6 ms·

I know there are plenty of more serious issues people have with Mozilla's direction and focus, but patronizing stuff like this really grinds my gears. > Which

I know there are plenty of more serious issues people have with Mozilla's direction and focus, but patronizing stuff like this really grinds my gears. > Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List of emoji animals] The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone. I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile, saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes artificiality.

ReadCarlBarks 1y ago
Thank you for loving Firefox - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highlight/true#M7430 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highl...
- ralfd 1y ago
  This is an amazing rant! Too bad it was only had 4 comments here at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892
  - rendaw 1y ago
    > Ah, but does anyone from Mozilla take any notice of our grumbling and complaining here? Apparently, no. Bodes well for this Q&A with someone thoroughly air-gapped from development and management.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      I’d love a Q&A with the Mozilla exec team… https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ Considering, you know, Firefox is their most important product.
      - transcriptase 1y ago
        No, Firefox is the conduit through which the funding provided by Google to stave off claims of monopoly are used for pet projects and padding CVs by people wholly uninterested in Firefox.
  - vintagedave 1y ago
    I just resubmitted. It deserves attention IMO. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580702
  - Barrin92 1y ago
    >This is an amazing rant! Is it? The guy is "highly offended" (???) by playful language and color themes and does the performatively enraged internet guy thing of being shocked that Mozilla has a political agenda, despite the fact that Mozilla, a purpose driven non-profit has had a manifesto written by Mitchell Baker since 2007? If you're enraged by an emoji or by someone saying thank you for loving our browser it's probably time to turn the computer off or something
    - tojaprice 1y ago
      Agreed, also: >> The article began: >>"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode." >> Sorry, "upleveled" is not a verb I've ever heard of, in decades of using the Web. Why are you beginning articles with made-up verbs that you know people aren't going to understand? Why not use standard, plain, clear English? Just because the person ranting had never heard of it doesn't mean that uplevel isn't a verb; and I am not sure how their amount of time spent using the web would correlate to their grasp on the English language.
      - mrob 1y ago
        I checked for "upleveled" in Google Ngram Viewer ( https://books.google.com/ngrams/ https://books.google.com/ngrams/ ) Although the word alone is found, there are zero matches for it combined with various articles and determiners: >Ngrams not found: upleveled a, upleveled the, upleveled fewer, upleveled less, upleveled more, upleveled fewest, upleveled least >Ngrams not found: upleveled most, upleveled this, upleveled that, upleveled these, upleveled those, upleveled each, upleveled every >Ngrams not found: upleveled any, upleveled some, upleveled either, upleveled neither, upleveled enough, upleveled sufficient >Ngrams not found: upleveled what, upleveled which, upleveled you, upleveled all, upleveled both, upleveled certain, upleveled several >Ngrams not found: upleveled various, upleveled few, upleveled little, upleveled many, upleveled much >Ngrams not found: upleveled my, upleveled his, upleveled her, upleveled its, upleveled our, upleveled their, upleveled your This suggests all the supposed matches for the word alone could be OCR errors or typos. If "upleveled" is a real word it's so rare that it has no place in any writing that you expect to be broadly understood.
  - enraged_camel 1y ago
    >> This is an amazing rant! It's not. People who take issue with every little thing like this are extremely unpleasant to be around, and extremely unpleasant to have as users.
  - meristohm 1y ago
    "Surely, you have one job and that is to deliver tech that works—not to waste users' time by giving them irrelevant copy to read which has no functional value." Microsoft has been doing this for years, with its messages during Windows setup, along the lines of "sit back and relax while we work our magic" which is at best annoying.
    - accrual 1y ago
      95, 98, Me, and XP all at least provided screenshots of some new features in the release. 10 and later just have the fuzzy "getting things ready" flavor text.
      - bombcar 1y ago
        Those were informative and at least not boring and changed often enough to keep you interested and tell you that set up is still working.
      - merb 1y ago
        Tbf most os‘s including windows install extremely fast. It’s the shit show you need to do after the installation that is annoying. Even starting edge after you did the worlds slowest after installation wizard. You need to fucking await it’s fullscreen feature announcement until you can download another browser.
        smegger001 1y ago
        I beleibe you can grab Firefox by FTP in the CMD or powershell at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ and never actually open edge or ie.
    - aydyn 1y ago
      At least Windows is giving that to you at a time when you cant be doing anything else. The nonsense mozilla gets up to is truly on another level.
  - tim333 1y ago
    I know everyone says you should use Firefox not Chrome but one of the nice things with Chrome is for the most part it just works without that kind of thing. Just looking at switching over after they scrapped Manifest V2 and I ads popping up on youtube!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- 93po 1y ago
  while i agree that mozilla is silly for thinking they're bring about positive social impact, it's also concerning for the author to call DEI (as a sentiment, not as a flawed implementation) "divisive politics" when it's just basic recognition of being a decent human. It makes me think the author is an "all lives matter" person.
- MollyRealized 1y ago
  "Welcome to Costco, I love you." That movie was so damn eerily prescient.
  - hyperdimension 1y ago
    On nearly every point. We should be glad we still have water, if not just to flush the toilets with.
- ibejoeb 1y ago
  "Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode." Hah, perfect. I recently got a contract to "upskill" a team. I mean, I kinda get it: training, right? But I was not confident that I really did understand it, specifically. I asked what the hell that meant and was met with a lot contorted phrases to describe it. Sure enough, training. We're inventing work...
Y_Y 1y ago
Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could, and that the limited time and ebergy available were being spent on things like compatibility and escaping from Google.
- account42 1y ago
  Wasn't that added around the same time where they removed compact mode from the UI because supposedly it was too much of a burden to maintain?
  - dao- 1y ago
    No, that had happened about two years earlier I think (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678742 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678742 goes back to 2020). Alas, the bottleneck there was UX staffing rather than engineering.
- dao- 1y ago
  > Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.
  - dale_glass 1y ago
    Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up, but nothing equivalent happened whenever it went away. My current desktop has been Fedora since Fedora 16, and I just upgraded from one release to the next continuously. So yes, whatever choice I made back in 2013 is just going to stick around on my current machine unless it goes away entirely or I manually change it. Colors are just not that important, if I like it well enough, it's going to stick around forever. The only one that caused intense feelings in me was the "Dreamer – Bold" theme that caused a fair amount of confusion about why the heck couldn't I tell which tab was active, and what could be possibly broken. Because it never occurred to me that the theme could be designed that way intentionally.
OldfieldFund 1y ago
100%. Also, I think we can sense where Firefox is going. Mozilla is a mismanaged company. A victim of itself and Google's monopoly/life support.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
Agreed, this just looks really tone deaf and amateurish. And it's avoiding the bigger issues. There are plenty and they actually need dealing with. Even just acknowledging some of those issues would be progress. There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla. More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way. I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.
- motorest 1y ago
  > More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Playing devil's advocate: how does that help your average Joe adopt Firefox?
  - Doxin 1y ago
    By improving the product
  - janfoeh 1y ago
    It does not, and that is fine. That ship sailed a decade ago. What they could do is something the other guys are institutionally unable or unwilling to do: build a proper user agent for power users. Radically transparent, trustworthy and extendable up the wazoo. With footguns and everything. That gives you a comfortable moat, a raison d'être and a stock of rabid, technically inclined fans which spread the word for you to their friends, family and coworkers the next time Google tightens the thumbscrews again. Basically: repeat what happened the last time when it was Firefox vs. IE, twenty years ago.
miki_oomiri 1y ago
This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users. They killed the dino logo: - https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf - https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc We were hackers, we became "cute and inclusive" (nothing wrong about inclusive… it just became the brand). Fuck this. Edit: I said 10+ years… but actually, it was more like 15 years ago.
- AndyMcConachie 1y ago
  Kinda hard to be inclusive if no one uses your browser. The greatest thing Mozilla could do for inclusiveness is to have more users. Not treat your users like children.
- motorest 1y ago
  > This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users. Having mascots is fine. It's like having a logo. Having multiple mascots is not good. What does a dinosaur have to do with a Firefox? The dinosaur was supposedly Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla. Firefox is one of the many projects under the Mozilla umbrella. Keep the fox theme in Firefox communications, leave dinosaurs for Mozilla's one.
  - xnx 1y ago
    > Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla How did I never know this?
basisword 1y ago
>> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.
account42 1y ago
I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine. It's marketing trying to craft a certain brand image instead of actual stakeholders being open about the what is going on with the project.
- motorest 1y ago
  > I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine. More than not being genuine, it's condescending and patronizing.
raffael_de 1y ago
I suggest we democratically rename Firefox to FireFoxy MacFireFace.
0x000xca0xfe 1y ago
Because the entire post reeks of LLM writing. It even got the long dashes.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  Well screw all of us that like using em dashes, I guess.
  - 0x000xca0xfe 1y ago
    The people I know that were using special dashes since before AI were all technical and precise writers (which is probably why they paid attention to it in the first place). I've never seen this unique mix of listicle-like light-hearted fluff with emojis AND special dashes written by humans. LLMs seem to love it, though.
  - ziml77 1y ago
    Keep using the em-dash with pride! Don't let the AIs steal such a beautiful thing from us!
- gjm11 1y ago
  I agree that it feels LLMish (though the LLMs learned it from humans and it's always possible that whoever wrote it just has that sort of style) but the dashes there are en-dashes rather than the longer em-dashes that LLMs seem particularly fond of. I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM fingerprints, because I rather like them.
  - venusenvy47 1y ago
    When I'm writing, I've always used en-dashes, but only because it's on my keyboard. Until people recently started talking about this, I didn't realize there was such a thing as en and en-dashes.
    - Rebelgecko 1y ago
      FWIW I think the - character on qwerty keyboards is a hyphen, which is a smidge shorter than an en dash - – —
OhioMan2943 1y ago
Too tired to cover my tracks tonight
- imglorp 1y ago
  Go on...
dmix 1y ago
This is an AMA with product managers, not the engineering team, so it tracks
lupusreal 1y ago
> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting It's because those entire departments are daycare for the people working in them. 8-9, snacks. 9-10, tweeting. 10-11, snacks and socializing. 11-12, nap time. 12-2, lunch. 2-3, tweeting. 3-4, socializing.

ReadCarlBarks 1y ago

Thank you for loving Firefox - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highlight/true#M7430 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highl...

ralfd 1y ago
This is an amazing rant! Too bad it was only had 4 comments here at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892
- rendaw 1y ago
  > Ah, but does anyone from Mozilla take any notice of our grumbling and complaining here? Apparently, no. Bodes well for this Q&A with someone thoroughly air-gapped from development and management.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    I’d love a Q&A with the Mozilla exec team… https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ Considering, you know, Firefox is their most important product.
    - transcriptase 1y ago
      No, Firefox is the conduit through which the funding provided by Google to stave off claims of monopoly are used for pet projects and padding CVs by people wholly uninterested in Firefox.
- vintagedave 1y ago
  I just resubmitted. It deserves attention IMO. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580702
- Barrin92 1y ago
  >This is an amazing rant! Is it? The guy is "highly offended" (???) by playful language and color themes and does the performatively enraged internet guy thing of being shocked that Mozilla has a political agenda, despite the fact that Mozilla, a purpose driven non-profit has had a manifesto written by Mitchell Baker since 2007? If you're enraged by an emoji or by someone saying thank you for loving our browser it's probably time to turn the computer off or something
  - tojaprice 1y ago
    Agreed, also: >> The article began: >>"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode." >> Sorry, "upleveled" is not a verb I've ever heard of, in decades of using the Web. Why are you beginning articles with made-up verbs that you know people aren't going to understand? Why not use standard, plain, clear English? Just because the person ranting had never heard of it doesn't mean that uplevel isn't a verb; and I am not sure how their amount of time spent using the web would correlate to their grasp on the English language.
    - mrob 1y ago
      I checked for "upleveled" in Google Ngram Viewer ( https://books.google.com/ngrams/ https://books.google.com/ngrams/ ) Although the word alone is found, there are zero matches for it combined with various articles and determiners: >Ngrams not found: upleveled a, upleveled the, upleveled fewer, upleveled less, upleveled more, upleveled fewest, upleveled least >Ngrams not found: upleveled most, upleveled this, upleveled that, upleveled these, upleveled those, upleveled each, upleveled every >Ngrams not found: upleveled any, upleveled some, upleveled either, upleveled neither, upleveled enough, upleveled sufficient >Ngrams not found: upleveled what, upleveled which, upleveled you, upleveled all, upleveled both, upleveled certain, upleveled several >Ngrams not found: upleveled various, upleveled few, upleveled little, upleveled many, upleveled much >Ngrams not found: upleveled my, upleveled his, upleveled her, upleveled its, upleveled our, upleveled their, upleveled your This suggests all the supposed matches for the word alone could be OCR errors or typos. If "upleveled" is a real word it's so rare that it has no place in any writing that you expect to be broadly understood.
- enraged_camel 1y ago
  >> This is an amazing rant! It's not. People who take issue with every little thing like this are extremely unpleasant to be around, and extremely unpleasant to have as users.
- meristohm 1y ago
  "Surely, you have one job and that is to deliver tech that works—not to waste users' time by giving them irrelevant copy to read which has no functional value." Microsoft has been doing this for years, with its messages during Windows setup, along the lines of "sit back and relax while we work our magic" which is at best annoying.
  - accrual 1y ago
    95, 98, Me, and XP all at least provided screenshots of some new features in the release. 10 and later just have the fuzzy "getting things ready" flavor text.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      Those were informative and at least not boring and changed often enough to keep you interested and tell you that set up is still working.
    - merb 1y ago
      Tbf most os‘s including windows install extremely fast. It’s the shit show you need to do after the installation that is annoying. Even starting edge after you did the worlds slowest after installation wizard. You need to fucking await it’s fullscreen feature announcement until you can download another browser.
      - smegger001 1y ago
        I beleibe you can grab Firefox by FTP in the CMD or powershell at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ and never actually open edge or ie.
  - aydyn 1y ago
    At least Windows is giving that to you at a time when you cant be doing anything else. The nonsense mozilla gets up to is truly on another level.
- tim333 1y ago
  I know everyone says you should use Firefox not Chrome but one of the nice things with Chrome is for the most part it just works without that kind of thing. Just looking at switching over after they scrapped Manifest V2 and I ads popping up on youtube!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
93po 1y ago
while i agree that mozilla is silly for thinking they're bring about positive social impact, it's also concerning for the author to call DEI (as a sentiment, not as a flawed implementation) "divisive politics" when it's just basic recognition of being a decent human. It makes me think the author is an "all lives matter" person.
MollyRealized 1y ago
"Welcome to Costco, I love you." That movie was so damn eerily prescient.
- hyperdimension 1y ago
  On nearly every point. We should be glad we still have water, if not just to flush the toilets with.
ibejoeb 1y ago
"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode." Hah, perfect. I recently got a contract to "upskill" a team. I mean, I kinda get it: training, right? But I was not confident that I really did understand it, specifically. I asked what the hell that meant and was met with a lot contorted phrases to describe it. Sure enough, training. We're inventing work...

Y_Y 1y ago

Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could, and that the limited time and ebergy available were being spent on things like compatibility and escaping from Google.

account42 1y ago
Wasn't that added around the same time where they removed compact mode from the UI because supposedly it was too much of a burden to maintain?
- dao- 1y ago
  No, that had happened about two years earlier I think (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678742 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678742 goes back to 2020). Alas, the bottleneck there was UX staffing rather than engineering.
dao- 1y ago
> Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.
- dale_glass 1y ago
  Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up, but nothing equivalent happened whenever it went away. My current desktop has been Fedora since Fedora 16, and I just upgraded from one release to the next continuously. So yes, whatever choice I made back in 2013 is just going to stick around on my current machine unless it goes away entirely or I manually change it. Colors are just not that important, if I like it well enough, it's going to stick around forever. The only one that caused intense feelings in me was the "Dreamer – Bold" theme that caused a fair amount of confusion about why the heck couldn't I tell which tab was active, and what could be possibly broken. Because it never occurred to me that the theme could be designed that way intentionally.

OldfieldFund 1y ago

100%. Also, I think we can sense where Firefox is going. Mozilla is a mismanaged company. A victim of itself and Google's monopoly/life support.

jillesvangurp 1y ago

Agreed, this just looks really tone deaf and amateurish. And it's avoiding the bigger issues. There are plenty and they actually need dealing with. Even just acknowledging some of those issues would be progress. There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla. More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way. I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.

motorest 1y ago
> More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Playing devil's advocate: how does that help your average Joe adopt Firefox?
- Doxin 1y ago
  By improving the product
- janfoeh 1y ago
  It does not, and that is fine. That ship sailed a decade ago. What they could do is something the other guys are institutionally unable or unwilling to do: build a proper user agent for power users. Radically transparent, trustworthy and extendable up the wazoo. With footguns and everything. That gives you a comfortable moat, a raison d'être and a stock of rabid, technically inclined fans which spread the word for you to their friends, family and coworkers the next time Google tightens the thumbscrews again. Basically: repeat what happened the last time when it was Firefox vs. IE, twenty years ago.

miki_oomiri 1y ago

This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users. They killed the dino logo: - https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf - https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc We were hackers, we became "cute and inclusive" (nothing wrong about inclusive… it just became the brand). Fuck this. Edit: I said 10+ years… but actually, it was more like 15 years ago.

AndyMcConachie 1y ago
Kinda hard to be inclusive if no one uses your browser. The greatest thing Mozilla could do for inclusiveness is to have more users. Not treat your users like children.
motorest 1y ago
> This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users. Having mascots is fine. It's like having a logo. Having multiple mascots is not good. What does a dinosaur have to do with a Firefox? The dinosaur was supposedly Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla. Firefox is one of the many projects under the Mozilla umbrella. Keep the fox theme in Firefox communications, leave dinosaurs for Mozilla's one.
- xnx 1y ago
  > Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla How did I never know this?

basisword 1y ago

>> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.

account42 1y ago

I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine. It's marketing trying to craft a certain brand image instead of actual stakeholders being open about the what is going on with the project.

motorest 1y ago
> I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine. More than not being genuine, it's condescending and patronizing.

raffael_de 1y ago

I suggest we democratically rename Firefox to FireFoxy MacFireFace.

0x000xca0xfe 1y ago

Because the entire post reeks of LLM writing. It even got the long dashes.

DaSHacka 1y ago
Well screw all of us that like using em dashes, I guess.
- 0x000xca0xfe 1y ago
  The people I know that were using special dashes since before AI were all technical and precise writers (which is probably why they paid attention to it in the first place). I've never seen this unique mix of listicle-like light-hearted fluff with emojis AND special dashes written by humans. LLMs seem to love it, though.
- ziml77 1y ago
  Keep using the em-dash with pride! Don't let the AIs steal such a beautiful thing from us!
gjm11 1y ago
I agree that it feels LLMish (though the LLMs learned it from humans and it's always possible that whoever wrote it just has that sort of style) but the dashes there are en-dashes rather than the longer em-dashes that LLMs seem particularly fond of. I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM fingerprints, because I rather like them.
- venusenvy47 1y ago
  When I'm writing, I've always used en-dashes, but only because it's on my keyboard. Until people recently started talking about this, I didn't realize there was such a thing as en and en-dashes.
  - Rebelgecko 1y ago
    FWIW I think the - character on qwerty keyboards is a hyphen, which is a smidge shorter than an en dash - – —

OhioMan2943 1y ago

Too tired to cover my tracks tonight

imglorp 1y ago
Go on...

dmix 1y ago

This is an AMA with product managers, not the engineering team, so it tracks

lupusreal 1y ago

> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting It's because those entire departments are daycare for the people working in them. 8-9, snacks. 9-10, tweeting. 10-11, snacks and socializing. 11-12, nap time. 12-2, lunch. 2-3, tweeting. 3-4, socializing.