"Enshittification": God, I love this term. It so perfectly captures what happens to a product when revenues stall and product managers think of anything to drive new revs. See: Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office.

I was just about to finish this post and ask if anyone knows the history. I Googled that and was surprised by the answer from Wikionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification

    ...[C]oined by Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow in 2022.

God damn, "Dr." Doctorow again!

Cable TV didn't use to have ads, until somebody figured out you could charge the customer and have other streams of revenue as well.

For Kagi, it's a matter of when, not if. Capitalism guarantees it.

As long as they don't take outside investment that's not a certainly. People complain about the prices but it's charging the real cost that let's them be able to offer something good without mortgaging the future.

I concede that if they got big enough, someone would come with enough money that they couldn't refuse, and buy them to try and "unlock vale" by racing to the bottom.

An even sadder example of it: Windows.

I don’t think the term enshittification applies when a product is fully enshittified from its inception.

How nice then that you can use Kagi as it is right now, today. Then if your prediction comes true in the future you can stop using Kagi.

No, it does not. They are free to create adjacent products to boost revenue as long as they want without debasing existing ones.

And the oxygen in the room you're in is free to concentrate in a single corner of it, making air in the rest of the room unbreathable.

Both are technically possible, but so extremely unlikely, that you can rely on them not happening.

My ML prof in university used this as an example for something that could happen but is highly unlikely. Each particle of oxygen can be in either half of the room so it's like 1/2 to the power of the number of particles (avogardo?) chance that all the particles are in one half suffocating the ppl in the other half. He was such a great guy.

This is a good point. Did Kagi ever consider having a freemium tier that uses adverts to pay for the (search) content? I don't think it is a terrible idea if it helps Kagi to improve their paid search.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

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.

You’re conflating capitalism with commerce.

See also, Whatsapp