There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business
There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business
I learned many surprising lessons from my 20 months as editor-in-chief of Deadspin, the skeptical, irreverent, hilarious, trailblazing sports outlet that…Megan Greenwell (TPM - Talking Points Memo)
like this
Snot Flickerman
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •Misleading title.
There are indeed "weird blogs" they just have to be devoid of capitalist funding.
Corey Doctorow's Pluralistic seems in many ways to be a natural extension of his BoingBoing days albeit a bit more serious than the lighthearted BoingBoing.
MetaFilter fully became a non-profit and still retains a more a blog-esque format than it's contemporaries.
Mother Jones has a strong online presence and has avoided the capitalist machine for it's entire existence.
The thing is (and the more important part of this story is) that submitting to the capitalist machine is to submit to its machinations and unwillingness to adhere to the age-old social contract of a business producing profit to be sufficient enough for a business to exist. Modern capitalism is indeed a shell-game of extracting maximum value, essentially truly squeezing blood from a stone until the stone no longer even exists. Anyone who willingly plays this game will be bitten by this game, unless they themselves become ruthless capitalists and focus all their energy on shell-game chican
... Show more...Misleading title.
There are indeed "weird blogs" they just have to be devoid of capitalist funding.
Corey Doctorow's Pluralistic seems in many ways to be a natural extension of his BoingBoing days albeit a bit more serious than the lighthearted BoingBoing.
MetaFilter fully became a non-profit and still retains a more a blog-esque format than it's contemporaries.
Mother Jones has a strong online presence and has avoided the capitalist machine for it's entire existence.
The thing is (and the more important part of this story is) that submitting to the capitalist machine is to submit to its machinations and unwillingness to adhere to the age-old social contract of a business producing profit to be sufficient enough for a business to exist. Modern capitalism is indeed a shell-game of extracting maximum value, essentially truly squeezing blood from a stone until the stone no longer even exists. Anyone who willingly plays this game will be bitten by this game, unless they themselves become ruthless capitalists and focus all their energy on shell-game chicanery over producing actual products, services, or content. There is no end-game here where the plucky capitalist-minded business-owner can overcome all and become the master of their own domain. The few who have (Valve, for example) had a solid financial footing to begin their more unique forays into profit-driving and they have stayed independent companies instead of publicly owned companies. That alone has saved them, and most of them (again, like Valve) started in an era before the behemoth of VC (Vulture/Vampire Capitalism) took hold, and made their early profits soon enough to not need such outside funding. Starting such a company today? Without outside funding? Get real. You'd have to be someone like Gabe Newell, who exited Microsoft with enough money to take a risk to make a profit of his own without needing outside stake, and the number of Gabe Newell's exiting industry to make their own goes at new business are exceedingly rare. The ones that actually succeed in making a profitable company are even rarer.
In capitalist America, the "free market" binds you and dictates your future.
like this
NoneOfUrBusiness likes this.
ninjaphysics
in reply to Snot Flickerman • • •nixus
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •There are plenty of weird blogs, just look up The Small Web. There are less weird blogs that make money, but I can't say that I'm overly sad about that.
The headline is a little misleading: This isn't really about small blogs, but more about how Private Equity harvests smaller companies, and leaves their husks to rot. That is a very legitimate problem that needs some serious solutions.
like this
slothbear, NoneOfUrBusiness and HarkMahlberg like this.
mesa
in reply to nixus • • •Shout out to piefed.social/f/smallweb
Lots of great communities there. And rss is still king ;)
nixus
in reply to mesa • • •mesa
in reply to nixus • • •Snot Flickerman
in reply to mesa • • •RSS support is absolutely my favorite old-web thing that's still around. It truly is fantastic to have your own curated RSS feeds.
The Fediverse specifically lets you create them really granularly as well!
MrSoup
in reply to mesa • • •!smallweb@piefed.social
mesa
in reply to MrSoup • • •MrSoup
in reply to mesa • • •mesa
in reply to MrSoup • • •Yeah its an awesome feature. I really like it.
You can combine peertube subscriptions, Lemmy/piefed communities/mastodon accounts just about anything subscribable to a "feed". Ex: piefed.social/f/fediversevideo…
If you have a piefed account it helps with keeping up with multiple like communities.
kratoz29
in reply to mesa • • •AmbitiousProcess (they/them)
in reply to nixus • • •Kagi has a great little feed you can use to randomly explore smallweb blogs. I'd recommend it!
kagi.com/smallweb/
As an example, here's this site dedicated to cataloguing the different variations of Disney park trash cans!
magicaltrash.com/
Kagi Small Web
kagi.comSnot Flickerman
in reply to AmbitiousProcess (they/them) • • •I have so many reasons to not use Kagi.
d-shoot.net/kagi.html
web.archive.org/web/2024041215…
lori (@lori@hackers.town)
hackers.townAmbitiousProcess (they/them)
in reply to Snot Flickerman • • •There's a lot of issues with that analysis.
The linked article literally states that they partnered with a small print shop, not that they own it. It says they bought warehouse space to store and fulfill orders. Now granted, yes, spending that much money on T-shirts can be a bad idea financially, but they do act as marketing because they get people talking, even if the brand name isn't on the shirt. This recoups the cost over time.
Kagi also heavily relies on organic marketing, so it makes total sense.
... Show more...The AI tools are easily deployed and based on standard open-source tooling. Not that hard to maintain, yet their AI integrations are genuinely much better than the competition, which draws in a lot of people
There's a lot of issues with that analysis.
The linked article literally states that they partnered with a small print shop, not that they own it. It says they bought warehouse space to store and fulfill orders. Now granted, yes, spending that much money on T-shirts can be a bad idea financially, but they do act as marketing because they get people talking, even if the brand name isn't on the shirt. This recoups the cost over time.
Kagi also heavily relies on organic marketing, so it makes total sense.
The AI tools are easily deployed and based on standard open-source tooling. Not that hard to maintain, yet their AI integrations are genuinely much better than the competition, which draws in a lot of people who pay for their higher-priced plan just for heavy AI users.
Orion is a fork, with minimal additional bloat. Again, not terribly hard to maintain.
Their entire business model is based around a subscription. No individual service is "profitable," it's just "part of what you get for your subscription."
Granted, though the hardest part for this is just making a frontend, which they've already done. There are many free and open source backends for hosting email services. They haven't promoted it heavily, and my assumption is because they're keeping it more on the down-low until they fix bugs, build out more features, and are sure it's something they can more heavily advertise.
And they later explained it's because there's a threshold of buyers you have to pass before paying sales tax, and they did not know if they would ever pass that mark, and later had to scramble due to new user growth to make that happen.
The vast majority of my answers from Kagi's AI were right, when other search engines were all wrong. (yes, I did actually check real sources to confirm) This is just a strawman of reality. Kagi even shows you what % of the LLM's response was derived from which source, whereas others leave you in the dark.
Oh, is that why Kagi said in the post also linked by the author of that post: "Large language models (LLMs) should not be blindly trusted to provide factual information accurately. They have a significant risk of generating incorrect information or fabricating details", "AI should be used to enhance the search experience, not to create it or replace it", and "AI should be used to the extent that it enhances our humanity, not diminish it (AI should be used to support users, not replace them)"
I'm not gonna keep going through every single thing point-by-point here since that'd take forever, but a lot of this is basically just taking minor issues, like the CEO posting about hopeful uses of AI, or talking about completely normal expectations to have of privacy when you trust a company with information, then blowing it out of proportion and acting as though this is a death blow for the service.
The author of the post quite literally talks about how "Kagi's dedication to privacy falls apart for me", saying they don't seem to actually care about user privacy... when just a few months later, they released Privacy Pass, which allows you to cryptographically prove you have a membership without revealing your identity, and to continue using Kagi that way. Not really something someone who doesn't care about privacy would do.
Overall, this just reads to me as:
1. They could be doing bad financially because of these decisions I didn't like them doing
2. Okay so they said they were profitable currently even after all that but now they're doing too many things (which could all bring in new users that would pay them)
3. Okay so people are paying for and using the things but there's no way they could possibly use AI in any good way
4. I've now ignored anybody saying the tools are actually better than others or are working well, but just in case you're not convinced, they don't care about privacy!
5. I know they explained the ways in which companies are going to get data on you and there is going to be a degree of trust when using a service that requires things like payment information but I still think they don't actually care about privacy!
I'm not saying all the points are completely false or don't mean anything, but a lot of this really does feel like just taking something relatively small (giving out a bunch of T-shirts during a time the company is primarily trying to grow its user count via organic marketing), acting as though it's both the current and permanent future position of the entire company and will also lead to the worst possible outcome, then moving on to another thing, and doing that until there's nothing left to complain about.
Kagi can have its own problems, but a lot of these just aren't it.
As a person using Kagi myself:
1. The search results are the best I've ever had. period, full stop.
2. The AI models are commonly correct, good at citing sources, out of the way till you ask for them, and feel secondary to the search experience
3. The cost is more than reasonable
4. Regular small updates with new tools have been incredibly nice to have (such as the Kagi news feed, which is great at sourcing good news from a variety of sources, or the Universal Summarizer, which is great at providing alternative, more natural sounding and accurate translations compared to Google Translate or DeepL)
I haven't really had any complaints, and contrasting it with this guy's post, it just reads like someone complaining about something they've never even used. Yes, you can complain about something you haven't yourself used, but the entire post is just "here's anything even minor that I think could be an issue if it were taken to the extremes"
Crotaro
in reply to AmbitiousProcess (they/them) • • •You briefly mentioned in your user-experience-list that the AI answers are only there when you want them to be, but I just want to emphasise it, since to me it makes a world of difference in comparison with other Search Engines like Google.
You only receive an AI answer if you press a specific "Gimme AI answer"-button (which is very unobtrusive) or add a question mark at the end of your search query!
I rarely jump to the defense of some company, but I only know of this one lori-person who tried to lay out reasons why Kagi is bad and, as you showed very well, @AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social, most of their reasoning/arguments aren't really all that
... Show more...You briefly mentioned in your user-experience-list that the AI answers are only there when you want them to be, but I just want to emphasise it, since to me it makes a world of difference in comparison with other Search Engines like Google.
You only receive an AI answer if you press a specific "Gimme AI answer"-button (which is very unobtrusive) or add a question mark at the end of your search query!
I rarely jump to the defense of some company, but I only know of this one lori-person who tried to lay out reasons why Kagi is bad and, as you showed very well, @AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social, most of their reasoning/arguments aren't really all that good when you look at them in more detail. And when they just plain refused to take an interview with the lead of Kagi, by burying their head in the sand and going "I don't care if you want to clear up misunderstandings, I don't want to talk to you!", it kind of sealed this person as not being a trustworthy source of criticism and more of "I'm mad that a new company is doing something different than other companies in the same sector"
I've been using Kagi for about 3/4 of a year now and I will certainly renew my annual payment to them. Of course it's not a magic bullet without any flaws at all, but currently it does the things it offers much better than any competitor I could find and all they want is around 10€ per month. They won't spam you with advertisement nor will they suck up your (arguably infinitely more valuable) private info to sell to the highest bidder. For now, Kagi has been doing and still is doing more good than most other tech companies.
AmbitiousProcess (they/them)
in reply to Crotaro • • •They also literally just released SlopStop as a community-based filtering mechanism that'll downrank AI slop, with the CEO saying "We believe AI slop is an existential threat to an internet that should belong to humans. This is the first step towards our ultimate goal: to kill AI slop so you never see it again."
Apparently they'll be using this to train something that can identify AI slop better based on the database of user-reported sites, and they'll be making the database open.
Their AI integration philosophy feels incredibly reasonable to me with how out of the way it is, how it properly cites its sources and shows how much of the answer each one influenced, and how the search results are often so good it doesn't even feel like you need the AI model, and this just sweetens the deal.
I can understand having issues with Kagi, they're a company, after all, but their stance and actions feel very good thus far.
Crotaro
in reply to AmbitiousProcess (they/them) • • •From what I understand, there'll be human review of every AI report, so the potential to abuse the system is also relatively low (if the Kagi team does their due diligence)
RalfWausE
in reply to AmbitiousProcess (they/them) • • •Wiby - Search Engine for the Classic Web
wiby.meHobbitFoot
in reply to nixus • • •In this case, private equity isn't the only villain.
Print journalism has been decimated over the last generation as it has become the expectation that the articles should be free. The money that used to support journalism is mostly gone.
The writer is focusing only in their own experiences, but the industry as a whole can't support many people who blog as is it is their job.
doeinthewoods
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •like this
NoneOfUrBusiness likes this.
chicken
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •How though? I don't doubt this is a real thing, but there isn't really a satisfying explanation being offered here. What the article is saying sounds like the process is, take profitable business, throw in garbage, somehow more profit. Where's the money coming from?
MacronDeezNuts
in reply to chicken • • •Look up private equity and corporate raids.
Short version - Layoffs increase short term profits, then you let the business die to sell off the assets. This is generally considered a safer strategy than long term investing because it doesn't require expertise and you get paid quicker (compared to buying a company and waiting 5+ years to turn a profit on the purchase).
chicken
in reply to MacronDeezNuts • • •I have read some articles about this, and I can see how it makes sense in some contexts. Like iirc when this happened to Red Lobster, they were able to make money through a combination of ripping off a certain group of investors, and the significant value of the company's real estate holdings. That makes sense.
In the case of online magazine equivalents though I really don't get it. What is there to sell off? Shouldn't any potential long term profits be priced in at the point they get bought out? If the company has tangible assets like offices, couldn't they just sell those without firing anyone and have people work from home? The intangible assets are all directly tied to the publication's reputation and audience, which seems like it would die off fast without anything worthwhile on the site.
Deyis
in reply to chicken • • •Oh god no! The tangible assets like buildings and land only increase in value, you don't get rid of those. You sell it to a holding company and lease it back to the original company for a profit (and probably several other companies who want space, too).
You then strip operations down to the bare minimum. A couple of writers at most and they're only really there to make sure the automated AI article generator doesn't accidentally publish a napalm recipe or some shit. You want to run it with as few people as possible to still generate enough content to run ads. Utilise your fanbase to submit content that you can run ads on because they'll do it for free or a chance to win a t-shirt or some shit. No fans? N
... Show more...Oh god no! The tangible assets like buildings and land only increase in value, you don't get rid of those. You sell it to a holding company and lease it back to the original company for a profit (and probably several other companies who want space, too).
You then strip operations down to the bare minimum. A couple of writers at most and they're only really there to make sure the automated AI article generator doesn't accidentally publish a napalm recipe or some shit. You want to run it with as few people as possible to still generate enough content to run ads. Utilise your fanbase to submit content that you can run ads on because they'll do it for free or a chance to win a t-shirt or some shit. No fans? No problem! Rip everything off relevant subreddits or other sites doing the exact same thing. Make up unsourced slop to piss people off because it generates engagement like you wouldn't believe. More eyeballs, more ad revenue.
And you make damn sure that the company never makes a profit on paper so you don't have to pay the relevant taxes. You made $50k more than you expected? Better pay a consultant (you) $40k to find out why. Then increase that rent by $15k.