4 ms·

happy people don't have time to comment

by lampe3 13y ago

waterhouse 13y ago
It's an interesting property of Firefox's feedback system, which was present long before the recent Brendan Eich controversy. The basic fact is that when people encounter a bug, they're likely to complain about it, but when things are working smoothly, they're not likely to think "Oh, I should tell the developers about this". In fact, when I imagine writing positive feedback, I realize that some of the ways that come to mind are "Yesss, thank god, that stupid behavior from the past is finally fixed", or possibly "Oh man this is so much better than [other browser] which has xyz problems"; each of those would probably have created at least as much negative feedback in the past, likely more.[1] The consequence is that, regardless of how good a browser is, negative reports seem likely to substantially outnumber positive reports, and so I think the feedback has always been "[majority]% sad". (It has certainly spiked recently, though.) I'm somewhat curious what the designers think of it; I guess it looks like it's just one statistic out of many that they display. [1] In the case of "OMG Firefox is awesome compared to browser Y which sucks in xyz case", it's true that the negative feedback would be directed towards browser Y and not Firefox; but if Firefox and browser Y are roughly competitive, then there are probably just as many "Gah Firefox sucks compared to browser Y which handles xyz just fine" cases, so the counting argument basically stands.
- lampe3 13y ago
  even if the bug is fixed most people wont come back and say how super it is. Most people think that software runs well is the default behavior and its nothing special to them. Even if you speed up something by 20% or more people wont come back and say how wonderful it is. They will maybe write on twitter/fb/G+ about is. I can't find the link to a analysis which showed how such system work in the internet but if your project is big and runs on so many platforms and you get a ration 10 bad to 1 good your doing pretty well. Things like Smartphone markets only work beacuse its only one platform and your app will be good or bad but not both

happy people don't have time to comment

by lampe3 13y ago

happy people don't have time to comment

It's an interesting property of Firefox's feedback system, which was present long before the recent Brendan Eich controversy. The basic fact is that when people encounter a bug, they're likely to complain about it, but when things are working smoothly, they're not likely to think "Oh, I should tell the developers about this". In fact, when I imagine writing positive feedback, I realize that some of the ways that come to mind are "Yesss, thank god, that stupid behavior from the past is finally fixed", or possibly "Oh man this is so much better than [other browser] which has xyz problems"; each of those would probably have created at least as much negative feedback in the past, likely more.[1] The consequence is that, regardless of how good a browser is, negative reports seem likely to substantially outnumber positive reports, and so I think the feedback has always been "[majority]% sad". (It has certainly spiked recently, though.) I'm somewhat curious what the designers think of it; I guess it looks like it's just one statistic out of many that they display. [1] In the case of "OMG Firefox is awesome compared to browser Y which sucks in xyz case", it's true that the negative feedback would be directed towards browser Y and not Firefox; but if Firefox and browser Y are roughly competitive, then there are probably just as many "Gah Firefox sucks compared to browser Y which handles xyz just fine" cases, so the counting argument basically stands.

lampe3 13y ago
even if the bug is fixed most people wont come back and say how super it is. Most people think that software runs well is the default behavior and its nothing special to them. Even if you speed up something by 20% or more people wont come back and say how wonderful it is. They will maybe write on twitter/fb/G+ about is. I can't find the link to a analysis which showed how such system work in the internet but if your project is big and runs on so many platforms and you get a ration 10 bad to 1 good your doing pretty well. Things like Smartphone markets only work beacuse its only one platform and your app will be good or bad but not both