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The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. To

The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. To the extent that wide social change ever happens, it only happens because the path of least resistance shifted from one thing to another. If you despair for the actions of the masses, never try to reason with them. Skip straight to assembling a good marketing campaign. I admire the spirit, but nobody's going to "stand up" and fight the good fight. Most people are only capable of being consumers. If you want them to change, give them something more attractive to consume. These are the rules of the game. Also, Firefox isn't some beacon on a hill. Its creators/owners are intensely corrupted at this point: politically, ethically, and pragmatically. They stopped building a tool to serve ordinary people a long time ago, and pivoted to attempting to build the most stylish and trendy browser instead. IE, a browser that looks as much like Chrome as possible without being Chrome. Firefox is still better than Chrome, but the differences become more superficial with each release, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually just becomes a shell for Chromium like everything else has, a way for a certain crowd to signal how ethical they are while still being tapped in to the Gooogle ad hivemind like everyone else.

blaze33 5y ago
> The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. Already in 1947, Georges Bernanos wrote: "it's always more profitable to satisfy man's vices than his needs" in his essay "France against Robots" (La France contre les robots, no idea if there's a good English translation though). Slightly off-topic but I can't recommend this book enough, it's quite forward-thinking and the chapters on freedom and privacy in an increasingly technological society might interest some of you here. I especially remember a brilliant rebuttal of the 'nothing to hide' argument that is still relevant nowadays. So yes, I agree with you, good ideas by themselves rarely happen to actually change how things work. Like you said "a good marketing campaign" might be more impactful. Is there still hope? I've had this question for quite some time now: how do you efficiently implement some change in a system that won't cooperate? Seems to me that it requires some hacker mindset to find how you can exploit the rules of the game to trick the system into working towards your goals. I've been given a great book full off details about what should be done if we are to improve our world in the coming decades, but it's a bit of a let down for me: what should be done is rarely a secret, how you actually manage to pull it off at scale is the real issue.
downWidOutaFite 5y ago
I sense some cognitive dissonance between your two paragraphs. In the first you argue for a focus on consumerism and marketing, in the second you criticize Firefox for competing by appealing to styles and trends.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Do you feel that this dissonance should change how we readers interpret this argument in some way, or is this meant solely as a typo-fix kind of comment? It’s unusual to see a new HN user offering proofreading comments, so I’m hesitant to accept that interpretation without checking first.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    Not sure what the meaning behind your comment, but I found /u/downWidOutaFite's reply to be thought provoking. Specifically, the original poster's paragraphs seem to contradict each other: the first suggests 'not fighting the good fight' because you have to appeal to consumerism, and the second blames Mozilla for not fighting the good fight and appealing to consumerism. I also don't know why the account age has anything to do with this -- they're not pointing out a typo, they're pointing out a logical contradiction.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      I see. Thank you for taking the time to speak in more depth about it.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  I do not see these two as being in opposite to each other, or more specifically i do not see the second contradicting the first. Firefox's owners can be corrupted and focused on the wrong things (i'm not saying they are, btw - actually i do not exactly agree with the idea of Firefox having "owners" in the first place, at least not the same way as Microsoft owns Windows) and have the wrong priorities. If you consider that Firefox needs to do things right, you may want to prioritize making Firefox "good" (whatever that means, e.g. making it the fastest and/or most secure browser and/or giving the most control to the user, etc) and then (in terms of priority) try to promote and create a marketing campaign that focuses on those aspects of Firefox. It isn't like marketing is all about style. And even if it focused on the style, one might disagree that the proper way to go about it is to copy Chrome. There are many ways to interpret these two paragraphs as not being contradicting.
stereoradonc 5y ago
I completely agree about the owners being corrupted. Under the semblance of "open source", the owners are only increasing their take-home salaries while firing away all the lower -level staff.
smhost 5y ago
> They do them because they're easy If you want to see a counterpoint to this, watch Goebbels' Total War speech. You can absolutely mobilize a great mass of people by promising them pain and hardship. Similar idea with JFK's moonshot speech.
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  The Nazis didn't promise pain, they promised a better world and told people they'd have to be prepared to go through pain and suffering to reach that goal. They also claimed the war was forced on them, that they had no choice. The speech was basically asking the people if they were going to bend the knee or stand up and fight to the last man. It was the Nazi version of the Braveheart speech, whatever we may think of that.
  - smhost 5y ago
    Well, not exactly. The ideological trick is to package pain and hardship and to sell it as something wonderful. It's not really even about promising good things in the future. That only works for part of the population (essentially the marshmallow experiment). What Goebbels did is much more immediate. If you identify with Goebbels, then the hardship itself registers as something that's good, and not merely as a promise of a delayed reward.
    - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
      Not sure I understand what you mean. It's a motivational speech like many others. Goebbels was a brilliant public speaker, no doubt. But he wasn't a social wizard who cast an evil spell on the German population, the way people who like to mysticize Nazism often portray him as. Such speakers still exist today, the same old populism still works great. The dangerous part about fascism is exactly that it wasn't a one off terrible mishap, it's a regular occurrence. The Nazis most certainly made all kinds of positive promises, they were the whole reason they got elected. They promised to fix the economy, fight unemployment, fight back against the unjust Versailles Treaty, support families, bring political stability and make other countries respect Germany again, etc... Just look at their campaigns and posters.
coffeeling 5y ago
I don't think Firefox is even better than Chromium overall. There's a lot of good stuff in Chromium that just doesn't exist in Firefox like a great tab groups implementation and PWA support. Some of the Firefox-only things I like are it suggesting Reader more more often, and the Page Info view. They're the kind of small conveniences Chrome is missing. [EDIT] Oh, and being able to use bookmarks to sync custom searches across devices was AMAZING. Of course, that had to die. [/EDIT] And of course zero knowledge sync and uBlock on mobile are huge, which Chrome itself has a less excellent record on. But some of the Chromium forks like Brave and Vivaldi not only offer those, but also good tab groups. The big thing with Firefox is that its enthusiast userbase is moronically hostile to Firefox gaining financial independence of some kind. They bought Pocket and integrated it and people were just about ready to lynch the Firefox/Mozilla team. A lot of them are more motivated by the kind of purity that makes people install gNewSense and complain about companies doing business than any desire to have an actually useful tool with independent revenue streams.

blaze33 5y ago

> The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. Already in 1947, Georges Bernanos wrote: "it's always more profitable to satisfy man's vices than his needs" in his essay "France against Robots" (La France contre les robots, no idea if there's a good English translation though). Slightly off-topic but I can't recommend this book enough, it's quite forward-thinking and the chapters on freedom and privacy in an increasingly technological society might interest some of you here. I especially remember a brilliant rebuttal of the 'nothing to hide' argument that is still relevant nowadays. So yes, I agree with you, good ideas by themselves rarely happen to actually change how things work. Like you said "a good marketing campaign" might be more impactful. Is there still hope? I've had this question for quite some time now: how do you efficiently implement some change in a system that won't cooperate? Seems to me that it requires some hacker mindset to find how you can exploit the rules of the game to trick the system into working towards your goals. I've been given a great book full off details about what should be done if we are to improve our world in the coming decades, but it's a bit of a let down for me: what should be done is rarely a secret, how you actually manage to pull it off at scale is the real issue.

downWidOutaFite 5y ago

I sense some cognitive dissonance between your two paragraphs. In the first you argue for a focus on consumerism and marketing, in the second you criticize Firefox for competing by appealing to styles and trends.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
floatingatoll 5y ago
Do you feel that this dissonance should change how we readers interpret this argument in some way, or is this meant solely as a typo-fix kind of comment? It’s unusual to see a new HN user offering proofreading comments, so I’m hesitant to accept that interpretation without checking first.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Not sure what the meaning behind your comment, but I found /u/downWidOutaFite's reply to be thought provoking. Specifically, the original poster's paragraphs seem to contradict each other: the first suggests 'not fighting the good fight' because you have to appeal to consumerism, and the second blames Mozilla for not fighting the good fight and appealing to consumerism. I also don't know why the account age has anything to do with this -- they're not pointing out a typo, they're pointing out a logical contradiction.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    I see. Thank you for taking the time to speak in more depth about it.
badsectoracula 5y ago
I do not see these two as being in opposite to each other, or more specifically i do not see the second contradicting the first. Firefox's owners can be corrupted and focused on the wrong things (i'm not saying they are, btw - actually i do not exactly agree with the idea of Firefox having "owners" in the first place, at least not the same way as Microsoft owns Windows) and have the wrong priorities. If you consider that Firefox needs to do things right, you may want to prioritize making Firefox "good" (whatever that means, e.g. making it the fastest and/or most secure browser and/or giving the most control to the user, etc) and then (in terms of priority) try to promote and create a marketing campaign that focuses on those aspects of Firefox. It isn't like marketing is all about style. And even if it focused on the style, one might disagree that the proper way to go about it is to copy Chrome. There are many ways to interpret these two paragraphs as not being contradicting.

stereoradonc 5y ago

I completely agree about the owners being corrupted. Under the semblance of "open source", the owners are only increasing their take-home salaries while firing away all the lower -level staff.

smhost 5y ago

> They do them because they're easy If you want to see a counterpoint to this, watch Goebbels' Total War speech. You can absolutely mobilize a great mass of people by promising them pain and hardship. Similar idea with JFK's moonshot speech.

trompetenaccoun 5y ago
The Nazis didn't promise pain, they promised a better world and told people they'd have to be prepared to go through pain and suffering to reach that goal. They also claimed the war was forced on them, that they had no choice. The speech was basically asking the people if they were going to bend the knee or stand up and fight to the last man. It was the Nazi version of the Braveheart speech, whatever we may think of that.
- smhost 5y ago
  Well, not exactly. The ideological trick is to package pain and hardship and to sell it as something wonderful. It's not really even about promising good things in the future. That only works for part of the population (essentially the marshmallow experiment). What Goebbels did is much more immediate. If you identify with Goebbels, then the hardship itself registers as something that's good, and not merely as a promise of a delayed reward.
  - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
    Not sure I understand what you mean. It's a motivational speech like many others. Goebbels was a brilliant public speaker, no doubt. But he wasn't a social wizard who cast an evil spell on the German population, the way people who like to mysticize Nazism often portray him as. Such speakers still exist today, the same old populism still works great. The dangerous part about fascism is exactly that it wasn't a one off terrible mishap, it's a regular occurrence. The Nazis most certainly made all kinds of positive promises, they were the whole reason they got elected. They promised to fix the economy, fight unemployment, fight back against the unjust Versailles Treaty, support families, bring political stability and make other countries respect Germany again, etc... Just look at their campaigns and posters.

coffeeling 5y ago

I don't think Firefox is even better than Chromium overall. There's a lot of good stuff in Chromium that just doesn't exist in Firefox like a great tab groups implementation and PWA support. Some of the Firefox-only things I like are it suggesting Reader more more often, and the Page Info view. They're the kind of small conveniences Chrome is missing. [EDIT] Oh, and being able to use bookmarks to sync custom searches across devices was AMAZING. Of course, that had to die. [/EDIT] And of course zero knowledge sync and uBlock on mobile are huge, which Chrome itself has a less excellent record on. But some of the Chromium forks like Brave and Vivaldi not only offer those, but also good tab groups. The big thing with Firefox is that its enthusiast userbase is moronically hostile to Firefox gaining financial independence of some kind. They bought Pocket and integrated it and people were just about ready to lynch the Firefox/Mozilla team. A lot of them are more motivated by the kind of purity that makes people install gNewSense and complain about companies doing business than any desire to have an actually useful tool with independent revenue streams.