I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
quirksmode.org
quirksmode.org
"But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if what you’re describing is always true, or just most of the time? And will you repeat that testing once new versions have come out? Will you go through related pages..."
This. A thousand times this. The problem for me isn't the quantity of information any more, it's the quality. 10-15 years ago if you hit an even slightly esoteric problem you'd bottom out a search pretty quickly and be on your own. Now, you'll find dozens of blog articles, community answers, Reddit threads... and unless you're very lucky they will all be wrong, from subtle "works on my machine"-isms up to "just commit a god-rights CI token to your repository, it'll be fine" - the telltale sign often being nobody can tell you why this is the solution, merely that they bashed other random solutions to related problems together until a particular combination happened to work.
Authoritative sources like MDN are vital in this context, having something you can refer to that tells you how things actually work so you can verify whether the suggestion you or a co-worker found on a blog is a sensible solution or the kind of horrible mess you'd expect to find alongside world-writable S3 buckets and services that regularly time out due to being OOM killed.
I’ve been spending my free time working with an experimental library. Google stops returning relevant results for searches on this topic around the 10th result. While this is often infuriating and leads to countless hours deep in indecipherable library code, it is equally likely to stumble upon an in depth discussion among users about pros and cons of various solutions. This context is rarely captured for mainstream tools, and when it is, those authors are lauded for their ability to contextualize the problem.
What is most disappointing to me is how often we document “what” but not “why” when most of us NEED the context of “why” to make comparisons across different tools or approaches for our use cases.
And you can mitigate a terrarium's impact somewhat by defining a protocol around it, but then the protocol becomes the new terrarium. And so it goes. That is why it never really gets solved by more general-purpose layers, but it does get solved in some degree by the documentation, which at least gives you a map of the jungle, and it gets solved for any end use by distilling down to a smaller terrarium that can be understood by its definitions rather than its dependencies.
It's not just technical information either. The internet has done this to everything. In comparison, the old mainstream media seemed to be more "truthful", in some sense. It is more truthful when it came to hard, citable facts. Most things the MSM offered as facts had cites, and turned out to be accurate. In comparison, the Internet swims in bullshit. It ranges from opinion dressed up as fact to outright lies told by trolls, and then and onto conspiracy theories from people living in some alternate Universe. Worst, since these people believe (probably correctly) that the louder they yell, the more they are likely to convince the internet seems to be mostly this stuff (outposts like Wikipedia being an exception).
And yet, I prefer this situation to what the mainstream media offered. The MSM suffered from two defects. Firstly, they were very prone to repeating accepted meme's as fact, over and over again, as if there were no competing theories. The most recent example masks where the MSM was flooded with the prevailing western expert opinion that masks had no effect. Back in the day, before the internet, I would have just accepted that. There was no easy way (where easy is spend 1/2 an hour entering search terms, clicking and reading) to fact check, so how could you do otherwise?
The second thing journalists are bloody hopeless at distilling and summarising the truth from an expert. Before the internet you rarely had an opportunity to see it in action. I had been told by elders repeatedly that if you see a story in the media about an event you attended or place you know well, you won't recognise it. That happened to me once too - it was a report about the commonwealth games in Time magazine. It was exactly as predicted - utterly unrecognisable. But it only happened once, and the lesson faded. Then the internet came along and you would read a MSM report, then happen on the comments of someone there or read the expert's own words, and it was like "wtf?". Now I find myself treating the output of journalists with suspicion, avoiding it where possible.
Much later it dawned on me why it was like this. The journalists main task, the one their employers judged them on and remunerated them on accordingly, had nothing to do with how accurately they reported the facts. It was whether you came back for more; bought tomorrow's paper, switched on the TV news; the only relevance of the truth to that endeavour is whether sticking to it brings readers or not. The combination of repeating established memes without question, the overarching drive to deliver addictive brain candy rather than information, and the difficulty of fact checking made the output of the MSM a truly insipid product.
So yeah, the Internet is swimming in endless repeats of bullshit and lies, but unlike the old MSM floating in that torrent of crap are the actual facts. You just have to put in the work to find them. And once you figure out how to do it, it's not even that much work. Knowing about sites like MDN, which is a reliable, complete, and up-to-date source of information is one of these tricks. For those of us who like our facts neat, being able to go straight to the MDN saves us literally hours of time in shifting through torrents of bullshit, or god-help us reading yards of inscrutable standards in order to find the thing we need to know. Loss of the MDN would be a real disaster in the economic sense - it would cost a lot of people a huge amount of money and time.
Still, as Wikipedia, and stack overflow demonstrate, it's possible to crowd source that style of site. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Of course, we all know that asking startups to actually fund open source (whether code, documentation, or learning resources) is like pulling teeth. I'd say maybe the collapse of some larger open source project(s) could convince companies to start actually giving a shit about whether or not the maintainers of the technology their entire businesses rely on have enough money to continue developing said technology, but it's more likely the companies would just say "well, let's put 10 engineers on this problem for a month to replace this dead open source technology with something new and shiny" and not recognize how much more they've had to spend. Or, y'know, they'll go with paid support of a Microsoft product or something.
>Their employers, big or small, should be the ones paying for it.
Your argument is counter intuitive, if it is truly a reference, then surely the developers themselves should pay for it.
A company hires a developer with the expectation that they know their field (including the standards etc.). It is the developers' own concern if they (understandably) need a reference to help them execute what they were hired for.
Just like lawyers and LexisNexis and similar tools.
If the developer is hired as an employee, then in general I'd say no. It's the employer's responsibility to provide the tools and resources the developer needs to perform the job effectively -- whether that's hardware, software, documentation, or working environment.
I believe it HAS to be kept free for the general public, no matter what.
Of course, as other commenters have been pointed out, it's hard to sell companies on paying something they "have" for free. Which is why companies will shell out big money for the O'Reilly Learning Platform or MSDN ($500/year/seat for the former!) but not even think about spending money on a community resource.
In fact, Microsoft now calls MSDN subs Visual Studio subscriptions, to emphasize that the main reason to buy one is to get premium VS features and personalized developer support.
But spend has to be justified. There needs to be a paid version with at least one functional change for a business to be able to sponsor it.
We can bullshit all day to finance about it being a "business need" for... I don't know, dark mode, or for the table to list IE6, or a breakdown by country, or something that most users won't miss. But it has to be present, so we can make the case. It can't be a donation, it can't be optional, and we need to get something out of it. That's the only way to get businesses to pay for open source.
Give everyone free access to MDN for X articles per month, New York Times style. Then sell a MDN Pro subscription with unlimited access and exclusives for $39/mo/user or $399/year. There's tons of examples in the cloud space of this working, like Linux Academy's online training or A Cloud Guru etc. that are making millions per year.
Just for reference, a MSDN subscription is $5,999 the first year and $2,569 for a renewal (but does come with a ton of stuff)... None of this 50-100 dollars per year or you're just setting yourself up for failure from the start.
Perhaps a similar approach could work for MDN.
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/benefits/#training?cat... - you can see that the learning materials you get for subscribing all come from third-party partners, from whom you could buy the same things separately.
(But then I live in a country where unions are normal, so I can't speak to how it would be perceived elsewhere.)
The people providing the service should get paid. Who bears the cost in the end, and whose credit card gets billed, are just implementation details. Choices for employers and employees to make among themselves. The provider doesn't care. The provider gets paid.
Employees will like to read that employers should pay, because they don't want to pay. Nobody likes to pay, including employers. But in the end, employers pay employees for value delivered. If that value includes the benefit of a service that costs money, it's part of value delivered.
Maybe the employee pays and the employer reimburses. Maybe the employer pays and the employee's pay, benefits, or expenses allowance gets docked accordingly. Maybe the employee and the employer split the cost somehow. Maybe the employee bears the cost entirely, so employees who can do without the service have financial incentive to do so.
It's not up to the provider to figure this out or negotiate it. If diners want to argue about who pays how much of the tab, the restaurant still gets paid. If tenants want to argue about who pays how much of the rent, the landlord still gets paid. In the USA, auto mechanics usually own their own tools, while in Germany, garages usually provide them. Either way, the toolmakers get paid. They don't wait to get paid until employee and employer figure it all out.
Basically the statement you made that employees are paid based on value delivered is not really accurate in most cases.
Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups.
>Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its successor.
Sounds like a decent idea, but a Patreon-style funding with different tiers will probably yield even better results.
Boom you hit the exact right spot!! Love it!
Edit: This also makes me wonder if there's non-profits that work on tech that aren't throwing their money away beyond the scope of the project. The moment non-profits are doing more than just paying engineers and other essential employees / volunteers I begin to worry a bit.
What is degenerate activism?
That's... well, naive, I guess?
Every single NGO picks an issue, and that issue has a political angle to it. Not only do I think it's unreasonable to expect an NGO to be apolitical, I think it's flat out impossible.
I would ask you: Do you really want NGOs to be apolitical? Or do you want them to share your political alignment, and in that way be non-controversial?
>Or do you want them to share your political alignment, and in that way be non-controversial?
Please stop these kind of assumptions - it just feels childish. I don't want political stances of any kind from an organization that's getting my money to make a specific thing better.
If I was to donate to MDN to make docs better, I don't want stances on far-right or far-left. I want my money to be used to produce better documentation, period.
Your notion of what "better" means is in and of itself a political stance.
I'll admit that's a bit slippery of me. A charity that writes technical documentation is about as apolitical as it gets. But my point is that every decision we make about how we should allocate resources in our society is political, because that's what politics is about. Expecting charities not to have political stances is silly, because the fundamental proposal every charity makes -- "let's all get together and spend money on X" -- is in and of itself political.
It was a genuine question, not an assumption. I was just challenging the way you were positioning your opinion. I thought my comment was phrased in a way that was polite and direct. I don't see how that warranted an insult.
I won't address the rest of your comment as I think bccdee did a fine job of saying what I would've said.
Well, I said I wouldn't want a NGO to use my money to take any stance unrelated to their original apolitical goal and your follow-up questions is along the lines of "oh so would you be ok if they aligned with your political stance?". Don't say thay's a genuine question because it's not, it just feels like a bait.
Well, I guess you can believe what you like. It wasn't intended as bait, but if you read it that way and refuse to believe me when I say I had no ill intent, I certainly can't change your mind at this point.
Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems.
A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no idea what it actually takes to run a charity; they have no idea what on-the-ground problems need to be solved day-to-day; they have absolutely zero understanding of the organizational supports needed to make any organization function. They're basically in the worst possible position to decide how best to use those funds.
But they still want to decide how they're used.
This despite the fact that they're ostensibly donating to a charitable organization specifically because that organization possesses all that expertise; expertise that costs real money to attract and retain, since they're ultimately competing against the private sector.
It's one of the reasons why, when I donate to a charity, I never specify how I want those funds to be used; I recognize that the charity is in a far better position to make that decision than I am.
I feel like there's a connection to Dunning-Kreuger in here somewhere...
Much of what the Firefox and Safari teams do on standards committees is activism as well: fighting against useful standards from the big player because they believe the standards are bad for users. I generally agree, but it's impossible to claim that it's anything other than activism (pro-privacy, etc) when the average Chrome user just goes 'cool, I can use my midi keyboard and bluetooth headset with my web browser'.
Mozilla was a doomed web startup up until the point where Firefox finally succeeded. Now they're doomed again. I won't even claim that's false - I think it's probably true - but it's a fact that the effort was hopeless early on too.
This is my perspective as someone who previously got paid to work on Firefox, then later got paid to work on Chrome, and had an offer to get paid to work on Safari. I think people who complain about Firefox often don't understand what the web actually is and what Mozilla actually does. To be fair, Mozilla is poor at educating people about it.
That's the thing. $50 / month from you or me means nothing compared to $5 / month from a 100x larger audience. Growing the audience means marketing, and tons of non-technical work.
A lot of charities become marketing firms to bring in more money. Because that's how you effectively grow a charity and get more work done. Its just the reality of modern society.
Look at the heads of Linux Foundation and Apache. They seem to do a great job marketing but also have a deep background in open source software.
I’ve worked for companies with CEOs from engineering and CEOs from marketing, I’ll try really hard to never work at a marketing company again.
Sounds like they don't need my donation, the people who do this non-technical work are bringing in revenue by the wheelbarrow load. If they weren't the price they charge for their skills would not be justifiable.
Small donations over a large base, which largely go towards marketing (ie: Sportsball and festivals at universities) will make a far larger and more successful charity than a purely technical oriented one. Its just the reality of the modern world.
That's the same argument used to pay CEOs hundreds of millions ("they make us more money"). And then there are studies suggesting that the effect the CEO has on the success of the company is rather small - and of course, the CEOs who aren't successful still get paid unbelievable amounts of money.
First, it's stated as a blind truth with no reasoning. The only thing I can do is say "you're wrong", as there's no basis upon which to have a real discussion.
Second, your repeated use of the phrase "degenerate activism" seems to have no other purpose than to elicit a strong emotional response. From my position it's borderline trolling.
Third, I have no idea what "doomed web startups" you're even talking about.
The entire comment, as short as it is, reads as bait for an argument, rather than an honest attempt to engage in a discussion.
1) Look at the CEO salary. She was not even an engineer. The C-level executives don't harm themselves in this process, but there is no improvement because of her and she is still reaping a big salary. This also means many people are disappointed and less donations.
2) degenerate activism: all the SJW / diversity shit that Mozilla is into. I know some people here are going to defend it. But artificially trying to create diversity in an ecosystem means low quality. And a company like Mozilla which can't keep talented engineers doesn't need all this.
3) doomed web startups: Pocket, and their new VPN service which is going to be used by exactly 13 HN users.
Competent people who can manage an organization that brings in $500 million in revenue per year aren't going to be cheap.
Wasn’t the whole Pocket debacle exactly this. The people behind Pocket had friends at Mozilla who signal boosted them and later acquired them?
But by choosing a charity, you make that decision. If you donate to MSF you expect your money to be used differently than if you donated to Mozilla or the ASPCA or the Ayn Rand foundation - and you'd probably be a bit unhappy, and less willing to donate in future, if you found out MSF spent your money on animal shelters.
Even if you donate to Givewell or similar, you're still expecting the money to be spent in line with the values they advertise (closer to MSF than the other three I named, but different).
So it's reasonable for someone to want a charity that broadly shares his values. Wanting to fund a nonprofit that produces web documentation, but not longshot startups, is a reasonable value to have.
I absolutely agree.
However, I think it's one thing to say "I will donate to Goodwill because I think their mission is important and they have a good reputation", and another to say "and when I donate you must used my money to pay for X and not Y". The former is a statement of values and trust in the organization. The latter is very nearly the opposite!
Also, when people donate lots of money to an organization, either as a personal grant or by bundling a bunch of donations they collect, they quite often do stipulate how it will be spent. If someone wanted to organize a drive for MDN, they would be justified in saying they want the money to appear as additional funds for MDN.
At least in the case of Mozilla, they doesn't seem to posses this expertise. They have overgrown beyond what they are capable of, both in terms of people and projects they have acquired/started.
It would be nice if there was a quick way for a charity to establish their trustworthiness. Currently, I focus on a few orgs that I do trust, and basically ignore the rest.
How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole.
Seems like you want control over the project, not to just be donating? At that point it appears one of your main solution would be to start a project like MDN that you can have such control over.
I just want something similar to a restricted university donation fund. Another faculty at my alma mater had a mega donation a few years ago that was restricted to paying for new research chairs in business. They couldn't use it for anything in other faculties. They couldn't reallocate it to recruiting. I want something like that.
The concern of about management salary is very important in Mozilla important than in a for profit entity.
Shareholders / board will react fast enough over market challenges or poor performance in for profit companies . Many, many companies have cut base salaries for management this year due look at Airbnb for example, All Mozilla is saying variable pay will be impacted.
Given the ownership and revenue structure of Mozilla nobody is in a position to keep management of Mozilla Corporation accountable, the donors to Mozilla Foundation donate miniscule amounts compared to what the Corporation makes in the single search deal with Google to have any real leverage.
The deal with Google just got renewed well before the lay-off's, despite the empty words about global pandemic being a reason, there is no major impact on their revenue ( or Google's for that matter).
I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure that "our revenues stayed the same between 2018-2023” would be seen as a failure in most companies. Not only do costs rise every year, employment decisions are made assuming it will lead to increased revenue.
For almost any non-profit maintaining their new donations for the same level for 5 years would be considered good performance.
Even in most aggressive startups maintaining revenues at $400-500 Million level is likely to cause first management change and rarely lay-offs of 25% of the workforce.
Even if that was the reason, clearly mangement have been unable and unlikely to that kind of growth. Firing quarter of your highly skilled workforce is not the right approach.
Had they killed 25% of the projects and retained the best of talent from those projects and repositioned them in other projects it would have made sense. While as you say such highly skilled workforce has salary growth expectations, hiring from the market is always costlier in terms of absolute salary, training, on-boarding, performance risk and finally attrition before RoI is achieved .
Donations are barely a factor here, it is not a meaningful part of their revenue.
As you say, one year of steady revenue would cause a significant shakeup in a company. By year three, things would look fairly dire. Mozilla has already tried a number of other options, and are in the middle of a management change. Eventually this becomes the only choice
In this day and age charities can't expect blank cheque donations without specific goals and targets they are personally aligned to.
The project gives up some control when they accept donations.
If I donate to an organization, I do so because I believe in at minimum a particular aspect of its operations. If I can't get, in return, some assurance that the money will go towards that aspect, I won't donate to them.
To me, the bar for either is essentially the same.
Would I pay? Yes, I can't imagine being in this field without MDN, and I don't necessarily care what they do with that fee specifically as long as the future of MDN and Firefox are secure.
This is a terrible sentiment, even if the only thing you actually care about are those two products.
As long as most people use Firefox to access websites run by Google, Mozilla is screwed. Google uses both overt and covert methods to drive Firefox users to switch to Chrome. For Mozilla to maintain the Firefox userbase, they have to get them to browse other websites.
Pocket is an obvious attempt at that, by providing a time-sucking website that works great in Firefox, isn't run by Google, and is relatively cheap to run (read: it's not video).
What surprises me is that Facebook wasn't advertising Firefox. I know that sounds stupid, but back when Google+ was a thing, Facebook was stuck competing with a vertically-integrated solution from the browser (Chrome) all the way to the social network (Google+). That seems like a terrible situation to be in, and Chrome's only worthwhile competition on Windows at the time would have been Firefox.
There are other metrics, but many use these metrics for understanding how funds are used at charities and applying some governance.
I was surprised Mozilla is so low as many charities strive for 90-95% toward mission so their admin costs are low enough to attract institutional donors.
[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...
The Corporation, though it's a subsidiary, takes in several hundred million a year, the lion's share being from revenue for selecting Firefox's default search engine.
Note that despite CEO Mitchell Baker's couple-million salary which has been much-bandied-about lately, Charity Navigator lists the top compensated director as Mark Surman at ~$200K. Baker runs the Corporation and chairs the board of the Foundation, but is paid only by the Corporation. The realities of Mozilla's existence don't really map cleanly to what gets reported on a Form 990 and shown by Charity Navigator.
So it's a little tough to get an accurate view of Mozilla's finances through Charity Navigator's usual information: there's lots of room for things to kind of shift around: for the Corporation to pay the Foundation for things and vice-versa.
Both from bad governance perspective, and doubly so because the board knows how this appears and doesn’t care. I expect because they have stable donations and don’t rely on “retail donors” who need to use these cheap due diligence tools.
I'm more or less resigned to supporting them (although with much less enthusiasm than I'd have otherwise) as the lesser of all available evils.
It does seem that quite a few people feel similarly, so I'd hope it'd be possible to create an alternative organisation with a tighter focus and to garner enough support to make it pay, but I'm aware what a huge undertaking a modern browser is, and how difficult it is to stand out in such a mature market.
Do they also insist they should be paying a 10th of what an Adidas costs for it because that’s basically the labor and material cost?
Sounds like a democracy except funding isn’t voluntary.
For instance, we might recall people donating money to the Red Cross to aid Haiti after the earthquake that country suffered in 2010. We later found out that maybe 75% of the funds donated actually made it to the country.[0] The argument can certainly be made that some of the donated funds should go towards the overhead of the organization but it seems reasonable for people to be upset when a full quarter of those funds somehow gets lost along the way.
People are asking charities to be more accountable because such accountability is direly needed. When large charities break trust with the public, as in the case of the Red Cross (and many others, perhaps Mozilla, even), this is what happens. Laying the blame on those still willing to hand money over for the good of all strikes me as misguided.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482020436/senators-report-fin...
To be clear, I didn't meant to imply everyone does this.
I'm just saying that many people do, and it's challenging for charities. It's one of the reasons I find charities provide options to direct giving to specific efforts, as it offers the donor some measure of control while still allowing the charity to manage things at the macro level.
> We later found out that maybe 25% of the funds donated actually made it to the country.
I think you've misread that headline? It reads:
"Red Cross Spent 25 Percent Of Haiti Donations On Internal Expenses"
Further, in the article, we see:
"But Grassley's office found that 25 percent of donations sent to Haiti — or nearly $125 million — were spent on fundraising and management, a contingency fund and the catchall category the Red Cross calls "program expenses."
What that says is 75% of donations did go to Haiti, and 25% did not. This is the opposite, I believe, of how you described the article?
Nevertheless, the American Red Cross doesn't exactly have the... best reputation in the world, which is why I'd probably not give to that organization at all, but rather would direct my funds toward organizations that are better managed (and then trust them to allocate those funds appropriately).
> People are asking charities to be more accountable because such accountability is direly needed.
Accountability != micromanagement.
My comment was about individuals micromanaging their giving, not about demanding transparency about how the organization is allocating those donations.
The latter is just basic due diligence, and is something we should all expect from NGOs.
I updated the comment with the correction.
It's a reverse. All donors of charities that aren't casual dilettantes know that the charities are teats to suck on by the fabulous people running them. That's why such donors use "Restricted funds"
https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/understa...
In other words, “No.”
Not that it’s good that Mozilla spends money on that stuff. But for $50-$100/year you want not just a web reference, but significant control over the company that produces it. That’s just not going to happen, so you might as well just say, “No.”
- The developers of the software in the bundle
- Humble Bundle organisation
- Charities
Usually I send 90% of my "donation" to the developers of the software and 10% to the Humble Bundle organisation.
Perhaps charities should have a similar donation mechanism where one can choose what percentage of ones' donation should be spent on:
- Management
- Marketing
- Field workers
- Charity itself
- Other ...?
Given such options, I might choose to spend 5% on Management, 10% on field workers and remaining 85% on the charity itself.
---
Come on.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/
edit: Looking into this further, I cannot figure out how to actually donate. It looks like they killed this donation program, maybe they should bring it back now.
I wonder if the number is such because they killed off the active subscription, or the program was only this "successful" to begin with.
What's this in reference to, specifically?
Edit: interesting that there are so many downvotes. Consider yourself lucky that this seems absurd to you, because it's borrowed directly from Nazi "degenerate art" and "degenerate music" and used like this almost exclusively in modern alt-right contexts to mean those falling outside of their ideal (bigoted) worldview.
Obviously the GP should have ommitted that flamebait (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24160738), but a comment like yours also breaks the site guidelines—specifically this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Going straight to Nazis is one habit that rule is intended to check. It leads to extremely predictable discussion that inevitably gets nasty because that's the only way for it not to be boring (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
As you said elsewhere it was not necessary for the commenter to use the word degenerate. I don't think anybody should be surprised by the reactions to it. It's entirely reasonable to criticize Mozilla's activist focus, or what went down with Eich, without stooping to that kind of language.
It's not "absolutely clear what the commenter meant", and that is the problem. Internet users are a thousand times too quick to assume they know "absolutely" what "the commenter meant" and then react reflexively to it. This is how the internet becomes optimized for outrage. That's why we have that guideline, and commenters here need to follow it. Note this guideline also: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I'd like to add some positive thoughts. This is off topic, sorry, but it's been a while.
Edit 2: I'm going to move them to a reply so I can link to it later.
The second stage is to use your reflective capacity—which is slower and calmer—to look at the comment from multiple angles and ask yourself things that there wasn't time for before: what other interpretations might there be? am I sure that what I feel I'm seeing is actually here? do I really need to react this way / post like this? what effect is my post going to have on the thread [1]? is there a different way to relate to this person? who do I really want to be, in this context? what community do I really want to be part of?
The reason this is better is not because it produces any particular content. People sometimes misunderstand that and assume that we're telling everyone to always be civil, constrained, etc.—but that's not it. Rather, it's because it's the only way to make discussions not be predictable. If we're all reacting with cached threat-responses, the only thing we can do is fight the same battles we've all been fighting for a long time. Since HN is a site for curiosity and curiosity withers under repetition [2], finding ways to escape the predictable [3] and make new moves in the dance is a must.
Past thoughts here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
In-context, it's clear what degenerate meant.
Right now on the right, it's used to refer to behavior and culture that is really abhorrent. That's at least my take on it, and how I use the term personally. 99% of the time the usage of the term is definitely not about race and eugenics which is what you're implying with the Nazi reference. I leave 1% because I don't preclude possibility of the rare existence of real race-supremacists in the world.
E.g. Misogynistic & violence-promoting "gangster rap" music, tik-tok trends that sexualize minors, and a bunch of other related things. These are things that if we take a step back and think about it, we realize that they're actually move society backward instead of forward. And we're all collectively jumping through mental hoops to claim otherwise because it's uncomfortable, unpalatable and scary to call out such bad behavior in a public forum.
However, I think your estimate of 1% is far too low. Hang around in seedy Discord chats, IRC channels, or Facebook groups (or on second though maybe don't... it's an interesting but inadvisable hobby.), and you'll see "degenerate" thrown around as a synonym for "Jew", "Muslim", "homosexual", "transexual" constantly. These usages are fully normalized, even among those who aren't professed neo-nazis but just identify as alt-right and trade in crusader and viking memes and spam "DEUS VULT" in chat.
The adoption of the traits of the crypto- prefix (you can infer what the suffix that usually goes with is...) are a defining characteristic of the modern internet right. They are very savvy to what they can or cannot say in "polite company" or in public, and will deliberately muddy words with multiple connotations (because the in-group can distinguish which is being connoted by context, even if you can't).
In a high visibility context you'll get "it was just a joke bro" or "I just meant like gangster rap and sexualizing minors, do you have a problem with that?". But as soon as they return to more insular spaces, "degenerate" is common currency for referring to races, religions, and sexualities seemed inferior.
It's become so normal that every other thread here will refer to "degenerates" or similar terrible terms for political opponents, and sadly the moderators seem to think this is normal as well.
If you're slightly to the left of Hitler and live in the US, you should arm yourself now, before it's too late.
I realize this kind of behaviour has been normalized by the president over the last four years, but I thought HN was better than this.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Beyond that, I'd need to see specific links to give you specific information. Always happy to do that.
Despite its distasteful origins, it's becoming a catch-all for self-aggrandizing anti-social behavior, and destructively anti-normative sentiments.
I can tell you this makes me feel unwelcome, and makes me disappointed in our industry in general. Dog whistles are often very obvious, as is the case here. Not allowing any common-sense deviation from "always presume good faith" is absolutely ridiculous.
In this particular case it looks like we see common sense as pointing in opposite directions, but such differences are inevitable any time that interpretation and judgment calls are involved, which is certainly true of moderation. Beyond that, it's hard to answer general statements about HN moderation when they don't include specific links. You might well be talking about comments that we simply didn't see (cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24161292). There are many other possibilities too.
Usually when I hear generalizations about HN moderation on political/ideological issues, they're being made by strong adherents to one ideological position who perceive the moderators as being secretly against their position. That's problematic because there are intense cognitive biases conditioning such perceptions, such as the one where people are more likely to notice cases they dislike than the ones they agree with, and to weight them much more heavily (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). If you consider that phenomenon, you'll notice that it guarantees that unbiased moderation will always be experienced as biased by passionate perceivers, regardless of which position they adhere to. This is a double bind situation for the moderators, and it makes such complaints difficult to respond to except by pointing out that the other side feels exactly the same way.
I don't mean to say that that's the case with your perceptions, just that it's hard to discuss these things without concrete cases to look at. Based on your comment, my guess is that we would agree on egregious cases (and those certainly get moderated here, except when we don't see them), but would perhaps draw the lines differently on borderline cases, like the GP. That too is inevitable when one is trying to moderate a community that has countless different perspectives—it's impossible to satisfy everyone, or even to satisfy anyone completely. But there's a choice here too: we want HN to be different from the places on the internet that are dominated by the online callout/shaming culture (not because the callouts are always wrong, but because of the systemic effect on the community when they become the default). For that, I think the plausibility guideline is the right medicine. It basically leads to scolding/banning for egregious cases, forgiveness for borderline cases, and open-mindedness in unclear ones (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24073607).
"Callout culture" has only become a problem now that it is hurting the powerful. To create an inclusive community, you have to actively root out bigotry. Most bigotry is rarely explicit, but couched behind terms like "degenerates."
When you allow bigotry to fester, you are making the decision to exclude people like me and include bigots. You will have to make uncomfortable decisions. There's no way around it. The assumption that you can largely ignore barely-concealed bigotry and also be welcoming to minorities and LGBT folks is false, but widespread among liberals in the tech industry. A recurring theme is that high-status straight males are making most of the decisions, and even with the best intentions, they fail horribly at inclusion because they don't listen to folks not like themselves.
It's 2020, and there is ample evidence both around us and in the academic literature about the omnipresence of racism especially in our society. Does HN and Y Combinator actually want to put in the hard work to create an inclusive environment? So far, the answer is a clear no.
Yes as well. I consider myself pretty conservative with my spending but with regards to free things that benefit me, I am thankful, so I donate. I believe people should do more.
That breaks the site guidelines against flamebait calling names in arguments. Casual bomb-throwing leads to flamewars, and you started numerous flames with just that one word. We're trying to avoid that here, so please don't.
You don't need that to make your point, so please stick to the rules.
If you see that the company is producing a good product that you're donating to support. Would the "customers" (supporters) want to support the time and cost associated with kicking out the CEO over personal+(believed to be) private activities? (Context: Brandon Eich donated 1k of his personal money to a conservative/anti-gay org, and an activist within mozilla found+escalated this and claimed hostile work environment, eventually got him removed)
If I was donating, I would be pissed to know that valuable time was wasted about that and the loss of talent of personal politics and disagreement.
Edit: "don't see any problem" does not mean I agree with the comment. It means I don't see any other place that it broke the site guidelines.
The GP should not have posted flamebait, and the repliers should not have taken the bait.
The L.A. Times published the CA state database of political donations >= $100 in size, activists searched it for known names. That was in 2012.
I mentioned this before and the claims were that you lost the "trust of the employees" infering that the work environment wasn't feasible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681475
I think for a private action that's insane. But oh well.
The loss of MDN will just result in Firefox becoming less relevant. MDN was not just a free resource, it anchored Firefox's relevancy in the web development world. I believe the layoffs of the MDN team is a fairly significant strategic mistake for Mozilla.
However it's far from a wiki and the process looks boring and cumbersome: https://web.dev/handbook/quick-start/
Google also pays technical writers to contribute to MDN which we consider to be THE destination for reference documentation. Both Google and Microsoft have employed multiple fulltime techwriters to contribute to MDN for the last ~7 years, I believe.
We don't consider web.dev to be an alternative to MDN. web.dev doesn't do reference documentation, but rather guides, tutorials, and news. web.dev is developed by the Web DevRel team and you can be sure that everyone working on Web DevRel and Chrome knows the fundamental importance of a diverse browser ecosystem. If there's anything we can do to make web.dev more inclusive, we'd love to hear it.
Now if MDN starts becoming outdated, someone else will fill that void. W3Schools maybe (nobody wants this), but it seems like a better opportunity for Google to swoop in and lead, to further solidify their domination in the browser space. Cynical sounding to you I'm sure, but that seems logical to me from a homo economicus business stance. I'd be happy to hear I'm missing something or wrong in some way so this doesn't happen, since after all, competition is great.
It's just hard to digest that this will always be the view of Google especially with its ads, search, android and chrome market share (monopoly). Google has conflicting interests and it's hard to digest "Chrome knows the fundamental importance of a diverse browser ecosystem".
I think people should be entitled to a free ride.
Important infrastructure can, paradoxically, be both free and expensive. We've committed, for instance, to spending a whole lot of money on maintaining all of our roads, but access to the street is still free for everyday pedestrians.
Not everyone can afford to pay to use the road. If you want to get a job, often you'll need to drive to and from work for a good while before you'll have enough cash built up to meaningfully contribute to the road through your taxes. Of course, wealthy people wind up paying more, but often times they wouldn't have ever become wealthy if roads hadn't originally been available to them for free. Important infrastructure can be free for individuals when our society makes a commitment to collectively paying for it.
MDN is an extremely important resource to beginner devs -- the exact people who would have trouble paying to support it. But supporting beginner devs is good for both the industry and the economy. Important public or open-source infrastructure such as MDN and Wikipedia should receive public grant money. We already do this with research grants for science, because there's a strong understanding that making research available for free makes society better. Informational infrastructure deserves the same consideration.
No it's not. Taxes pay for this. Business taxes, property taxes, local taxes, gas tax, etc. It is decisively not free for pedestrians or commuters.
No it's not. It's governed by free motor vehicle law. Pedestrians are often punished by law for walking in the street.
Why can't there be some sort of industry association that pays for shared goods that everyone in the industry benefits from? Are companies just unable to see the benefits gained from this?
> Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat?
I've seen some open-source authors/contributors successfully raise enough money, after they'd pledged to work on their project full-time. So the problem might not necessarily be to raise. But money has this uncanny ability to shift a project's focus. What happens when you raise more money than you actually need for the next 3 years (considering the scope of the project)? Will the project just mention that it doesn't need to raise more and just proceed to do what it's supposed to do? All the while spending and raising sensibly? Or will it find novel and creative ways to spend all this extra cash?
> The problem with expecting volunteers to do this sort of work is that they burn out.
Should we assume that once someone gets a salary they're somehow more resilient to burnout? I'd think that the burnout would be due to a volunteer biting much more than they should. So couldn't this also be an issue of work management and allocation?
> The passionate community has nothing to do with anything, unless they’re willing to pay. A profoundly unscientific poll indicates that only about two-thirds of my responding followers are willing to do so.
Is paying the only way to have helpful resources? I mean, we have the Wikipedia and StackExchange models that seem to provide decent value, even if not on par with MDN's standard. Would it be possible to have a model for MDN that meets somewhere in the middle, such as community contributed contents, moderated, reviewed, and edited by both community and full-time, knowledgeable, and paid staff? Unless I'm mistaken, I think the Linux kernel also follows something similar.
I don’t think there are black or white answers to these questions. There are toll roads and freeways, for-profit but regulated water utilities, “free” education and firefighting funded through taxes. But all of these, like MDN, are public goods [1] where some pooling of resources makes sense. It’s not so much wanting them to be free as it is wanting shared low cost options.
Oh sweetie, no.
I feel entitled to Mozilla's management being competent and not killing the company.
Appealing to developers is a precondition for that.
MDN does that.
But there are free alternatives. So charging for it would be counter-productive.
If Mozilla had shown even trace amounts of competence at business development, rather than acting like a freshly-minted MBA parachuted into a university's administration, I might be more sympathetic.
As it is I've formed a partnership with a violin manufacturer. Mozilla won't see any money from it but we're going to play them a very profitable-sounding sad tune as soon as we recover our initial investment.
Will a wikipedia-style MDN be successful if there are (in addition of volunteers) paid writers who cover the majority of the work need? Maybe not. Maybe that's what the existing MDN proves.
EDIT: So I've found answers to my content questions at [1] - does the community have the appetite for an alternate site?
1 - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/About#Using_MDN...
That is not the model of MDN, it seems.
> If not, this is all about making you feel better,...
These 2 statements here reflect this weird behavior I have seen in certain countries like the UK where everyone will say things like "we <3 the NHS" or "protect the NHS" during the pandemic, but on the other end either the government or the proletariat or both will be unhappy to expand funding of the NHS.
At times this behavior feels a bit cult-like and I also think that the dopamine-effects are meant more for those giving the applause.
Yes, it's an initiative that needs money. Maybe this will enthuse somebody up high to reconsider, or somebody else to take the torch and run with it.
But even if it doesn't, a bit of recognition is nice. These are humans and even though it doesn't pay the bills, it might help somebody not feel they're as worthless as Mozilla imply.
Stop dumping on these projects because you're all sourpuss about "free". You're only adding to the hurt.
This is poorly chosen language as it doesn't distinguish between freedom versus monetization.
I think most users of free software know it's 'free as in freedom' and they are not being duped.
I think most users of free services are duped into thinking it is actually free and are unaware their data is being sold and monetized and are paying for the service with their data. Lately more people are waking up to that fact though. I don't mean services like MDN, just things like Facebook, Google etc
2. A lot of this complaint seems to be about needing to repeat manual browser testing regularly. Why is it manual?
3. The web is a bloated, overcomplex, platform with hundreds of talented people full time employed to make it more complex every day. Since it seems HTML+CSS+Javascript cannot be contained inside any line drawn, can we figure out something like a WASM + son-of-DOM simpler reboot that throws out as much of this complexity as possible? As in, stop using the existing HTML tags and default CSS, let the app define new ones along the lines of WebComponents, and make the DOM be just a rendering engine to get things like universal text selection and copy-paste (as opposed to everything just blitting to a canvas and reimplementing that). Of course I'm oversimplifying -- but I really think the world needs an old school "hourglass figure architecture" here to limit this feature creep.
Mozilla brought in $3.25 BILLION in revenue over the last 10 years. If they'd saved/invested a majority of it then they could go for decades without any further revenue. The business model was sound if they didn't decide to waste money.
Also, the W3C and ECMA standards documents are all free and are more authoritative references than any wiki. It would be interesting to see if a language model e.g. GPT-3 could translate the standardese into something more readable to laymen.
There are always a lot more consumers than creators of content on any platform. Most people going to use a resource are not the same who can write about it, not everyone on YouTube has something to share or make a video. And why give it away for free when you can make a paid course, give a talk, charge consulting fees, sell a solution to a problem?
You need to align incentives. Again, why contribute to something and possibly deal with the pain of moderation for free (costs instead of gain). Should we blindly trust the wisdom of the crowds? The other cost of free, is that the community may not be capable or not interested in sufficient moderation - this leads to low quality content which chases people away, even if there is good content right next to it.
OWASP's incentives and objectives have never been 100% clear to me. There are some big security players involved, but it seems more interested in research, community, grants, etc versus content. When you look at MDN, Mozilla has a clear incentive to document these things so developers build more "standard" vs "Chrome-focused" web apps, which helps keep users on FireFox since all of their favorite sites are less likely to break without FireFox simply copying decision made by Chrome. By documenting expected action and quirks, it forces Google et al. to try to move back towards agreed upon standards.
In security, I am generally more reliant upon vendor write ups and content from people with a reputation. Security has a much smaller population than web dev. Also, for web dev a lot of people pick it up and feel comfortable writing publicly even when they are just starting out (See Dev.To). I am not sure if companies pump millions of dollars into commercial web tools beyond graphics and CMS type stuff, so I wonder if a more decentralized collection of guidance is practical for the web, not to mention that there is a lot of nuance between browsers and even recent versions.
In the past, the W3C was at least nominally "in charge" of the web. They were the natural providers of documentation. But then 2 big things happened: (1) vehement disagreement between the W3C and the browser vendors over the successor to HTML4, and (2) the "mobile revolution", which changed the landscape of the whole tech industry.
To a significant extent, W3C has been sidelined by WHATWG. So now, WHATWG would be the natural providers of documentation for the web. However, WHATWG is dominated by Google/Apple/Microsoft, and nobody really trusts those BigCos to run the web, even if they do actually run the web by virtue of their market share dominance. And each of those BigCos has their own agenda which is not necessarily beneficial for the open web.
Thus, we're left with a leadership vacuum. We can try to "crowdsource" documentation, but that ultimately seems doomed to failure IMO, as most crowdsourcing efforts are. (The well known "tragedy of the commons".) I don't have a solution to these problems myself, to be sure. Sorry! I do agree that the solution needs to be permanent organizational funding of professional writers, but I don't know who that organization should be.
think the fundamental problem is that the Universe has no clear organizational structure.
We have to make it up as we go a long. Even a national government was simply made up by some people and enforced by the use of force, the only law of nature.
Not surprising this is prevalent. This sort of ‘artificial positive feedback and positive thinking helps solves problems’ was rampant in schools.
Not to mention social media significantly selects for performative behaviour over tangible and measurable support.
Perhaps a combination: Patreon for continuous funding and development; kickstarter for specific big features/releases (e.g., resurrecting Places and implementing it in Servo).
Also, has anyone archived MDN, in case they pull the plug on it unexpectedly now the team is gone?
Looks like MDN was on mediawiki at some point. It worked fine then too.
Who pays for Wikipedia? Who pays for NPR? People do use fundraisers from time to time.
Where are all the Universities in this? Should they have a roll in any of this? Seems like all the Ivy League places could donate? Maybe they already do.
I suggest that if the management team at Mozilla were actually good at their jobs maybe MDN would already me profitable. I'd also suggest that it's in browser manufacturer's interest to provide documentation. If MDN disappears something will fill that void. Maybe it's time for a change.
If all else fails, just slap everything into a man page.
So be it. I think the rest is standards translation plus examples.
For this sort of thing, content isn't king, content is pawn. Back to w3schools or whatever, I suppose. Not the end of the world.
I think if it came to it, this could be BountySourced (or whatever the acceptable solution is now) and just suck up the fact that we won't have compatibility. With Evergreen browsers that's a moving target anyway.
"Open source," projects that are well funded appear "free," which seems to distort perceptions and opinions.
Maintaining good documentation, like maintaining libraries, and good compilers takes a lot of on going effort. This creates value and deserves compensation.
If not corporate sponsors, if not a patreon style model, what else can we do? Does everyone on the web contribute a little bit through volume collective licensing when you buy a domain or host a server or from profits of commercial entities on the web platform?
Of course this opens another bag of problems of how to decide on which projects to finance how much or unwanted govermental influence on the projects. But I would still say it is a realistic alternative to corporate sponsors and patreon style funding.
I don't think we can rely on Google or Microsoft caring for MDN in the future. They may do so for a while, but will inevitably let it languish or turn it into something that heavily promotes their own visions.
At the very least given the high traffic it ought to be getting, the current maintainers can try monetising it with non-invasive and contextual ads.
Jeff Atwood said it once: `If you put a number next to someone's name, then that person will try everything to increase that number`. Also: it would look good on CVs and would be a good heuristic to determine if a person's really fit for a position.
Damn true!
See also: programming.
Wikipedia and StackOverflow have proved that technical writing can be done by community and crowd sourced effectively with active moderation.
This model has and can work, even independent sites like caniuse.com have been able to good quality content and are used widely.
Similarly, many stack overflow questions are out of date, and good luck getting them updated to reflect current best practices. And if you do ask the same question again trying to resurface a newer, better way to do something it will almost certainly be closed as a duplicate. Huge fan of the resource though.
Ultimately, experienced professionals who are paid full time to be both writers and technologists can do a better job, especially over a long period of time.
PostgreSQL is a good example, it fantastic documentation and runs on mostly volunteer work the documentation is on par (IMHO better) to say Oracle/ MSSQL/ DB2 documentation which have paid professional writers behind it for example
Quality is more a function of editorial oversight rather than nature of contributions itself.
SO and wikipedia has both been effective partly because of stricter review process ( reason their brands are trusted) and also have been criticized for it, getting the balance right is not easy.
Sub-reddits are good way to study this, there are ones which emphasize on participation over quality and vice versa, i.e. optimize for the reader or the writer.
There are no perfect solution, and communities must keep changing, early on contributions are more important i.e. quantity, as the site and brand grows large quality is more important (SO and wiki both went through this lifecycle).
MDN has very different starting point - strong brand and content quality but no contributing community. They will have to come with something that fits their unique needs.
I did pay for MDN. Google monetized my personal data and gave some of that money to Mozilla.
I paid for MDN. Not with money, but same difference. Mozilla got money.
Now if you want to complain about Mozilla not spending that money on MDN but relying on crowdsourcing, then be my guest. I don't have enough insight into who go paid what at Mozilla to comment on that.
But please stop the "cult of the free" b/s. Just because there is no paywall in front of it does not mean it wasn't paid for.
This is good for everybody, but in particular for Mozilla because it reduces the chance that people will write things that work on Chrome but not Firefox and then just call it a day.
But I do think this article hits on something important, which is the difference between activism devoted towards demanding things of others, versus activism devoted to creating an organization to actually do some work.
It seems like it would be quite possible (though there is a lot of work involved) for someone to create an independent organization that just works on MDN? You don't anyone else's permission. There are various volunteer groups that decide to fix various things on Wikipedia, without having any intention of running Wikipedia.
But someone needs to lead. Who will bell the cat? [1]
It has incredible Google juice, seems to be as resilient as an army of cockroaches, and is about as pretty.
Still, it's another path this could take.
Everyone is an armchair director, very few actually contribute to such projects.
It is matter of UX and openness towards contribution. MDN never felt like it needed my contribution, not once I thought that a) I could actually add value b) my contributions were welcome. Until a couple of days back I and many others did not know even that MDN took wiki style contributions.
I hate this faulty line of reasoning. It's a false dichotomy. You cannot simultaneously be either part of all the world's problems and/or solutions.