8 ms·

The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content

The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber! I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!

tempest_ 1mo ago
You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless. Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.
ymolodtsov 1mo ago
The problem with micropayments isn't the tech really, it's that only the users want them but not any publisher. Which is completely reasonable.
- carlosjobim 1mo ago
  Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong. Edit: Typo
  - CoastalCoder 1mo ago
    Would AI tokens count as a kind of prepaid micropayment?
  - ymolodtsov 1mo ago
    Why would any publisher want them? Who exactly tried? As a publisher, I'd want consistent subscription revenue. The goal is to convince users to pay after they hit the paywall several times.
    - carlosjobim 1mo ago
      I think the majority publishers have tried it in the past 10-15 years. If you are a publisher, something which gains widespread attention might happen in your region, or an article might become viral for other reasons. You know that a lot of people would like to read that article and not become subscribers. So if you can sell access to an article 50 000 times for 1 dollar, that's $50 000 in income you wouldn't otherwise have. But unfortunately, very few people are willing to pay a dollar or 50c for an article which they are desperate to read.
sph 1mo ago
A good product that is not solely focused on rent seeking these days is worth celebrating.
- frereubu 1mo ago
  I know what you mean, but it comes across - even to me, a paying customer who does really like Kagi - a bit like talking to someone involved in an MLM who can't wait to steer the conversation around to their product. I'd just prefer discussions to stay somewhat on topic. There's something interesting in this announcement in that, in my view, it deliberately omits an attribute that's a mild proxy for high-quality journalism, and I always find it a shame when the topic at hand is drowned out by generic boosterism.
CoastalCoder 1mo ago
> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber! Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)
gherkinnn 1mo ago
Longstanding user and it is great! It is one of the very, very few digital services that hasn't fucked me over within a year. I will celebrate as if I had discovered Kagi yesterday.
Anonyneko 1mo ago
>you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).
- bcraven 1mo ago
  I subscribed to https://the-fence.com/ https://the-fence.com/ last year and it's been superb.
al_borland 1mo ago
> I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.
- orrito 1mo ago
  It has been tried e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle but it just doesn't work, even a tiny fee will already deter most people from "buying" an article as it will always feel as a loss. Whereas with a subscription you don't feel bad in the moment for losing money but feel good for using your already paid subscription.
tensor 1mo ago
Apple news manages to give access to a variety of mainstream sources for a fixed price. Unfortunately there is no way to block the ads and without an ad-free tier it's a no go for me.
- bigcoffeeguy 1mo ago
  You can block Apple News ads with DNS-level adblockers. Still works, for now...
lyu07282 1mo ago
> only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.
preg_match 1mo ago
The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction. So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket. One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.
- lotsofpulp 1mo ago
  Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction? The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
- joseda-hg 1mo ago
  Isn't this what Brave tried to push? You get their Basic Attention Token crypto
- II2II 1mo ago
  The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs. Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff. But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
rcpt 1mo ago
Micropayments never work. It's too much friction for the median user to decide if they want to spend a quarter on an article. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs/ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...
- m463 1mo ago
  Used to be you would trade a yak or a horse for something. Then you could trade little pieces of metal. In the future, why not something smaller? I mean, people are trading virtual things (like an app). Why not something small for something as small as a website view?
  - rcpt 1mo ago
    Look at the paper. There's a floor to mental work. Even if it's a nickel, having to make that decision is enough friction to kill the whole deal
    - m463 1mo ago
      But we charge for tokens, and sites like youtube and spotify reward in collected chunks.
- zhivota 1mo ago
  I'd argue it's still a product issue, one that will eventually be solved. The reason a payment is too much friction today is because it's surrounded by a raft of cruft: is there an extra "processing fee", am I signing up for a recurring charge and didn't realize it, I have to enter my card details and address, or I have to log in to some system, I have to OTP with my bank, etc. It hasn't been solved yet, but someone will solve it to the point that it's a single swipe to buy an article for 25c, and it'll work. I would argue the NYT is in the best position to do so, but they are addicted to their scummy business practices where it's hard to cancel, you pay "$2/mo introductory rate" that suddenly escalates to $40/mo, and so on. I could see Substack taking a crack at it also.
boplicity 1mo ago
Almost no publisher wants micropayments. Full stop. Micropayments are simply not good business.
adamtaylor_13 1mo ago
The foregone conclusion is that journalism is somehow helpful or valuable to me. I have never read a piece of journalism or "news" and thought to myself, "Wow, how useful! I'm so glad I consumed that." And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one. So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
kelnos 1mo ago
> We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies! We can't, because the website owners don't want one. They want there to be no standard, because then it's more likely that some people will accidentally allow them.
potamic 1mo ago
> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something meaningful and insightful about a product, there's no better endorsement of it. But low effort platitudes are probably doing more harm than intended.
- forestrywat 1mo ago
  What if it's genuine? I use kagi. The results quality is pretty good, but I probably use the uprank and downrank feature all the time. Being able to report stuff as AI and get little indicators that a site is AI slop is good. As an example, serious eats is my go to recipe site, and I've got it tuned so it returns higher in my results. I also really appreciate I can write my own custom css, and style every box and widget on the page. And marine most of all, I love that their AI tool will not show up unless you end your query with a "?". Meaning I'm explicitly opting in to using it. My last reason for liking it is ideological. No ads, no manipulation because of advertising tech. Just ... the stuff I searched for. I do not like the image search page, however. It feels clunky in a way I can't put my finger on. There's a few other things I really like, but it's hard to type them all out. So I often go, "kagi is great, love kagi."
- Drew_ 1mo ago
  I get the same feeling with this sort of thing. I did try Kagi and stuck with it for the last year. It's pretty good, but not without it's faults. - Out of the box, search result quality is comparable to Google - Search is slow. Latency for most queries is about a second. Sometimes 3 seconds. Google is shockingly fast in comparison. - Personalized results is a killer feature (blocking, boosting and suppressing domains) - There is no iOS app. Only one in beta that is seemingly abandoned. - Their site/app design is just passable at best - Their AI quick answers give solid answers and are pretty concise
mrweasel 1mo ago
The more I think about it, the less sure I am that the model for journalism is actually broken. For some unknown reason, people do not want to subscribe to news media, but they'll happily pay for Netflix, Disney, HBO and Spotify. The comment is always: I want to be able to pay for this one article, but streaming doesn't work like that. I can watch a movie on Netflix and pay €25 per month, then watch what ever else I want. Or, I can pay €13 and watch just that one movie on AppleTV and nothing else. Newspapers are more expensive, typically, because their subscriber count is way lower than that of Netflix, but their cost remain roughly the same. You can't say: I want to pay $1 for an article, unless that article is massively popular, that's not going to cover all the other less popular, but important news for that day. Journalism requires a stable income to produce things of value. Investigations may that months or years. Using the cost of the Netflix/AppleTV example you should either subscribe, or pay around half the monthly subscription per article. So no, the revenue model for journalism isn't broken. Our ability so recognize the value of good journalism is. It's easier and more profitable to write an "article" about Kim Kardashians oatmeal with a few dusin ads slapped on, than it is to do a multiple page article about the governance problems of the UK, which you need to sell, because advertisers don't want to be associated with politics and the target audience big enough anyway. So, we can't have good, independent journalism, because the amount of people who care aren't enough to cover the expense or they want to shop around and only pay for the topics and views they care about and agree with. Micro-payments is the complete wrong way to go, we need more people to start subscribing to newspapers again and the papers needs to take that money and funnel that money directly into actual journalism.

tempest_ 1mo ago

You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless. Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.

ymolodtsov 1mo ago

The problem with micropayments isn't the tech really, it's that only the users want them but not any publisher. Which is completely reasonable.

carlosjobim 1mo ago
Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong. Edit: Typo
- CoastalCoder 1mo ago
  Would AI tokens count as a kind of prepaid micropayment?
- ymolodtsov 1mo ago
  Why would any publisher want them? Who exactly tried? As a publisher, I'd want consistent subscription revenue. The goal is to convince users to pay after they hit the paywall several times.
  - carlosjobim 1mo ago
    I think the majority publishers have tried it in the past 10-15 years. If you are a publisher, something which gains widespread attention might happen in your region, or an article might become viral for other reasons. You know that a lot of people would like to read that article and not become subscribers. So if you can sell access to an article 50 000 times for 1 dollar, that's $50 000 in income you wouldn't otherwise have. But unfortunately, very few people are willing to pay a dollar or 50c for an article which they are desperate to read.

sph 1mo ago

A good product that is not solely focused on rent seeking these days is worth celebrating.

frereubu 1mo ago
I know what you mean, but it comes across - even to me, a paying customer who does really like Kagi - a bit like talking to someone involved in an MLM who can't wait to steer the conversation around to their product. I'd just prefer discussions to stay somewhat on topic. There's something interesting in this announcement in that, in my view, it deliberately omits an attribute that's a mild proxy for high-quality journalism, and I always find it a shame when the topic at hand is drowned out by generic boosterism.

CoastalCoder 1mo ago

> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber! Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)

gherkinnn 1mo ago

Longstanding user and it is great! It is one of the very, very few digital services that hasn't fucked me over within a year. I will celebrate as if I had discovered Kagi yesterday.

Anonyneko 1mo ago

>you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).

bcraven 1mo ago
I subscribed to https://the-fence.com/ https://the-fence.com/ last year and it's been superb.

al_borland 1mo ago

> I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.

orrito 1mo ago
It has been tried e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle but it just doesn't work, even a tiny fee will already deter most people from "buying" an article as it will always feel as a loss. Whereas with a subscription you don't feel bad in the moment for losing money but feel good for using your already paid subscription.

tensor 1mo ago

Apple news manages to give access to a variety of mainstream sources for a fixed price. Unfortunately there is no way to block the ads and without an ad-free tier it's a no go for me.

bigcoffeeguy 1mo ago
You can block Apple News ads with DNS-level adblockers. Still works, for now...

lyu07282 1mo ago

> only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.

preg_match 1mo ago

The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction. So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket. One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.

lotsofpulp 1mo ago
Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction? The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
joseda-hg 1mo ago
Isn't this what Brave tried to push? You get their Basic Attention Token crypto
II2II 1mo ago
The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs. Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff. But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.

rcpt 1mo ago

Micropayments never work. It's too much friction for the median user to decide if they want to spend a quarter on an article. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs/ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...

m463 1mo ago
Used to be you would trade a yak or a horse for something. Then you could trade little pieces of metal. In the future, why not something smaller? I mean, people are trading virtual things (like an app). Why not something small for something as small as a website view?
- rcpt 1mo ago
  Look at the paper. There's a floor to mental work. Even if it's a nickel, having to make that decision is enough friction to kill the whole deal
  - m463 1mo ago
    But we charge for tokens, and sites like youtube and spotify reward in collected chunks.
zhivota 1mo ago
I'd argue it's still a product issue, one that will eventually be solved. The reason a payment is too much friction today is because it's surrounded by a raft of cruft: is there an extra "processing fee", am I signing up for a recurring charge and didn't realize it, I have to enter my card details and address, or I have to log in to some system, I have to OTP with my bank, etc. It hasn't been solved yet, but someone will solve it to the point that it's a single swipe to buy an article for 25c, and it'll work. I would argue the NYT is in the best position to do so, but they are addicted to their scummy business practices where it's hard to cancel, you pay "$2/mo introductory rate" that suddenly escalates to $40/mo, and so on. I could see Substack taking a crack at it also.

boplicity 1mo ago

Almost no publisher wants micropayments. Full stop. Micropayments are simply not good business.

adamtaylor_13 1mo ago

The foregone conclusion is that journalism is somehow helpful or valuable to me. I have never read a piece of journalism or "news" and thought to myself, "Wow, how useful! I'm so glad I consumed that." And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one. So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

kelnos 1mo ago

> We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies! We can't, because the website owners don't want one. They want there to be no standard, because then it's more likely that some people will accidentally allow them.

potamic 1mo ago

> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something meaningful and insightful about a product, there's no better endorsement of it. But low effort platitudes are probably doing more harm than intended.

forestrywat 1mo ago
What if it's genuine? I use kagi. The results quality is pretty good, but I probably use the uprank and downrank feature all the time. Being able to report stuff as AI and get little indicators that a site is AI slop is good. As an example, serious eats is my go to recipe site, and I've got it tuned so it returns higher in my results. I also really appreciate I can write my own custom css, and style every box and widget on the page. And marine most of all, I love that their AI tool will not show up unless you end your query with a "?". Meaning I'm explicitly opting in to using it. My last reason for liking it is ideological. No ads, no manipulation because of advertising tech. Just ... the stuff I searched for. I do not like the image search page, however. It feels clunky in a way I can't put my finger on. There's a few other things I really like, but it's hard to type them all out. So I often go, "kagi is great, love kagi."
Drew_ 1mo ago
I get the same feeling with this sort of thing. I did try Kagi and stuck with it for the last year. It's pretty good, but not without it's faults. - Out of the box, search result quality is comparable to Google - Search is slow. Latency for most queries is about a second. Sometimes 3 seconds. Google is shockingly fast in comparison. - Personalized results is a killer feature (blocking, boosting and suppressing domains) - There is no iOS app. Only one in beta that is seemingly abandoned. - Their site/app design is just passable at best - Their AI quick answers give solid answers and are pretty concise

mrweasel 1mo ago

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that the model for journalism is actually broken. For some unknown reason, people do not want to subscribe to news media, but they'll happily pay for Netflix, Disney, HBO and Spotify. The comment is always: I want to be able to pay for this one article, but streaming doesn't work like that. I can watch a movie on Netflix and pay €25 per month, then watch what ever else I want. Or, I can pay €13 and watch just that one movie on AppleTV and nothing else. Newspapers are more expensive, typically, because their subscriber count is way lower than that of Netflix, but their cost remain roughly the same. You can't say: I want to pay $1 for an article, unless that article is massively popular, that's not going to cover all the other less popular, but important news for that day. Journalism requires a stable income to produce things of value. Investigations may that months or years. Using the cost of the Netflix/AppleTV example you should either subscribe, or pay around half the monthly subscription per article. So no, the revenue model for journalism isn't broken. Our ability so recognize the value of good journalism is. It's easier and more profitable to write an "article" about Kim Kardashians oatmeal with a few dusin ads slapped on, than it is to do a multiple page article about the governance problems of the UK, which you need to sell, because advertisers don't want to be associated with politics and the target audience big enough anyway. So, we can't have good, independent journalism, because the amount of people who care aren't enough to cover the expense or they want to shop around and only pay for the topics and views they care about and agree with. Micro-payments is the complete wrong way to go, we need more people to start subscribing to newspapers again and the papers needs to take that money and funnel that money directly into actual journalism.