[Karunamon]

Capitalism is the only reason they exist in the first place.

Don't confuse an entire economic system with the unique problems caused by public ownership or investing (i.e. growth at all costs). Plenty of smaller organizations would be quite happy to operate with modest profits for their owners and never scale beyond that point.

[rchaud]

> Capitalism is the only reason they exist in the first place.

Precisely, which is why enshittification is a when, not an if. A paid search engine will never pick up enough users to survive at $10/mo. It will either be acquired or start throwing in "non-intrusive" ads to balance the books.

[freediver]

> start throwing in "non-intrusive" ads to balance the books

Here is a personal guarantee that this will never happen with Kagi while I am in charge.

There are too many ad-supported search engines and browsers out there. I would not waste 10 years of my life to make yet another one. If Kagi can not sustain iteself with memberships, it will be the end of it.

The initial reason I started Kagi was to provide my kids with an opportunity to grow up in an ad-free experience of the web. In this interview [1] I talk more about my motivation.

[1] https://dkb.io/post/DEPR_kagi-interview

[barrysteve]

You have broken your privacy policy to share user block lists as advertising on HackerNews.

Call us back in 6 months when you arbitrarily change something else and give us another motivating pep talk about your commitments. roll eyes.

[freediverx]

How has this broken any privacy policy? To me this seems like general information that can’t possibly be traced back to any individual users or groups of users.

[freediverx]

You’re conflating capitalism with commerce.