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Comment by dopeboy | Hacker News Reader

Much respect to Neeva for being in the arena. Couple thoughts:

* Outside of the HN crowd, I don't think the average consumer thinks of privacy as a differentiator.

* I don't know if competing on general search is the way in. I think you need a wedge, and these new companies competing on a certain vertical (like search tools for developers). I see promise here, with specialized LLMs in the backend.

* The biggest search engine in the world comes as the default option on the most popular browser and the most popular phone operating system. Even if your results are 10x better, that's a huge hurdle to overcome.

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> Outside of the HN crowd, I don't think the average consumer thinks of privacy as a differentiator.

Frankly, I think this community is the exact same. Pretend to care about privacy, but convenience comes first. Like, I think the AI fad here is a perfect demonstration. I dunno.

This is the issue with trying to derive market insights from an upvote based community.

Unfortunately, people do not say what they truly think when internet points (formal sanctions in the sociological sense) are at stake.

They instead bend their commenting to align with the performative moralistic aspirations of the most extreme members of the group. Here it presents as an almost hysterical level of privacy absolutism over even trivial things at the expense of everything else. Reading HN you would think there’s a huge market of people living off the grid in a mosquito coast sense. But it’s a mirage.

You see this in tons of subreddits as well. Humans do weird things when you get us in large groups and gamify the interactions.

I think it's possible to avoid, at least if you have the determination.

For example, I chose a real name account intentionally partly because I was afraid that a pseudonym might encourage me to just go on typing nonsense that most intelligent folks could see through, yet avoid pointing out due to game theoretical reasons.

Sometimes it's extremely advantageous because I occasionally find myself the only HN user actually engaging in a substantive discussion in decently upvoted posts. Where literally ever other comment or comment chain in the post is either not replied to or consists of just folks writing platitudes one after another, even when the initial comment is substantive.

Sometimes I get extra lucky and some challenger appears trying to knock the arguments down a peg, which provides convenient tests of veracity.

But this does require staking some real world credibility to get that boost in willingness in others to engage substantively.

I feel you! When I complained a couple of weeks ago about a high-profile chat app, that is "free" and had no business model, I got downvoted.

We like to point the finger at facebook, but we turn around and are happy to use other "free" products.

If you're not paying, you're the product.

But it seems we have the memory of a goldfish (yes, I know the goldfish memory story is false)

The personalized search engine is a gamble. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

And google thinks their version works well enough. Now my search results are crap. And I have to ask ChatGPT my problem after explaining it in a whole lot of detail and waiting for it to answer.

I think consumers care a lot about privacy, it's just not clear to most of them just how much it's being violated on a daily basis.

This is a common misconception rife across regular "techie" audiences. Many consumers do understand its privacy implication (+ads) and they consider it as a plausible economical trade-off to freely use the service. Some younger people even see it as utility! (which to be honest I don't fully understand yet) This is why those privacy narrative doesn't resonate well across the majority. If you want to promote a specific agenda, you first gotta understand the target audience rather than the topic.

People claim this every day on HN but I never see any proof.

I have never seen or spoken to a person who fully understands the implications of privacy violations and still doesn't care. I meet some people who do care and understand, but don't know how to fight it so they give up. I meet tons of people who think they're trading off privacy for convenience, but when I question them they're completely unaware of the extent to which it's happening. When I explain it to them they always enter the first group.

Sorry, I'm just not buying it. To the extent that people "want" this, it's mostly that they've had the wool pulled over their eyes, not because they've made a well educated decision.

This is nothing but a lie we in the tech industry tell ourselves to feel a little better about the horrible things we're doing.

Let me refine: consumers care about privacy but are OK sacrificing it for convenience.

You're still wrong.

I suspect how much they care about privacy depends on how the pollster asks the question.

> * Outside of the HN crowd, I don't think the average consumer thinks of privacy as a differentiator.

It's like trying to sell a service based on it being decentralised or a social media service on free speech. It's a nice to have thing, but the majority of the population don't really consider it a selling point on its own.

I think Kagi may have a better selling point because of this, since the differentiators are more 'you can choose exactly which sites you don't want to see/do want to see', not just 'we don't track you'.

But I'm not sure even that's enough. Probably needs to be a mix of both really good marketing and search results that are leagues ahead of Google's (something that's admittedly not as unlikely now as it used to be).

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