- The community today is the result of 10+ years of disappointment. Some are long enough following Firefox to remember what has been lost, and some have grown and cultivated their grudges over a long time. And people know, there will never be a golden age of Mozilla again, from this point on it's just survival. For many, it's probably just a relationship of necessary evil they have to swallow.
- Because the chatbox can't access other websites, doing its work there. That's what integration is all about, to connect parts.
- Every app has to open itself for integration, especially if it's not a native app like Firefox. From where they get the AI at the end doesn't really matter, they will support them all anyway.
- There are many features you are not using in all your software. Just being there, should not be a problem for people. You should evaluate a software by what it's giving you, and which harm it brings, not by what it's giving others you do not care about.
And so far, we can assume that AI in Firefox will be like all the other stuff people don't care about, just optional, a button here, a menu-entry there, just waiting for interaction, but not harmful.
- > Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed.
Ah, true, Chrome has it, but Firefox not. Coincidental, some weeks ago I had to use this, worked well, and is another reason to always have an alternative browser around. Yes, Mozilla should work to at least fix that stuff.
- They have enough money to split their focus, sugar daddy Google is providing it.
- > The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core.
They always did, everyone does. This is not really new, and not really that harmful in itself. The deeper problem is that you need developers who are also understanding what they are doing, what people want and need, developers who are nerdy about some topic and very deep into their understanding of it. But Mozilla seems to lack this, which is also why they have to follow every fad blindly, because they just don't know it better, have no real vision and understanding which enables them to build something really worthful. Mozilla seems to be the embodiment of what happens when you have a task and your solution is to just throw money at it until something works.
And let's be fair, it is easy to be good at something, but really hard to master it and dominate the world. It's not really their fault, they are probably doing their best, they just don't know it better, and so does everyone, including fans if we are honest. Everyone has their own preferences and goals, and often they are conflicting with each other. Mozilla has to find a common ground to server as much people as possible, and IMHO they are still good at this. Firefox used to be so much worse on some aspects, Chrome and other Browser are still worse on other aspects. Getting the perfect Browser is just not realistic.
> Give us more extensibility instead.
True, it's really a joke how many of their promised APIs never were finished after they killed XUL.
> Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more.
Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?
> There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative.
Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5? Most stuff done with Flash or Java-Applets is now possible out of the box. Or is something missing?
- > if you read random posts on X versus HN there is no comparison.
Fair. At this point, I'm not sure if X should be still called social, it's really just a mess of bots and voices.
> Moderation for sure helps, would there be ways to make it scalable with less manual supervision?
This would be the golden goose of communication. Everyone wants good automated moderation, but depending on the topic, crowd and size, it's really hard, and probably expensive, depending on the solution. The main problem is, you have to have a very good understanding of any disputed topic, to understand if something is good for the discussion, or not. And not even all human mods have this on all topics.
> let's say now your platform becomes popular. It will attract players that will want to exploit that either to sway opinions for their own gain, and I believe that this is becoming increasingly cheaper to game and simulate whole crowds. So the limits are mostly with this in mind.
Understandable. And yes, this often happens, a community grows, gains numbers and the vibe and focus is shifting in some way. It's similar to what is usually called "going mainstream" of something. Numbers influence the community, and it's hard to preserve the originals. And this is the normal social fringe. Communication is always about some level of "swaying opinions" and exploiting others for some goal.
So if I understand you correctly, you want to isolate the bad actors, and limit their impact? The question is, if you can successfully divide them from honest actors, or even good actors. Maybe a mechanical or automatic way to build up reputation, social standing and social impact might be a way. HN for example is using the karma-points to unlock certain features on certain levels. Maybe if you can build up a more detailed karma-system, which is more complex than just points, it would be possible to create a semi-automated system for healthy social interactions?
As I already said, I don't like the simple voting-systems, because it's too simple, and tend to drift into simple number-games. For example, nobody knows why something receives votes, and people tend to vote more for certain comments, which are not necessarily beneficial for the discussion. So I think a more diversified voting, with meaningful votes, would be better. On GitHub people are using emojis to communication their reaction to messages in issues, and some projects are even making use of them for certain actions. So using a set of preselected Emojis with specific positive and negative meaning, would IMHO enhance the simple voting-system and maybe allow an automated reputation-building, which then can be used by an automated modding-system.
> I'm wondering if there is some sort of taxonomy of these rulesets or levers that exist?
There is a broad set of information and knowledge in communication-science, diplomacy, psychologies, sociology, etc. But whether they can be used with a social platform is a different thing. Social platforms should be easy, simple, people want to chat and entertain themselves. If you make it too complicated, annoying, they won't participate much, and the platform will die. The biggest problem is again resources, manpower for modding, manpower to organization, time invested in using the platform..
And thinking about, there are also all kind of specialized Subreddits, which have strict rules how they communicate and for which goal. They are usually kinda good, tame and focused in their disputes.
- Calling HN non-toxic is really a stretch. Toxicity here is more subtle, but still around.
Voting and novelty, they also exist with other, more problematic, platforms. I don't think simple voting really helps in maintaining the social health of a platform, a more complex system would probably more beneficial than a simple count.
But what really helps is good and fair moderation, and a suitable sized group. If it's too small, nothing much happens, if it's too big, you will be drowned in noise and grinded in too many differing opinions. And size also helps moderation.
But I don't think enforcing low limits are really helping here. It's just another simple mechanical solution, like voting. It's too much depending on the topic, thread and persons involved how big or small a limit should be. Some topics need many involved people, some people don't have always the time to pay full attention to something, but others could continue their part. Good discussions evolve naturally and also randomly, because you never know which expert is around and how much time they have on that day.
Also, you are saying social platform, but social also means meaningless chat, while it seems to aim for meaningful high quality interactions.
If you aim for high quality-discussions, then maybe it would be more feasible to improve extraction and presentation of meaningful parts. Like let humans and AI marking useful parts, AI constantly creating summaries and so on. Kinda like having the discussion on side, and a result like a "Wikipedia-article" on the other.
- Because USA, land of the free, and armed.. There is too much violence and tools enabling there, so everyone needs ways to survive. Cams are useful to locate all kind of problems; gun are not the only tool used.. I guess this is the price of liberty.
- Where is the dropbox-part in this? This seems to be a filemanager for remote storages, which is kinda the opposite of dropbox, which is mainly a local service for syncing data. Or did the documentation missed explaining the sync-function?
- > There are no "levers".
I disagree, there are always levers. But the "comfort-zone" of HN's mods and crowd is much smaller and more specific, while the attention on misbehaviour is much sharper, so the lever are not as easy to pull as on other platforms. HN is basically hard-mode, compared to any big noisy platform.
> Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately.
That's only true if it's done poorly, or outside HNs core-topics. There is a good deal of sneaky marketing on HN, but usually well integrated into the normal flow of comments, so It's either accepted in context, or low enough to fly under the radar. In a nutshell, this means, everything is accepted, as long as it brings value, high entertainment or satisfy curiosity, and is not just selling stupidly in your face.
At the end, HN is still a platform of smarter and more educated people, and they want to be handled on their level. If you can match this, you can pull every lever they've given space for. But of course, that's not something many can easily do.
- In other words, productivity in tech skyrocketed for hours..though it seems some work was flavoured with irrational anger.
- But, would the addiction become worse if HN changed, or would there be a point where they could cure it?
- Update-checks are not included in telemetry. And I would think most people using addons still do update their addons from time to time, or even have the auto-check active. There is also the download-stats from their server-side, so I would think they do have a good enough picture of their numbers. Might be they could be 10% off, but surely are there not tens or even hundreds of millions of stealth-users around.
> It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
Don't think so, most people don't give a f** about this. Tech-people on that level are even in the industry a minority. And on the other side, those stealth-users are worthless for Mozilla, because they can't make money from google with them. So for a project needing to make money with usersnumbers, everyone who is out of this, isn't core audience anyway.
- Thanks, I think this was what I was searching. Strange that it's not appearing in my search-results.
Relevant part from the site: [..]Add-on usage measured here reflects multiple facets of browser customization, including web extensions, language packs, and themes.[..]
40% is a big minority, but not really what I would call core audience, especially when language packs and themes are also counted here. And 5 of the top 10-addons in that statistic are language packs.
Though, UBlock Origin is #1 with 9.6% user-share, and it's shown to have 10.5 million users on the store-page, which means there are at best only around 100 Million users left with Firefox on desktop? Seems worse than I thought.
- Ublock Origin has 10,488,339 Users listed on it's Mozilla store-page at the moment, AdBlock Plus has 3,188,401 Users. And Firefox has surely still far more than those ~14 million users.
There was an article from Mozilla, some years ago, going more into the details about this, but I'm not sure where. Though, I found another one[1] from 2021, which starts with only one third of the users having installed an addon.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/blog/firefoxs-most-popular-innova...
- > Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.
Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.
> They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,
To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
- Knowing an option, doesn't mean it's his goal. It's probably just a regular offer from Google, they always decline.
Yeah, I'm not searching 500 posts for this..
> Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread
Who is Christophe Henry? Is this some namecalling?
> Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them,
That doesn't make it better, being somewhat selective is also normal. Most companies don't have the resources to follow literally every fad.
> So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.
That's the point. Communication of Mozilla is so awful, their whole public picture is how wasteful they are with money, throwing it at pointless dead on arrival-projects. Here are two lists with them [1], [2], this is not a small number of failed projects. They are not even including the small changes in the browser itself.
[1] https://www.spacebar.news/the-mozilla-graveyard/ [2] https://killedbymozilla.com/