Sometimes there is, actually, a vocal minority.

And at least I know that I am happy to talk about a product that I pay for. Is some of it because I feel like there's a sunk cost - the amount of money that I've paid into it? Yes, of course there is. Is it a good search engine? Yes.

Do I wish there were features added to it that they've promised for a while now? (namely being able to pay for more AI credits, especially if you paid a year in advance?) Yes.

It's a niche service that is almost perfectly tailored to meet the needs of HN users.

It's a paid-only service, without ads - "you are not the product", that lets you hide results from popular (to the mainstream) sites like Instagram and Pinterest, and to filter out low-quality sources like W3Schools, while raising MDN and the Arch Linux wiki to the top.

HN is cringe with their influencer marketing, always have been.

Kagi, Claude, Rust, and other Canadian trash nobody will ever use in the real world.