How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news feed than Facebook
theverge.com
theverge.com
"Why your brain hates other people"
"The most hated Bachelor in America explains himself"
"You're doing Scrum wrong and here's how to fix it"
"Fund managers warn a downturn is coming and it's going to be ugly"
"The dangers of belly fat"
It's lots of outrage & negativity, and I imagine it's because that's the kind of article people are actually reading & sharing, so that's what feeds the recommendation algorithms.
I don't mind if Pocket develops a personalized profile of my interests, but I'd like it to surface what I want to see. Right now YouTube does a better job of detecting my interest in music hardware & album production techniques than Pocket does.
I do the YouTube equivalent and watch mostly educational channels: minutephysics, numberphile, 60 symbols, cgp grey, 3 blue 1 brown, spacetime, veritasium, codyslab, physics girl, etc. computerphile for checking my layman's terms explanations of computer concepts.
Then I intentionally avoided saving articles from HN and just saved any decent blog posts related to programming. One of those must have mentioned Merkle trees or something because it started recommending "5 ways Bitcoin will make your farts smell better" etc. Then I gave up.
I would think a ML model could fairly accurately judge the level to which articles are written in an intentionally inflammatory way, I would like to see tech companies start to make a sincere effort to allow users set an adjustable filter on this "inflammatory-ranking" dimension of the content in their feed.
I'm not sure this is possible anymore. Even legitimately well written articles and sources now use clickbait titles to just be competitive. And you can't really blame them, they're just trying to stay in business using the systems people like us make. I'm really concerned that we're conditioning new generations to expect clickbait titles. It makes me wonder how long until this is just the norm for all titles. And the most abrasive thought, how long until we've reached a point where avoiding clickbait titles actively stunts your ability to get information and knowledge?
At this point, I've stopped worrying about the titles and just focus on the sources.
Firefox should be a standalone web browser that focuses on security, privacy, efficiency, and customization. Not Chome+Social Media 2.0.
I was having coffee with a friend today and he mentioned he was thinking about opening a facebook account – here's the kicker: the reason he wanted to get a FB account was the news feed; he wanted to be able to subscribe to people's pages and get updates when they post something new.
I mentioned RSS; he was flabbergasted. He didn't know such a thing exists. I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.
However there's a distinct possibility said subscription interface will go away in future. (Whether or not the list of feeds in Page Info would go away at the same time is less clear)
Yes, but even this feature would be more like a traditional browser: A service-neutral, "dumb" feature where the user is directly in control. Not in an abstract marketing sense but literally: A user subscribes to a page and will get all events from tha page in predicatable order.
The "news feed" as implemented by Facebook and envisaged by Pocket is something completely different. You "subscribe" to pages alright. But this is simply a hint that gets fed into a curation algorithm. What you then see is a selected subset of events from your subscribed pages, in addition to "related" content and content the algorithm things you might find interesting. The algorithm used is of course constantly being changed and optimized towards a metric you probably don't even know. In short, with that kind of system, the user is very much not in control.
> I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.
Apologies for being cynical, but I'm not surprised. I'll be bold and assume that you can make money with curated feeds (or letting other people try out their curation algorithms on your userbase) but you can't make money with RSS.
I don't see any difference with how HN and Reddit attract people. They all seek the added social aspect to reading news; and Facebook is just what people know.
>Apologies for being cynical, but I'm not surprised.
Luckily cynicism doesn't equal realism. FF devs often make data-driven decisions, and none of the devs showed interest fixing all the accumulated bugs. So they left this to matter to add-ons, the big button was eventually stored away and the one in the address bar abandoned for Pocket. No sneaky marketing strategies involved.
That based on telemetry data the RSS feature was barely used in general. I haven't seen any commentary that suggests any relation with their support for Pocket.
I would very much like to see a banner at the bottom of the new tab page introducing RSS and how it can be used, similarly to how Mozilla did for Firefox Sync.
Actually it's a lot easy than others have said. It's just Bookmarks > Subscribe to This Page. If you don't have the menu bar enabled (I do), you can just press alt to see it.
However, version 60 added pocket, along with other "features" such as the optional Firefox experiments (where, if you opt in, they track your user behavior to improve the browser).
Guess I'll be looking for a new browser again.
Firefox is about letting you control your browser experience, that's why the ability to easily remove options you might not like will always exist. If/when this ever changes, that would be a significant departure from their Mission statement.
The true history of Pocket suggests otherwise -- in 2015 Mozilla integrated Pocket, which was at that time a private company separate from Mozilla, into Firefox.
Further, when Mozilla first integrated it into Firefox, there was no way to remove it, only hide the icon:
> "This page http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/1999137-h.... purports to tell you how to disable Pocket for Firefox, yet all it does is remove the button from the toolbar. Searching "pocket" in about:config reveals numerous preferences that can be edited, including browser.pocket.enabled which remains set to true after following Pocket's instructions."
Only after severe backlash [0] did Mozilla decide the best way to handle it was to purchase Pocket.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730
> The true history of Pocket suggests otherwise -- in 2015 Mozilla integrated Pocket, which was at that time a private company separate from Mozilla, into Firefox.
What in this true history you cite indicates otherwise?
Please elaborate on how some config settings are altering your browser experience.
I fear you're vastly overestimating the effects a few people had on Mozilla's decision to experiment with, then buy a company that could help them potentially gain some actual influence over content-makers and the ad industry, and hopefully reduce their utter reliance on Google's money.
At best, the only thing the criticism over Pocket accomplished was to hasten Mozilla's pre-existing desire to develop these kinds of features as (what became) Test Pilot extensions.
Thanks, I never noticed the '...' menu. Now my new tabs are refreshingly empty. I just don't understand why a '...' was even necessary, all of the options would still have fit nicely when expanded to a horizontal bar. I blame whitespace-driven design.
And it's especially also a different source of income than search engines. They try to differentiate here, in case for example Google's monopoly becomes even more extreme and they push the price down.
And exactly in this vein, a big motivation for Pocket is competing with search engines in general. It tries to be another channel through which users can discover new content, so that Google can't determine everything you believe in without any hindrance.
Otherwise it's a cool product.
Wallabag also offers automatic tagging rules and RSS feeds to each tag.
The same was true with Firefox' customized home page ads of a few years ago. Everyone focused on 'advertising in Firefox', and overlooked the critical work they were doing: solving the problem of advertising, a seeming necessary evil, with confidentiality. In the uproar, the great value of that work was lost (IIRC).
- Standard Firefox with our officially recommended extension. (use for the front-page/default download)
- Minimal Firefox without any extensions or other optional features. ("Try this on older/slower computers")
- Developer Starter Kit with a selection of extensions related to web development.
- Social Media Special with more extensions like Pocket plus quality-of-life features for people that spend z lot of time on Facebook/etc.
Having a variety of options is important, because there isn't a universal spaghetti sauce[2].
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...
They discuss advertising in the browser chrome here: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/04/30/a-privacy...
Note the PR-speak in that article. Advertising, by its very nature, cannot "provide value to users". If a publisher is paying to promote a story, it's because they want the story to capture more of users' attention than the users themselves want.
Mozilla, a non-profit, which produces primarily a browser with currently a small market share, needs to do something to bring in some revenue. Having Google as the default search at one time (and may still be) a revenue stream for them.
But on the last point about advertising. I disagree with your statement. In many cases, advertising allows consumers to know about services and goods they might otherwise not know about. This isn’t inherently bad. I believe the adtech way, though, is because it puts at harm a lot of people’s data for, often times, a very negligible benefit in reaching consumers.
I agree that advertising can help in that way, but I'm not sure how often that actually happens. The largest markets tend to be for products where everyone is generally aware that they exist (otherwise the market woulndn't be large) and most products are only differentiated by brand (e.g. fashion) instead of novel features. Because generic internet advertising follows the money, it ends up as a zero-sum game about moving market share between brands.
If there were a site that allowed only ads for completely novel products, or if the ad is just a link to a double-blinded study comparing along a measurable dimension against a competitor, I might subscribe voluntarily to be advertised to. Until then, HN comes close enough.
I see three links (on mobile) of actual content; articles or blogs with substance that I may or may not find interesting. They fall below the list of my most visited sites, and they're eminently missable. Depending on how I open Firefox I will not even see them due to bypassing the start page.
I've read several of those articles and found them interesting. It's value added to me, and I don't have to see ad banners for stupid crap in the bargain.
I don't see the problem.
Mozilla is making it easier to think thoughts like this: If Firefox is just as bad as the other browsers, you might as well use the most popular one.
The same is obviously true for Firefox, with Mozilla being the gatekeeper, but this is where non-profit vs. for-profit does come back into play.
As for bad things in Chromium, as well as a fork that tries to fix it: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
As for news articles: When Mozilla does things, they're open about it, which is why news articles get written about their fuck-ups. And they're held to a much higher standard by journalists, as they are a non-profit.
When Google does something shitty on the other hand, people are quick to dismiss it as them needing to make money somehow. And there's lots of instances where Firefox goes the extra mile, where Chromium conveniently forgets about it and then no one blames them, because it is the extra mile, not the standard among browsers.
A prominent example is Chrome Sync. It's not end-to-end-encrypted and Google does state in their Privacy Policy that they use the browsing history submitted to them with Sync for other purposes. Your browsing history being stored on Google's server in decryptable form also means that NSA, CIA, FBI have access to it. You can make it end-to-end-encrypted, which however requires a second password and is therefore something that only users will do that really care about it. Basically, it's there to calm those that would complain otherwise. Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default, only one password needed.
And this is just the biggest and clearest example. We're talking about millions of lines of code with tens of thousands of design decisions. Google will have opted every time for the option that's not yet quite bad enough to gather bad press. Mozilla on the other hand has no reason not to protect users, if possible, even if it does not gather them good press.
Non-profit status doesn't mean that they refuse to take money, but that there are no stock holders. The organization as such is still interested in maximizing revenues and people working in it are not necessarily volunteers. How is decided who works for Mozilla and what's the direction it takes?
The fact that I said that I'm considering compiling Chromium doesn't mean that I trust Google. There's a top level comment that hits the nail in the head: we have been Mozilla users because we trusted Mozilla, even when it was technically inferior to competition. It they lose the differentiation factor...
So, there's actual clear specifications of what they're allowed to do and what not. I don't know the exact ramifications either, but some important points are that they're not allowed to keep more than a set amount of money and that any money they get a hold of, which exceeds this amount of money, they have to invest into their specified mission (which in the case of Mozilla is to make the internet a healthier place: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/).
They are allowed to pay people appropriate wages, but as you've already pointed out, there's no stock holders. No one gets paid out extra money when they make extra profit. They are legally bound to reinvest this money into their mission.
And there's also the Mozilla Corporation. The Corporation is not legally a non-profit. So, they don't get tax exemptions, but can keep around as much money as they want. So, in a way, they can make a profit, which is by increasing the amount of money they keep in their bank account.
However, they are a 100% subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. So, the Mozilla Foundation is their only stock holder. If they do make extra profit, they either have to reinvest it right away, put it on their bank account to reinvest later, or they can pay it out to the Mozilla Foundation, where it's again in non-profit hands, and is therefore legally enforced to be reinvested into Mozilla's stated mission. In other words, it's not possible for the Corporation to make profit which is not at some point reinvested.
The Corporation being a subsidiary also means that the Mozilla Foundation holds sovereignty over the Corporation. They can throw out Mitchell Baker (Executive Chairwoman) or Chris Beard (CEO) and set their wages.
So, the Corporation has motivation to make a profit, because the Foundation could throw out their key people, which in turn could throw out any slackers within the Corporation.
The Foundation also continues to hold the Firefox and Mozilla trademarks and has the final say of what's included into Firefox's source code.
And so I think their chances would be higher (but still pretty low) if they were spending serious amounts of money on a campaign to promote RSS and a service similar to google reader. That way they'd at least get tech-savy people on board who would then act as evangelists for them.
If Firefox is going to regain any of its former glory, it needs to be easy for people to switch to without making sacrifices.
It feels unfair if you blame only Mozilla for your issue though. It only seems to be that way because Mozilla changed something. But developers knew well in advance about this change.
If Photoshop doesn't work on the latest Windows version, do you blame Microsoft or Adobe? It'd depend on the nature of the issue but generally Microsoft allows developers to plan ahead.
Why did an extension like Bitwarden (a one man project) get their shit together while LastPass (with a big corp like LogMeIn behind it) not? If it were the other way around, I'd have understanding. Also, Bitwarden is open source, cheaper than LastPass (half the price if you want 2FA), you can even run the cloud backend locally if you prefer, and you can convert from LastPass (its only a CSV IIRC).
This comment on LastPass support forums sums it up: "I have had this submitted as a trouble ticket for almost a month now ... support simply sucks"
[1] https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=296945&star...
A solution either works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, blaming people doesn't solve anything.
For example, if I needed to use Photoshop for my job and it did not work on Windows, I would have to use a Mac. I would have to do this even if it was solely Adobe's fault that Photoshop did not work on Windows. Deciding who to blame would not solve my problem.
Well, you don't blame right away, you first try to solve the problem. If something doesn't work you contact a support dept. In this case you'd contact Adobe support since its their software. In Firefox example you'd contact LogMeIn since its their software. If Firefox explodes bunnies, you contact Mozilla but if your PC shoots lasers at bunnies you contact whoever you bought your PC from (e.g. Dell).
If there's a package on Debian which doesn't work who I contact the package maintainer or the software developer? If I buy a car radio and it doesn't work on my car, who do I call? If I buy a Raspberry Pi and Linux stops working on it, who do I call? If you buy a vacuum cleaner from brand X and it doesn't work anymore, you go to the store and they arrange it for you because the deal is with them. The answer who to contact -and ultimately blame if the problem isn't solved- is the company you do directly business with. You bought a product from LastPass and subscribed to it; you pay for that, get them to fix their shit that's what you're paying for. A working product. Simple.
Or, just do like I do, and switch from a product which got more than twice as expensive for zero benefit for the customer. Because if you don't switch you reward that shitty behavior.
The only way in which Firefox is actually more restrictive with extensions, is in requiring user opt-in for internet connections that are not necessary for the functioning of the extension (so that's usually telemetry or ads).
But if LastPass refused to function because it can't send data back home that's not actually needed, and which it can't reasonably explain to users, or because it can't load third-party content from the internet, which would be a massive security hole, then I strongly advise using a different password manager.
Overall, though, this sounds to me like LastPass is just too incompetent to port their extension, which again should not be hard as Firefox's extension API is essentially a superset of Chrome's.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lastpass-pass...