4 ms·
> Pocket That's the one that fascinates me - the Mozilla folks really shouldn't have the bigcorp "let's eat our seed corn today because nothing except this qua
by CommieBobDole 3y ago
> Pocket
That's the one that fascinates me - the Mozilla folks really shouldn't have the bigcorp "let's eat our seed corn today because nothing except this quarter matters" motive or even really a profit motive at all. It was a perfect opportunity to add a neat feature to their browser and maybe make a little money with high-quality promoted articles.
But no, it pretty much immediately turned into a pipeline to shovel the largest possible quantity of garbage into in pursuit of whatever pittance they make from it, and the only downside is that anyone who opens their flagship product is immediately overwhelmed with a page full of internet barrel-scrapings. Which, you know, couldn't possibly be bad for the product, could it?
- rchaud 3y agoI don't blame Mozilla for this, although I do think Pocket doesn't fit in with their ethos so I was surprised when they bought it. Pocket's changes happened because of paywalls going up everywhere circa 2018. Before that, you could get a great selection of articles from top publications. After the changes, 90% of the material they could legally scrape without getting into trouble were the ad-funded content mill blogs, fluff like Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com and FastCompany.
- basch 3y agoI sort of feel the same way about Microsoft and MSN/Edge Home. You’re this giant enterprise conglomerate, and the page you first open on people’s computers is ad ridden credit card offers, and weird clickbait where thumbnails don’t match headlines. The sheer power of being the default home page on millions of business computers, and using that eyeball attention for such shitty purposes and a cheep buck is disappointing.