I did not say that very few people participated, which is anyway also true with respect to 19k users.

Fair enough. However, I think the quality of the criticism is more interesting than the quantity of people engaging in it.

let alone the fact that that’s the result you find when you look for “kagi and brave”, which means if you are learning about this topic, you will go read that thread and get familiar with these facts.

Which is true, but I’ve gotten at least one person replying to my comments saying that they were not aware of what Kagi was doing with Brave, and as a result wants to now avoid Kagi. Again, people aren’t going to dig that deep.

They’re definitely not going to read this far into our conversation, which is also why I ended up skipping chunks of stuff you said without commenting on it, because otherwise this conversation is going to become infinitely long and one of us is going to accuse the other of being Hitler.

I think that Google is way worse than brave.

And you present a good argument, that in total, Google causes more harm than Brave. But my problem with Brave, in addition to pandering towards the worst kind of people (not politically, of course, but the crypto bros), is that Brave causes far more harm for its scale than Google.

Car accidents kill more people in the United States than shark attacks, but I bet you would spend more time on a sidewalk than in a shark cage, given the option.

Which, I think, answers the thing you were most interested in.

(ETA: even if we assume Brave is an equivalent or lesser evil, and that anybody being honest about no longer funding Brave would also have to push against every other third party service getting funded… That’s where SearX comes in. And that’s why I recommended it.)

They have a mission to “humanize the web”, and they tend to stress that they want to improve “internet” as a whole. How does this relate to hiding being a for-profit company/pretending to be nonprofit?

Because cringe corporate speak always looks to me like a disingenuous way of trying to differentiate your company from a different company. Kagi isn’t the only corporation that doesn’t do this (Proton does it worse) but they were the only one that was relevant.

And when people who had previously bought into Kagi’s “humanize” corpospeak only to see Kagi start shuttling money to a man known for his attempt to de-humanize minorities, and watching Kagi justify the decision by how it might at best save them a couple bucks down the line, I’m not surprised they would speak up.

Sure, Kagi Corp is making promise after promise. For now. You cite their good track record, but with their Brave Corp partnership, they have now initiated a bad track record.