abbenm @ abbenm @lemmy.ml

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14

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243

Joined

5 yr. ago

Moderating

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I mean I don't love it, but I'm also not sure what the argument is supposed to be about how this ties to browser market share. Mozilla made $593 million from their most recently released financials. The CEO made $6.9 million. My calculator tells me that's 1.16%.

So is the argument that Mozilla that if they set the CEO salary to $0, used it all on more developers, that would spin up a browser experience that's so improved it would lead to more market share? A 1% change in Mozilla's spending will bring them to 50% market share? 40%? 20%?

What's the cause and effect here? Do we even actually know that that's true, that it even has anything whatsoever to do with development choices at all? I get that the CEO is an easy target but I think assuming that is explaining market share ignores things like Google's dominance of search and ads, and how those piles of cash drive initiatives like Android and Chromebooks, which helps propel Chrome to dominant market share. Those are the drivers of market share. I don't even think people have even tried to begin to think through this argument in real terms, it's just a lot of knee-jerk reaction to news stories disconnected from any specific idea of cause and effect.

Did I miss something? I don't think the browser is going to be full of ads?

I'm honestly not sure.

I don’t think throwing a fit and it being a hissy fit are the same thing.

the things people will debate online

edit: I beefed it on this one. They were being normal and I misunderstood. Note to self to think before typing in the future.

It’s probably a coincidence that shortly after Mozilla acquires an ad company, they “accidentally” remove an ad blocker.

I mean I'm of two minds here. One, there's an epidemic of intellectually lazy, kneejerk Mozilla hate and it's time to turn the tide on that.

But on the other hand, even as a Mozilla fanboy I can see how this is a really bad look, and really indefensible. I think it's more of a huge error of judgment, and if there are other huge errors, I can begin to see a problem, but I think they have too much of a positive track record in their history to just go reaching for the tinfoil hats so quickly.

I thought that was the shit Chrome was doing to block adblockers and antimalware plugins, if Firefox is doing the same thing what browser do we use now? :-(

They're doing a modified version of V3 that they changed to restore ad-blocking functionality.

It was a manual review conducted by an actual person that in the end admitted they were wrong

Good to know! I wasn't sure if it was automated or not. That's rough.

Firefox will be adopting Manifest V3, but a modded version that enables ad blocking.

The best I can think of is that the explainer language used to justify the extension's removal was just boilerplate language that got copy+pasted here because someone clicked the wrong button. But even that makes a mockery of the review process.

I think "oops clicked wrong button" would be slightly more defensible, but not by much. If they truly rejected the extension for content in it that it does not have, it's hard to see how a human could make that mistake even accidentally. But maybe there's something I'm missing.

I'm sorry, but you're not at all taking responsibility for your mess, and trying to re-frame this as you being simply too smart for this world is kind of a deadbeat move.

If you think nobody else knew that Mozilla and Google get revenue from ads, like it's something you need to "help" everyone understand, you're underestimating the knowledge of people you are communicating with and overestimating yours.

How does any of this connect to the FOSSpost article you shared from like 2 comments ago? The argument from FOSSpost was originally "Mozilla has been silent", but then it changed to "Oh, well actually Mozilla did criticize it, but since then they've changed, so they need to criticize them again".

Speculating on the meaning of a "silence" and treating it like proof of something is already a terrible way to reason for reasons that seem so obvious to me I would never expect to have to explain it in a serious conversation. There are better ways to gauge their commitments than that, there are better pieces of evidence to set the context, the evidence you are putting forward is mixed rather than decisive... and these are all the things I already said the last time around.

Yet here you are, offering to "help" me follow as if this lowly train wreck was a brilliant point that's being misunderstood out of a deficit of curiosity.

Right - I think either way there's a snowballing effect. Astroturfing, at least as far as I can tell, can be notable for at least trying to make coherent arguments. Echo chambers I would say are characterized by fuzzy thinking, and I've seen more of the latter here (especially in this thread).

That said, sometimes the goal of astroturfing isn't to make a point but to degrade conversations with noise and nonsense, extrapolations and digressions. In light of that, I suppose that too could explain some of what we're seeing.

I just have to stop and note something here. This is an incredibly disorganized way to carry on a conversation. I feel like you didn't pick up most of what I put down, and instead, you've opened two new pandoras boxes, stacking a mess on top of another mess.

So just to recap:

• You posted an opinion article criticizing Mozilla from a place called FOSSpost
• I noted that it was a bizarre article because it was about something not directly tied to Mozilla, and the logic trying to tie Mozilla to it was questionable
• I noted even if you entertain this bizarre logic (which you shouldn't!) Mozilla has criticized V3 in the past
• I noted that given that they have criticized it in the past, the only way this already bizarre logic would make sense was if remaining issue is the timing, but even so that's entertaining the bizarre assumptions of the article

Phew. So now you're talking about timing.

I wanted to do my best to take the feeling of disorientation at the strangeness of your comment and turn it into words, so here goes: (1) I feel like the essence of the point isn't about the timeline of Mozilla acquisitons (not mentioned by your first article) but about the article's questionable logic of interpreting silences to mean something, which hinges on all kinds of subjective choices about how you interpret context (2) the point you seem to be making now, is about a shift in Mozilla's motivations and identity, which is a very nebulous and subjective thing, and hardly even the kind of thing you can establish with an article or two (3) you don't seem to be up to the task of attempting a nuanced reconciliation between the table you posted and the other privacy policy info on the same page that the other user brought up (4) the article you posted together with the table doesn't contain the table or anything affirming your description (I found the table via google but it's a disorienting way to organize the information) (5) even if your interpretation was reliable it wouldn't mean silence during a particular news cycle was proof of anything (6) none of these things establish a motivation for sympathetic behaviors toward Google (in fact it would seem to be the opposite) (7) there's not any reason to think these are the best pieces of context to be brought to bear on this question, (what about, for instance, the fact that Mozilla has their own modded version of V3 that restores add blocking? That seems at least as relevant to gauging their true intentions as anything you have posted, given that the first article was about V3).

Even if you were 100% right, there has to be a way to make this argument that doesn't require everyone reading it to reach for the dramamine. It's a disorganized mess.

I've noticed the same thing you have, but I suspect it has a different explanation. I think it's more an echo chamber thing. People have said variations of this for a while now in HN comment threads, on reddit and here. And there's a snowball effect from more people saying it.

But there's been a throughline of bizarrely apathetic and insubstantial low effort comments. That's the one thing that has tied them together, which is why I think they are echo-chambery. Just for one example: one guy just never read a 990 before (a standard nonprofit form), and read Mozilla's and thought it was a conspiracy, and wrote an anti-Mozilla blog post. And then someone linked to that on Lemmy and said it was shady finances. Tons of upvotes.

But I'm convinced that no one reads through these links, including the people posting them. Because it takes two seconds to realize they are nonsense. But it doesn't stop them from getting upvoted.

So my theory is echo chamber.

I think because, in this context, it's because there was an extensive explanation of the problems with Mozilla's decision on this page.

As the other commenter noted, this is kind of a nonsensical article. I am not by any means a fan of Mozilla's decision on Ublock, it seems egregious and indefensible. But the convoluted logic of making Manifest V3 about Mozilla is completely emptyhanded, and there's no rhyme, reason, logic, or precedent suggesting we should make anything of their absence of a statement.

Also, this is especially nuts because Mozilla HAS in fact criticized Manifest V3! They just happened not to have done so within a particular randomly selected window of time.

Being open minded in response to new information is an automatic upvote from me

I had an alienware Steam Machine and it was perfectly fine.

I think the criticisms of the Steam Machine suffered from what I would call the Verge Syndrome, which is only being able to comprehend things in a binary of instant success or failure, with no in between and no comprehension of other definitions of success.

Steam Machines were a low risk initiative that were fine for what the were. They did not have a ring of death, they didn't have a blue screen, the OS itself was not glitchy, they didn't lose money, and they didn't fail any stated goals. They got the Proton ecosystem up and running, and got the ball rolling on hardware partnerships, which led to the smash success of the Steam Deck which would not have been otherwise possible.

I understand that argument, but to me that departs from normal parlance of the kind that would ever be used in a meme.