4 ms·

It's great to see this recent marketing initiative from Mozilla to frame themselves as a privacy-first company. Mozilla has always been considered by the commun

It's great to see this recent marketing initiative from Mozilla to frame themselves as a privacy-first company. Mozilla has always been considered by the community as an organisation that should respect the privacy of their users, but there hasn't until now been such direct public statements to that effect to point to. Mainly I hope this can now be pointed to by Mozilla/Firefox users as a set of standards that should be followed when Mozilla devs put in place measures that infringe users' privacy or don't do enough to protect it. Right now, https://mozilla.org/ https://mozilla.org/ sets 15 Google cookies and 12 Google localStorage tracking values when you visit it. Mozilla's previous statements[0] justifying this have been fairly weak. I really hope this new PR initiative gives some extra leverage to those asking for change. [0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/9IQvIubDOXU/0tWVVlrUJOQJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/9IQ...

winningcontinue 7y ago
Be careful taking in this new direction as anything more than marketing PR. As you've stated before, I don't even think this time, it's anything more than the marketing department speaking for everyone. Mozilla has had weak statements on previous PR controversy's before. On a longer timescale, the organization will change it's position again due to economic and cultural pressures.
wayneftw 7y ago
It's interesting to me how you can call out this post and recent others as a "marketing initiative from Mozilla" without any apparent backlash (as of yet), but when I called it "brigading by Mozilla supporters and fans" on multiple other threads I was completely removed from the conversation. Is there really a difference? Is this the sort of story that casual users or even avid fans of the browser would organically promote? That's the logic that I was handed in some of the responses to me. Am I that out of place to assume that the following is how it goes down? 1.) The marketing/evangelical folks at Mozilla create a story and post it here and elsewhere. 2.) They put out a call to all their supporters in various channels to come and help promote the story (and keep other commenters in line apparently)... I think the problem is that comment forums always optimize towards showing me what the currently active mob/majority thinks about a topic rather than sorting things towards my own personal tastes. I'd much rather see a rating system that weights posts/topics and comments based on my history. For instance: if I've promoted a certain topic in the past, put it higher. If I typically promote a given user, put their comment higher. If I typically promote a certain user who promoted another comment, put that comment higher. And so on. Basically censor the stuff I usually disagree with instead of allowing mob rule. [1] I don't see the point of trying to make everybody see the same truth because that's not how real life works. Mostly, people tend to live in tribes. Wouldn't it be nice if the Internet wasn't always in your face telling you how wrong you are? IMO, such systems would put a chill on the global culture war. [1] - This might be the perfect problem for a graph database. If anyone wants to work on something like this, let me know how to contact you and I'll give you all of my ideas!
- feanaro 7y ago
  So, in other words, you want the internet to help you cement yourself in your current positions?
  - wayneftw 7y ago
    Nope. Just trying to live my life without constantly being pitched to. Are you advocating for mob-mentality?
    - afiori 7y ago
      It is not a dicothomy. While there are obviously trends at all times, they evolve over time and new ones emerge. I do not know your positions but it could simply be that someone with the right formulation able to start a trend is yet to come. Mob mentality is not the same as a popular idea or opinion, could be that popular assumption are indeed wrong and many people either do not care (maybe for principles or maybe because it is not really important) or just never encountered convincing arguments.
      - wayneftw 7y ago
        > Mob mentality is not the same as a popular idea or opinion... Firefox isn't popular and that's my point. A browser with less than 10% market share got on the front page of many places this week because of a marketing push that was helped by a group supporters, a mob, who helped push it there. A system that was optimized more towards my own dislike and distrust of Firefox and Mozilla wouldn't have shown me this bullshit.
        feanaro 7y ago
        It's not popular, but it's better. The recent series of unfavourable events around Chrome and Google led people to talk about it more.
    - feanaro 7y ago
      No, I'm advocating for plurality of opinion, exposure to new information and constant challenging of my own viewpoints. My reasoning is that, at any given point in time, I am wrong about a great number of things. I fear that any algorithm that learns to present me exclusively with the content I like (i.e. which elicits the least emotional objection) is going to hide all things that might correct my current errors.

winningcontinue 7y ago

Be careful taking in this new direction as anything more than marketing PR. As you've stated before, I don't even think this time, it's anything more than the marketing department speaking for everyone. Mozilla has had weak statements on previous PR controversy's before. On a longer timescale, the organization will change it's position again due to economic and cultural pressures.

wayneftw 7y ago

It's interesting to me how you can call out this post and recent others as a "marketing initiative from Mozilla" without any apparent backlash (as of yet), but when I called it "brigading by Mozilla supporters and fans" on multiple other threads I was completely removed from the conversation. Is there really a difference? Is this the sort of story that casual users or even avid fans of the browser would organically promote? That's the logic that I was handed in some of the responses to me. Am I that out of place to assume that the following is how it goes down? 1.) The marketing/evangelical folks at Mozilla create a story and post it here and elsewhere. 2.) They put out a call to all their supporters in various channels to come and help promote the story (and keep other commenters in line apparently)... I think the problem is that comment forums always optimize towards showing me what the currently active mob/majority thinks about a topic rather than sorting things towards my own personal tastes. I'd much rather see a rating system that weights posts/topics and comments based on my history. For instance: if I've promoted a certain topic in the past, put it higher. If I typically promote a given user, put their comment higher. If I typically promote a certain user who promoted another comment, put that comment higher. And so on. Basically censor the stuff I usually disagree with instead of allowing mob rule. [1] I don't see the point of trying to make everybody see the same truth because that's not how real life works. Mostly, people tend to live in tribes. Wouldn't it be nice if the Internet wasn't always in your face telling you how wrong you are? IMO, such systems would put a chill on the global culture war. [1] - This might be the perfect problem for a graph database. If anyone wants to work on something like this, let me know how to contact you and I'll give you all of my ideas!

feanaro 7y ago
So, in other words, you want the internet to help you cement yourself in your current positions?
- wayneftw 7y ago
  Nope. Just trying to live my life without constantly being pitched to. Are you advocating for mob-mentality?
  - afiori 7y ago
    It is not a dicothomy. While there are obviously trends at all times, they evolve over time and new ones emerge. I do not know your positions but it could simply be that someone with the right formulation able to start a trend is yet to come. Mob mentality is not the same as a popular idea or opinion, could be that popular assumption are indeed wrong and many people either do not care (maybe for principles or maybe because it is not really important) or just never encountered convincing arguments.
    - wayneftw 7y ago
      > Mob mentality is not the same as a popular idea or opinion... Firefox isn't popular and that's my point. A browser with less than 10% market share got on the front page of many places this week because of a marketing push that was helped by a group supporters, a mob, who helped push it there. A system that was optimized more towards my own dislike and distrust of Firefox and Mozilla wouldn't have shown me this bullshit.
      - feanaro 7y ago
        It's not popular, but it's better. The recent series of unfavourable events around Chrome and Google led people to talk about it more.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    No, I'm advocating for plurality of opinion, exposure to new information and constant challenging of my own viewpoints. My reasoning is that, at any given point in time, I am wrong about a great number of things. I fear that any algorithm that learns to present me exclusively with the content I like (i.e. which elicits the least emotional objection) is going to hide all things that might correct my current errors.