really pushing Ansible. Similarly, they've stopped doing oVirt in favor of cloud style OpenStack, nee OpenShift. Which is great if you're building your own cloud fabric, but not really the VMWare / HyperV competitor oVirt was which is something lots of mid size orgs need. ProxMox still seems to be going.
And for people who aren't paying for support - I imagine they have skilled in house teams that can certainly figure out Debian if they've been orchestrating CENTOS and now Alma say.
A lot of sort of vaguely near pointing out issues with a lot of obvious missing crucial context to push a very strong right wing agenda.
College is expensive because we as a culture vastly overrate who needs to go and for what purpose, while allowing minors to take on insane debt that the government guarantees. It's one of those things where we do the worst of all worlds. If we were leftist about it, it would be free public school like gradeschool-highschool. If we were conservative about it, we'd get rid of the government loan backing and allow people to discharge the loans in bankruptcy, and you'd see prices come down just because otherwise there'd be people just not able to get a loan to begin to pay the bills. We might also stop assuming that all jobs need a college degree, and bring back more needed emphasis on the trades.
Real estate issues are very real, but he just makes a "conspiracy theory" of "evil real estate barons". He might not be as far off as he contemplates given the corporate purchase of houses for rental and AirBnB, but there's a more fundamental issue with his question of "why don't people move to the country" and it's not just that there actually are states trying to chain you down to a bed to have a kid. It's simply the not at all radical and quite obvious idea that there are less jobs in the country. It's all well and good that you can rent a house for $800 month vs $5,000 a month, but if you can't get a JOB paying $800 a month you aren't living there.
I could go on, but he probably intentionally is so misleading by omission there's little point.
Do people find it compelling really? 2,700 members is not that big a site in the modern internet, but they have a pay for social media service that has existed for a long time, so if you don't want to become a unicorn company or have wide appeal / access, it seems like it does work as a business model?
I think this is what FM radio basically is, and def what SiriusXM is. It might also be why radio is less interesting to many than Android Auto or Carplay.
I think you need to define "better". If you're not set on having the same amount of people (because network effects are the biggest pain, and if it was as big as reddit presumably you'd have heard of it)
TV/Movies has forums at dslreports.org, and people sort of discuss on mastadon.
Technology as Ars Technica, here, mastadon instances and hashtags, discord, and if you're talking work, stuff on mailing lists via google and others, and maybe teams?
I have mostly given up on politics - I can't imagine having useful discussions in public online anywhere anymore.
Home DYI had the HOYUZZ (??) forums I think. But again, that's mostly web based I think.
I'm not into the other stuff so IDK on those. I could imagine someone trying to build a competitor - I mean there is lemmy I think.
And the bigger issue even is when these expert designers retire - where do we get more experts? Do we become the elohoi of "The Time Machine" where we don't know how to do anything? Is AI really going to completely replace these designers in their work lifespan?
Kagi is at least as good for my day to day use, though I can't say it's obviously better. What it does have that I find useful is more ability to rank forum posts and the like higher, where they often have the real answers. Along with the "lenses" which let you kind of say what sort of stuff you're looking for - like only forum posts.
Right now, they also added to the Ultimate level a bunch of AI models you can chat with, which actually have pretty up to date knowledge it seems, and wider knowledge. For example, Claude 2 via Kagi was able to both help me as a DM with making a D&D 3.5e NPC (GPT4 can't do that alone, or at least didn't for me, and the plugin I tried to use that was suggested just didn't work at all), all the way to actually quickly finding JunOS commands and giving useful info about various outputs and clarifying what to do - which so far seem to be correct.
But the actual value to me is I can also ask GPT4 from Kagi, and Google Bison, so I don't need multiple subscriptions. I don't actually know how long this will hold true, but for now Kagi does a lot of stuff in one place that's pretty useful for me.