@gvrooyen I have many thoughts about ad-funded and freemium style models. And economies of scale... I'm not sure what percentage of Google Search's expenses were in generating and updating the index, vs the cost of serving - but a premium-only search service? How does one build critical mass in the user base to fund the work?

Ok, I guess that's also partly a normal gamble in any startup: build it, betting you'll succeed at finding the necessary users, and perhaps skimp on freshness of the long tail, or latency of capturing breaking news, until you can afford it.

I want to look into Kagi some more later. Collecting your personal data is less of an issue when it's purely for personalising, and not largely for better-attention-stealing ads, or constructing time-sucking media feeds.

Should I share some more thoughts on another day? About anything in particular? This was simply my current stream of consciousness.

I hope to write up my ideas around this - my first attempt showed me I'm rusty writing for an audience. 😊 What I hope to figure out in the next month or two, is whether this is worth doing at all:

It'd be a platform which is heavily focused on either getting people to understand each other, or disengaging asap (instead of inadvertently mutually trolling each other). Explicit mutual interest in bridge building and empathy, or explicit decision to disengage for clear, conscious reasons.

I initially wondered if it could be done through some cultural engineering / community leadership for some new community on an existing platform, but I don't think it will work without a custom platform - specifically supporting this concept. If I implement it and ever get it beyond a minimum viable product, it would place emphasis on emotions experienced - which means it could become as annoying as unsolicited psychoanalysis, if I got it wrong. 😝