[manchmalscott]

I'm fine paying for search, but I don't want to use LLMs and therefore I don't want to _pay_ for access to LLMs that I'm not going to use. If Kagi offered a lower cost subscription with zero LLM bullshit then I would happily resubscribe. I'm not holding my breath though, being able to actually find information on the internet is just probably dead forever.

[Marsymars]

That's kind of the nature of any subscription that isn't pay-per-use for every action... you're always going to be paying for various things that you don't use/consume.

[manchmalscott]

YouTube premium recently added a “lite” tier. I don’t use YouTube music and I don’t watch shorts or music videos on YouTube, so I’m able to have the channels I watch get compensated without paying for what I perceive as unnecessary and non-core features of the platform.

Clearly such a thing is possible, and a company which insists it isn’t is fundamentally either uncreative or user hostile.

[Marsymars]

Maybe I perceive monetized videos on YouTube as an unnecessary and non-core feature - I'd like a tier where I only have access to non-monetized videos, but get the other perks of membership (background playback, etc.)

[eviks]

So what is it about subscription that makes this impossible? There are other factors that favor dumbed down user interfaces, but they are not unique to subscriptions

[Marsymars]

> So what is it about subscription that makes this impossible?

Just the nature of it? A subscription is always going to be a regular fee that pays for an aggregate of multiple things, some of which aren’t used by every subscriber. (And which some subscribers are going to object to paying for.) The only way to ensure that you only pay for what you use is a pay-per-use model.

And conceptually I really like pay-per-use models, but the public tends not to love them - in particular for things with low marginal costs of production/serving, like software services. (As opposed to medium marginal-cost goods, like say, home gas utility, where non-usage-based pricing is available, but tends to be poor value.)

[Hikikomori]

You mean added it back, though not available in my country. Stopped paying for youtube when they removed it years ago.

[saltysalt]

I'm building my own search engine that is human-curated, as I am also uncomfortable relying on AI to filter my search results. It's free, feedback welcomed: https://greppr.org/

[mastermage]

Thats realy cool, and i would be interested in building something like this for myself (for German sources) do you have any directions to point me into for making something like this myself?

[saltysalt]

I'll try to make time soon to write a blog, and post the link here.