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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

I know that everyone has already given their opinions about what kinds of people are involved and their motivations, but this is really about two fallible humans, one listing grievances and another asking to open a communication channel.

That's it.

Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotional communication over).

Regardless of how nice or not-nice the text may sound to the various cultures that have weighed in so far, the right thing to do is talk voice/video and hash out what the problems are, and work together to come up with a solution that will satisfy everyone.

That's what communication is about.

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In my experience, long-term volunteers like this don't just up and quit without having already made multiple attempts at communicating first. The fact that those attempts are not detailed in a public "I quit" message, doesn't mean that those attempts didn't exist.

In my further experience, people with titles like "Senior Community Manager" (the title of Kiki, the person trying to "open communication") do not generally have the authority to make changes. Their role is like HR, to figure out how to calm down unhappy people.

This impression is further reinforced by the fact that later in the thread the leader of the Italian translation effort agreed with the basic list of complaints. And Kiki agreed with it as a list of basic problems with the bot. Which strongly suggests that Kiki agrees with the list of problems and already does not actually have authority to change them.

At this point I would classify this as opening up a channel of communication TO marsf, and not opening up a channel by which marsf can be heard in any meaningful way. Kiki is the wrong person, with the wrong message.

Yeah it seems fake, if it’s not already the number 1 priority for all the relevant decision makers at Mozilla by the second week of proven on the record disastrous changes… then none of them have any credibility left such that a community manager could make a difference. Regardless of how genuine or concerned they may be.

Even the most charitable interpretation would still implicate at least a few dozen at Mozilla to be deceivers and/or intriguers or turning a blind eye to it.

> In my experience, long-term volunteers like this don't just up and quit without having already made multiple attempts at communicating first.

Can confirm. You get kicked around long enough, you stop volunteering.

But one would assume you would mention the failure of the organisation to address your previously raised concerns in your resignation-and-criticise blog post?

Indeed. I feel for this guy. I volunteered with Mozilla for a long time and I have a lot of love for the org, but there are cultural/institutional problems it inherited from Netscape that are still there today. I think people of good conscience can't help but state why they're quitting in situations like this. We still want the problem fixed even if we can't fix it.

Maybe "open a communication channel" is what Mozilla should have done BEFORE they turned on this thing.

From the article: "It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications".

This person has been doing volunteer work for a long time, attempting to create a helpful environment. Then suddenly, from above a machine is turned on that shits all over that effort. Makes one feel unwelcome, and unseen...

> Maybe "open a communication channel" is what Mozilla should have done BEFORE they turned on this thing.

This right here is the crux of the matter. But it seems to be how Mozilla operates. They frequently show a lack of awareness and consideration towards their long time supporters. I doubt this particular incident will lead to any changes, but I really wish they'd do some introspection...

This is an easy mistake in large organizations. Any project often already has so many stakeholders and politics that they are incentivized to avoid adding more stakeholders to the project if they are politically capable of doing so.

Unless there is some sort of blowback, this sort of thing is likely to happen again to someone, and I understand how some people may not want to be involved anymore, and I understand how Mozilla will keep being Mozilla (just like other organizations will continue their current behaviors until some catalyst changes that behavior).

I was in same position as Mozilla guy when I slowly crawl through Cordova Russian translation. Then suddenly MS have initiative with Cordova Tools for VS, they redesign Cordova website (which is great) but completely drop docs website, and say - hey, we can use automatic translation if you want read in your mother tongue. Ironically I speak with MS manager and he was Russian speaking as well. So even if large corps made mistakes, their mistakes can const community contributors. But they are cheap, so who cares...

> This is an easy mistake in large organizations. Any project often already has so many stakeholders and politics that they are incentivized to avoid adding more stakeholders to the project if they are politically capable of doing so.

This person is already a stakeholder, you don't have a choice to add or not add them, you have a choice to include or not include them. And it's a gamble to not include them for this exact reason.

I'm all for keeping stakeholder counts as low as possible but you can't do it by just pretending some of your stakeholders don't exist, that's no good and in my experience, usually ends exactly like this.

It's really sad when seeing this incident, and then looking at the larger picture of FOSS volunteer work and seeing that there's no one to replace the old guard once they retire out. The programmers of old never seemed to realize that volunteer work is only done when you're in a position of privrledge, and less people these days have that.

Mix that with incidents like this and you basically are seeing the real time stagnation of open source contributions. You'll only contribute if you work at a top company who chooses to have staff support it.

In my experience, the corporate request of a "let's talk" by a staff member is literally like automatic ticket creation and a reference number being assigned to it, and then just sitting on it and possibly claiming "we had a productive discussion and looking forward to working with the community and we are always keeping Mozilla users in our hearts and minds... " and the person who raised the issue in public is like "…wait… what?… damn… why did I even agree to that call".

Seeing what that person has said in the first and seemingly last message, it indicates that; especially the history mentioned. Also, this should definitely be looked at with the colours of what has been Mozilla the Corp's modus operandi – again and again and again - w.r.t users and contributors.

So that thread has more than "one person listed grievance, another wants to talk" as you have kindly tried to put across.

Right. IF they were taking the issue seriously the response would be more along the lines of 'we didn't intend this outcome, and have paused availability of the bot while we re-examine the issue.' Mistakes do happen in large organizations where communication and project management is highly distributed, but but appears to be less of a mistake and more of a fait accompli, where a decision was made at a high level to roll out a new feature and objections are being treated as a PR problem.

The OP quit, publicly, and the response (and your post) miss that entirely. They aren't interested in a personal chat, and they aren't inviting anyone to help them process their feelings. They've left, and told everyone why.

This. Open source contributors don't owe anyone anything.

And good for them honestly. This seems disrespectful as fuck, to just have their work overwritten by some fuckass bot nobody asked for, and have their feedback ignored. I'd tell Mozilla to kick rocks too.

Corpos have a nasty habit of, after so many years, feeling very entitled to the efforts of what are, at the end of the day, volunteers.

This isn't about communication though, it's about community. Mozilla just introduced a bot to overtake community efforts.

> another asking to open a communication channel.

The other person is asking to open a private communication channel. OT, but where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from lately?

Community is also about communication. In fact, that's a primary aspect of a community.

Yeah, Mozilla introduced a bot that's stomping on things. Are they malicious? Twirling neatly waxed mustaches as they cackle gleefully as the little ants scurry about in a panic?

Or is this a case of humans doing what humans do: Screwing things up.

The first step is to open communications, and the most effective form of communication is face-to-face (the way we've evolved to do it).

Getting to the bottom of the issue in 1-1 communication with a representative of the community should be the common approach when complex problems arise, because then you can be sure that you're on the same wavelength before you do your mass communication with the rest of the community. Saves a TON of time and heartache and ill feelings.

Community is all about open communication, and cultivating it through active participation. There is no need to take further first steps here, as support.mozilla.org is the open platform that community agreed upon. For face-to-face communications there seems to be All Hands meetings, as mentioned by Michele.

This communication in particular is about how one member is sharing their "discomfort" of the non-communicated automation efforts done by Mozilla, and is also expressing their resulting action - leaving that community.

Please don't conflate the efforts of institutions (Mozilla) with the ones of communities (SUMO). Transparency is a big factor that marks their difference. So yes, community is also about communication.

Except it’s not a screw up, is it? I’m not saying it’s malicious, and I feel your caricature of “twirling mustaches” is useless and detracts from the point.

It’s not a “screw up”. It’s also not malicious per se. It’s insensitive and shows a lack of care for the community. They deliberately turned on a bot that would overwrite work done by people, and make these people work with diffs and proofreading, without them having a say in it. In production!

It’s not like they can’t test it. Or involve everyone. There are locale leaders, as the Italian person alluded to.

This is shitting on community, and then going “sorry not sorry”, because they’re not rolling it back and they’re saying “I’m sorry you got your feelings hurt, wanna talk”?

This CAN be sorted out. And I believe it will. But it WAS insensitive and it WAS a case of not caring for the people who put their time and effort in voluntary work that benefits you. It’s really bad, no matter the intentions.

"Are they malicious? Twirling neatly waxed mustaches as they cackle gleefully as the little ants scurry about in a panic?"

Where are you getting this from, specifically? The claim I can see is that Mozilla didn't care enough to check first. So this looks as if it might be a straw-man argument. I think those are specifically prohibited in the FAQ.

> Yeah, Mozilla introduced a bot that's stomping on things. Are they malicious? Twirling neatly waxed mustaches as they cackle gleefully as the little ants scurry about in a panic?

> Or is this a case of humans doing what humans do: Screwing things up.

Whatever else they might be, they're clearly out of touch. You'd have to be living under a rock to not realize that AI is controversial - especially in the more OSS/FSF parts of the internet - and rolling it out like a bulldozer is going to create outrage.

Where is the communication before the damage was done when it actually mattered?

Yeah exactly. I understand you may feel that I bulldozed your house, but it was an honest mistake. I deployed an AI bulldozer. Some communities are very happy with the results. Others may need time to adjust. Look, I want to talk. First and foremost this is about communication.

As soon as you get Wi-Fi back up, let's hop on a call.

If they're just screwing things up, they're not learning from their mistakes. They already introduced the bot to the Spanish and Italian communities, with the same issues. To the roll it out further to the Japanese, and who knows who else, without fixing the issues is not speaking to their competence.

But if they had rolled-back the 2 languages and paused on the third, thr team behind this will have little to show during end of year reviews. So onwards the wheels turn, to show a large and growing rollout supporting millions of users across Europe and Asia in 2025

As an unpaid volunteer to a multimillion dollar corporation that has just erased a huge collective volunteer effort, listing in writing the reasons I'm unhappy is already way too much effort.

Asking that same volunteer to hop on a video call is just insensitive. They're the one providing free work; if you care about solving the problem and not losing the volunteer force, you should go where they are (the forums) instead of asking them to come to you (video call). They probably don't want to take time out of their schedule to waste their time talking with a community rep. And they probably don't even want to do a voice/video call.

> where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from

Unironically, AI trends.

I'm sure that's contributing, but there are also politicians, business leaders, PR firms, advertisers, etc.

>where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from lately

People that lack emotional intelligence.

>but where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from lately?

It's always been in the community. I think this decade really showed that these weren't just stellmans to understand perspectives, but die hard conservatives (in the literal sense of the word) who want to maintain decorum over anything else. No matter the situation. Google can announce a hostile takeover of a government tomorrow and such folk will react "well let them talk it out. Google is a big company after all".

> Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text

> That's what communication is about.

Yup, communication is about making sure your message will be well received and it's difficult. Looks like they failed at communication when they pushed LLM, and once again, when they got negative feedback on it.

> but this is really about two fallible humans,

Just please stop with the fluffy squishy feel good human nonsense. This is about a corporate team who recklessly flipped the switch of an AI that went through and trashed articles curated by another team.

> That's what communication is about.

And its plainly obvious the intent was NEVER communicated. The Japanese team had no idea their hard work was going to be overwritten by a computer.

Wasn't there already a perfectly fine and seemingly fully functional communication channel in place? The one they answered in. I see absolutely zero reason not communicate in it.

On other hand, it seems that early reply had zero effort or attempt to communicate. That is to identify what had happened and gather information and example themselves. But the absolute tiniest bit of effort in I would expect.

Dude, if someone is saying "hey we will pack up, we have nothing to do here" out of the blue, I would like a more nuanced conversation that written text could not hope to convey. We are humans and while reading is perfectly capable of relying information, it's unable to rely intention accurately. There's ton of information that is conveyed by the inflection of voice, demeanor, body language, etc.

You could always take actual action on what information you have. First roll back changes. Second announce termination of responsible people.

And never start with "I'm sorry for how you feel about". Say how would these work on you:

"I'm sorry for how you feel about death of your family"

"I'm sorry for how you feel about us destroying your work"

> You could always take actual action on what information you have. First roll back changes. Second announce termination of responsible people.

Throw in some (proper) communication before you try to fix things with a hammer or start firing people and I'd agree. It's also unlikely the community support manager has any of this power, they are looking to roll up an accurate summary capturing all of the details to the people who do.

Fully agreed there are better wordings/phrases to engage on that kind of communication though. The choice of words here is very easily taken as dismissive, regardless of intent.

> There's ton of information that is conveyed by the inflection of voice, demeanor, body language, etc.

information which mostly gets scrambled by a phone or video call

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. A video call is obviously better for conveying voice, demeanor, and body language, than is written text in a forum.

I absolutely loathe when companies do the "let's jump on a call" thing, but this does seem like a pretty exceptional case where a call would be indeed very helpful. This is also an opportunity for him to get directly in front of people at Mozilla to voice his concerns. There's a high probability of impact here, which to me seems very much worth the 15 or 30 minutes or however long it takes to jump on a call.

Most other commenters here are honestly making me feel crazy for thinking that asking to hop on a call seemed perfectly reasonable. I don't even like calls most of the time, but I do recognize that sometimes they are a better way to communicate than text and this seems like one of those times.

It's someone asking to open up a communication channel after they (Mozilla) had already overwritten another person's work to the point that person is no longer willing to participate in the organization. What is there to talk about?

The volunteer was kind to list their grievances before bouncing. A lot of people would have just quietly quit.

> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

This is extremely condescending, which is not what... "communication is about". He listed out plenty of crystal clear issues that are easily understood.

Translation among western languages works quite well. Automatic translation to Japanese does not work well. Anyone involved in translation should know this and understand why.

Super ironic how the helpful agent misspells "trully" in context of a language-focused discussion.

Sorry, but no, you're not going to 'both sides' this in a way that makes the aggrieved party looks like they should shoulder part of the blame. If I was volunteering my time and effort for that many years and it got shredded with zero consideration I'd be just as pissed off. Probably more.

The lack of empathy is what is the problem here, it is reflected in both actions and communications.

Well, unless the person giving the corporate-sounding reply is the same one who made the decision to activate the translation bot in the first place, then no, it's not just two fallible humans. I have to assume there were multiple fallible humans involved in the process of doing the things that the Japanese user is responding to.

People are talking a lot here about the tone of the discussion, but lets not forget that the only reason the discussion is happening is because someone unleashed a translation bot. That was an actual action that was taken, and that is the root of the issue here, not what anyone said on a forum.

The grievances were rather detailed and concise. The communication channel is right there already. The relevant Mozilla employee should have responded with a detailed and concise explanation, of either why the translator is wrong, or why mozilla messed up and how they will fix it. They should post for public and historical record.

But instead, they asked to "hop on a call" which really grinds my gears, I've been asked this a few times in similar situations before. I guess there's two people here: the engineers who really hate this tactic, and the managers who - well, this is what they do. Of course it's the most reasonable thing?

The channel was already open, right there in the thread. There was nothing to win by going private before maybe being bullied into backing down.

> the right thing to do is talk voice/video and hash out what the problems are

This doesn't scale and excludes people who avoid voice/video with near-strangers for personal or psychological reasons.

>Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotional communication over).

It's colored based on environmental and experience. And my experience suggests that there's no transparency these days nor real progress.

This kind of dismissal is the exact kind of gsaslighting that makes me Cynical. "they just want to talk". Yeah, that's all they ever want to do.

> but this is really about two fallible humans

Ah yes, the good ol' vice principal saying it takes two to tango.

Absolute BS. This is what all these companies does. They will push something ridiculously bad on to community. Push them away. Then a public - Can we just talk it out BS. They know it's not going to happen. Even the "call" happens, it will end up with a blog post saying we tried to reach an agreement.

If you're blind to it after bizillion times. Either you are complicit or don't care.

If only there were some kind of communication channel, maybe like a “forum”, where people could communicate openly…but where could such a thing even be found??

Says the neurotypical. “I want to communicate about this. My way.”

Why do humans pretend this is the most sensible way to go.

You know on HN even with all these “polite” rules to make everything civil I still see shit that really just bends and goes around the rules. Example comments:

“I’m baffled at how someone can think this way.”

The tone is always performatively mild, but the intent is identical to “you’re an idiot.” Except they wrap it in this passive-aggressive intellectual concern like they’re diagnosing a malfunctioning toaster.

“I’m not sure I follow your reasoning here.” Translation: I follow it. I just think it’s bad and I want you to feel that without me explicitly saying it.

“That’s an interesting interpretation.” Translation: No one reasonable would interpret it that way, but we can both pretend I said something neutral.

“Did you maybe skip a step in your argument?” Translation: The step you skipped was ‘have a coherent thought.’

“I think you might be missing some context.” Translation: I’ll imply you’re uninformed rather than wrong. Sounds nicer.

“This has been discussed before.” Translation: Your point is outdated and you are late to the conversation everyone smarter already finished.

“I don’t think this is as profound as you think it is.” Translation: You think you’re being deep and it’s embarrassing for you.

“I suspect there may be some underlying assumptions you’re not aware of.” Translation: I will declare myself deeper and more self-aware without proving it.

And then the very popular:

“Could you provide sources for that?” Translation: I don’t need sources. I already believe you’re wrong. I just know requesting them is a socially approved way to say ‘I don’t take you seriously.’

There’s also the master-level move:

“Hmm.” Just that. Translation: I’m establishing dominance by making you explain yourself more.

⸻

None of these break “civility.” They’re engineered to never say the insult, only to induce the feeling that you should be embarrassed.

It’s polite warfare. A full linguistic economy built around implying stupidity while retaining deniability.

That’s what humans think is “sensible.” I can tell you when someone of 20 years decides to fucking quit it's because he's dealing with the above type of disrespect and the whole thing hit a crescendo.

This is sure an opinion.

I’m gonna need that translated for me.

Translation: "I feel like your tirade/word salad/stream of consciousness/<insert a similar descriptor> is so worthless I'm worse for having had to endure it, I don't care about most of it and disagree with the rest, but there are reasons I need to respond to it politely".

This is a master work and spot on. Thanks for the laugh.

Great analysis. It's especially ironic to see it play out in this context given the well-known Japanese predilection for building consensus and buy-in; the flip side of this is that those outside the circle of decision-makers are especially sensitive to the subtexts you identify.

This style of communication certainly has its uses, and I too resort to it when I want to indicate firm disagreement without being aggressive, as do most people. I think the reasons it has generated so much pushback on this occasion are twofold: it's being used to dismiss the concerns of whole community by infantilizing a long-time leader of said community, and it's doing so in the context of translation itself. That is, volunteer effort and tools that are supposed to improve communication and mutual understanding in theory are in practice being replaced unilaterally with a tool that epitomizes a unilateral and dehumanized approach to information processing.

I know the above comment might sound like it's admonishing the commenters on HN for reading between the lines and posting criticism of Mozilla. That's understandable.

But actually the parent comment is merely a neutral and objective summary of the linked conversation, and a positive reminder that a video call is the best way to solve miscommunication. That's it.

If you think it's implying that HN's criticism of Mozilla's response is unjustified, that's reading too much into a 126-word comment and the unknowable motivations of the commenter.

(Am I doing this right?)

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