Actually, that email exchange isn’t as combative as I expected.
i suppose the CEO completely barreling forward past multiple attempts to refuse conversation while NOT screaming slurs at the person they're attempting to lecture, is, in some sense, strictly better than the alternative
i was impressed enough with kagi's by-default deranking/filtering of seo garbage that i got a year's subscription a while back. good to know that this is what that money went to. suppose i'll ride out the subscription (assuming they don't start injecting ai garbage into search before then) and then find some other alternative
switching topics, but i do find it weird how the Brave integration stuff (which i also only found out about after i got the subscription) hadn't... bothered me as much? to be exceptionally clear, fuck Brandon Eich and Brave -- the planet deserves fewer bigots, crypto grifters, and covid conspiracists -- but i can't put my finger on why Kagi paying to consume Brave's search API's just doesn't cause as much friction with me. honestly it could be the fact that when i pay for Kagi it doesn't feel like i'm bankrolling Eich and his ads-as-a-service grift, whereas the money for my subscription is definitely paying for Vlad to ~~reply-guy into bloggers' inboxes who are critical of the way Kagi operates~~ correct misunderstandings about Kagi.