Users that comment on a post are not a random sample of the community at large. So you can't draw conclusions about the community by looking at a biased sample of posts, because it just projects that bias into the comments. This is a truism of most online platforms, e.g. Twitter.

> HN is not a hivemind.

Big claim. Add the keywords "Rust", "Webasm" or "Burnout" to your title and your chances of making it to the frontpage increase significantly.

I think the question is why you apparently see rather few people show up in adjacent threads. You see this with many topics. There's the people who complain about Apple's monopoly, and there's the people who say Apple is dying because they have no marketshare, but you might reasonably expect both groups to fall under the umbrella of people interested in Apple's marketshare.

> what sorts of posts are likely to elicit reactions from a particular group

Also: given such sorts of posts, once one seeming/presumed group acquires dominance in a thread of comments, that "others" may self-select out of commenting on that particular article.

Lurker here. Made an account because fuck it, why not.

I am partial to the Bromite fork of Chrome on Android.

It has built-in adblock, and DNS-over-HTTPs in the setup menus.

https://www.bromite.org/

I understand that stock Chromium can do DoH with options on the command line; I have been meaning to set this up in a few places.

This is a bad view of users and people in general. It's also a really bizarre view of the Firefox complainers, who are the ones demanding that the status quo be kept. One can end up in contradictory situations like that when you judge people based purely on how much they agree with you, or with institutions you support. People who hate the thing you hate are not "haters," and people who like the thing you hate are not "sheep." Very few people are choosing their opinions in order to annoy you, or in order to annoy Mozilla.

Supporting the management status quo is the opposite of supporting the product status quo; Firefox now is an absolutely unrecognizable product compared to Firefox 5 years ago. Not coincidentally, Chrome isn't unrecognizable, it's dependable. I wonder why it's successful? Is it because google isn't playing fairly, or because anyone who has ever been satisfied with Chrome has never been given any good reason to leave, while every change in firefox seems tuned to peel off 2% of the userbase?

If there's an effective way Google isn't playing fair, it's probably that they have some indirect but strong influence in directing Firefox development.

You see the same thing with non-profits. For-profit companies can ask $50 for a product, do whatever they like with the profit, and everyone is happy. A non-profit asks for voluntary donations for a similar product and gets all of their receipts to local pizza joints examined.

The problem with Mozilla is that most of us seem to be holding them to a higher standard. It's not minor details that are scrutinized but more like "HOW IN THE HELL DID THEY THINK THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA", and sadly there's been about 1-2 of those per year.

Those are two different groups of people. The Firefox complainers are Firefox users. The people satisfied with Chrome are Chrome users.

Please stop making excuses for Mozilla - their management has made many questionable decisions including bundling unnecessary extensions like Pocket and closed source DRM plugin without user permission, aggressive telemetry tracking, downloading and running codes / features without your knowledge (it's opt-out but only if you know what to opt-out of) and now even bundling adware into the browser.

Instead of ensuring their engine is easily modular and usable they are more concerned about others making competing browsers and thus let greed drive their design decisions to make a clunky and poorly architected product that just lags in development.

Fire the greed driven management of Mozilla, and bring a team more concerned about developing a good product than letting money drive the design decisions, and Firefox will be back on track.

Not my opinion, but from what I've seen, it's a different standard.

FF has historically been concerned with privacy and transparency. When they move contrary to that, people "hold them accountable" by issuing public critiques.

In comparison, I'm not sure that the Chromium project ever intended to have privacy as one of their forefront values.

Pale Moon is very hostile to packagers and distros, threatening them with lawsuits within the first few messages of a conversation. I wouldn't want to give a userbase to them if they treat people like that.

The problem with Pale Moon is it's effectively a dead end from a development standpoint. Yes, it gets security fixes from upstream (for which are applicable) but it doesn't receive much in the way of meaningful web compatibility (the elephant in the room being WebComponents, which none of the team have the capability of implementing in the current codebase). It's based on Firefox 52 and refuses to re-base on later versions, partially due to lack of XUL-based extensions and partly due to the introduction of Rust (which does not exist on some platforms which Pale Moon supports - including Solaris/Illumos).

@dang pointed out when I commented similarly on another thread that early comments on threads seem to tend towards the negative, and sentiment often shifts more positive as things go on (which is exactly what happened on that other thread)

Meh, go back to this day, 2013 [0] and you’ll see the same constructive/non-constructive criticism. It’s an exacting crowd, which is what I love personally.

I wouldn't say that it is negativity. It's criticism that is mostly constructive, which I appreciate because nowadays it is popular to ban/cancel criticism on forums or social networks.

> HN seems to shoot down everything with negativity

Except marketing-driven products, which get really overhyped here.

The project is 100% negative liberty so it doesn't surprise me that there's a negative reaction. The selling point to unbundling can't be pure fear. Consider supporting the SerenityOS browser. Andreas Kling is breaking his back creating an entirely new browser, and it actually works. It takes a true genius to do something like that.

Careful. Every time I've mentioned Brave here I've been downvoted. Getting on point: I've used Brave for awhile now and it's been fine. Major issues for me are updates are frequent enough to be annoying, and I haven't been able to access sites with self-signed certificates.

Reminds me of a Star Wars quote:

Luke Skywalker: Is the dark side stronger?

Master Yoda: No, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive

I try to stay far away from Google.