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Please reconsider Kagi's partnership with Yandex.
by cuu508 3mo ago
Please reconsider Kagi's partnership with Yandex.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jwr 3mo agoYes, please do. Your support of Russia is the only reason why I stopped using Kagi and paying for Kagi. I really want to like you and use your product.
- p-e-w 3mo agoIf you consider supporting a Russian company equivalent to “supporting Russia”, then I assume you are happy to be supporting the United States by using US services… like the one you are on right now.
- woadwarrior01 3mo agoAlso, people seem to be oblivious to the existence of the neo-cloud: Nebius whose services and servers, a lot of western AI companies use. Nebius was spun out of Yandex 2 years ago to assuage the "supporting Russia" allegations and is still run and managed by an ex-Yandex crew. By that measure, I suppose using a lot of western AI tools is also equivalent to "supporting Russia".
- jwr 3mo ago[flagged]
- RobotToaster 3mo agoHighlighting hypocrisy isn't whataboutism.
- inigyou 3mo agoHighlighting hypocrisy like this is calling out the fallacy of Proving Too Much: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-too-much https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-to... In short: if your argument supports the conclusion you want but also supports conclusions that are absurd, it's probably not correct.
- mort96 3mo agoYandex is especially tightly coupled to the Kremlin from what I've gathered. It seems less like supporting some American indie game development studio and more like supporting Palantir.
- jorisw 3mo agoGathered? Where?
- mort96 3mo agoArticles like: * "The Sad Fate of Yandex: From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool", from the Centre for East European and International Studies - https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/the-sad-fate-of-yandex-from-independent-tech-startup-to-kremlin-propaganda-tool https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th... * "Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic", from the NIH - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/ * "How the Kremlin Subjugated Yandex", from GWU's Russia Post - https://russiapost.info/articles/yandex_kremlin https://russiapost.info/articles/yandex_kremlin There's lots and lots more out there too on the topic, just a Google search away.
- inigyou 3mo agoGood thing we have Kagi in the middle to firewall it from us, then. It does genuinely return better results for westerners due to not being subject to western censorship. I assume Kagi is smart enough to, say, down-rank or ignore Yandex results when the search is about Ukraine
- ar-nazeh 3mo ago[dead]
- Hoefner 3mo agoWhat’s wrong with Yandex? How is it any different from Bing, Google etc?
- kreco 3mo agoIt happens to be Russian. So people boycott it. You may note that when US goes to war nobody boycott the US.
- wasabi991011 3mo agoPlenty of people boycotted (to some extent) the US before that, when it started its trade war(s).
- kreco 3mo agoFair. I should have said that the boycott is totally on a different level.
- ejohansson 3mo agoOuch. I was not aware. Cancelled. It's rough that it's so hard to be an ethical consumer these days. Mullvad gone, Kagi gone.
- jabron 3mo agoGoogle? Microsoft? AWS?
- barbs 3mo agoDamn, what did Mullvad do?
- mort96 3mo agoFounder and CEO funded a Swedish far right party. They stood for roughly 72% of what that party took in. https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.html https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.h... Mullvad has tried to paint it as, "this does not represent Mullvad the company, this is a private political donation" and stuff like that. I don't buy it. Funding Mullvad funds the CEOs.
- inigyou 3mo agoFWIW I don't think anything Kagi is doing is unethical. If I did - if I did feel it was unethical to spend money at a company that is in a country that does war crimes - I'd also have to feel that almost all spending was unethical, including things like buying lunch. On a secondary point, if we want more ethical things to exist, we have to create them. If we want an ethical alternative to Mullvad it's on us to do it.
- ejohansson 3mo agoI think the situation you're in affects what you can reasonably do and hence what can be considered "ethical". You cannot opt out of paying taxes (and buying lunch), but it is possible here for me to avoid funding this war and try to seek better alternatives.