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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

It's great to see this recent marketing initiative from Mozilla to frame themselves as a privacy-first company. Mozilla has always been considered by the community as an organisation that should respect the privacy of their users, but there hasn't until now been such direct public statements to that effect to point to.

Mainly I hope this can now be pointed to by Mozilla/Firefox users as a set of standards that should be followed when Mozilla devs put in place measures that infringe users' privacy or don't do enough to protect it.

Right now, https://mozilla.org/ sets 15 Google cookies and 12 Google localStorage tracking values when you visit it. Mozilla's previous statements[0] justifying this have been fairly weak. I really hope this new PR initiative gives some extra leverage to those asking for change.

[0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/9IQ...

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Be careful taking in this new direction as anything more than marketing PR. As you've stated before, I don't even think this time, it's anything more than the marketing department speaking for everyone. Mozilla has had weak statements on previous PR controversy's before. On a longer timescale, the organization will change it's position again due to economic and cultural pressures.

It's interesting to me how you can call out this post and recent others as a "marketing initiative from Mozilla" without any apparent backlash (as of yet), but when I called it "brigading by Mozilla supporters and fans" on multiple other threads I was completely removed from the conversation. Is there really a difference?

Is this the sort of story that casual users or even avid fans of the browser would organically promote? That's the logic that I was handed in some of the responses to me. Am I that out of place to assume that the following is how it goes down? 1.) The marketing/evangelical folks at Mozilla create a story and post it here and elsewhere. 2.) They put out a call to all their supporters in various channels to come and help promote the story (and keep other commenters in line apparently)...

I think the problem is that comment forums always optimize towards showing me what the currently active mob/majority thinks about a topic rather than sorting things towards my own personal tastes. I'd much rather see a rating system that weights posts/topics and comments based on my history. For instance: if I've promoted a certain topic in the past, put it higher. If I typically promote a given user, put their comment higher. If I typically promote a certain user who promoted another comment, put that comment higher. And so on. Basically censor the stuff I usually disagree with instead of allowing mob rule. [1]

I don't see the point of trying to make everybody see the same truth because that's not how real life works. Mostly, people tend to live in tribes. Wouldn't it be nice if the Internet wasn't always in your face telling you how wrong you are? IMO, such systems would put a chill on the global culture war.

[1] - This might be the perfect problem for a graph database. If anyone wants to work on something like this, let me know how to contact you and I'll give you all of my ideas!

So, in other words, you want the internet to help you cement yourself in your current positions?

Nope. Just trying to live my life without constantly being pitched to.

Are you advocating for mob-mentality?

It is not a dicothomy. While there are obviously trends at all times, they evolve over time and new ones emerge.

I do not know your positions but it could simply be that someone with the right formulation able to start a trend is yet to come.

Mob mentality is not the same as a popular idea or opinion, could be that popular assumption are indeed wrong and many people either do not care (maybe for principles or maybe because it is not really important) or just never encountered convincing arguments.

> Mob mentality is not the same as a popular idea or opinion...

Firefox isn't popular and that's my point. A browser with less than 10% market share got on the front page of many places this week because of a marketing push that was helped by a group supporters, a mob, who helped push it there.

A system that was optimized more towards my own dislike and distrust of Firefox and Mozilla wouldn't have shown me this bullshit.

It's not popular, but it's better. The recent series of unfavourable events around Chrome and Google led people to talk about it more.

No, I'm advocating for plurality of opinion, exposure to new information and constant challenging of my own viewpoints.

My reasoning is that, at any given point in time, I am wrong about a great number of things. I fear that any algorithm that learns to present me exclusively with the content I like (i.e. which elicits the least emotional objection) is going to hide all things that might correct my current errors.

> No, I'm advocating for plurality of opinion, exposure to new information and constant challenging of my own viewpoints.

Good for you! Now, how about letting people get challenged and exposed to new information at a time and place when they choose to instead of constantly? I like camping and hiking...but I'm glad I get to go home to my comfortable house most of the time.

People are currently starting to gravitate more towards small group chats on WhatsApp and similar and away from places like Twitter and Facebook. I wonder why? Could it be it's because they don't want what you want 24/7?

I think so.

And the system you're advocating for, the current one, is obviously way more susceptible to being gamed. As you can see here all it takes is a small mob and a marketing push to get your unpopular browser on the front page 5 times this week. The system I want isn't susceptible to that in the slightest (but if I want to go look at things that I might not agree with, I'm still able to - that's my whole point: User in control, not some timely mob).

> People are currently starting to gravitate more towards small group chats on WhatsApp and similar and away from places like Twitter and Facebook. I wonder why? Could it be it's because they don't want what you want 24/7?

Are they and does this have anything to do with exposure to conflicting opinions? Proper studies would be needed to determine this conclusively. After all, this is how it used to be, before Facebook and Twitter appeared and became widely popular not that long ago.

> And the system you're advocating for, the current one, is obviously way more susceptible to being gamed.

I'm not advocating for any system, this is just how life is: you undoubtedly encounter opinions which are not aligned with your own. You will also be wrong a lot of the time. That's nothing to be afraid of. You certainly don't need to build a sheltered city to hide from this.

> The system I want isn't susceptible to that in the slightest (but if I want to go look at things that I might not agree with, I'm still able to - that's my whole point: User in control, not some timely mob).

Except this doesn't really work in the general case. It's both intuitively familiar and well researched that it is really hard to change someone's mind and opinions are very inert.

Furthermore, I don't really see why it would be useful to expend significant energy to shelter yourself from opposing opinions. Simply to avoid emotional discomfort? If you're not in the mood for it in a certain moment, simply not reading online forums and going for a walk or picking up a book seems like a better option.

Most people follow like minded people, become surprised when they have an unexpected opinion, and sometimes unfollow them. Not sure developing new social media would gain adoption.

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