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Comment by NoboruWataya | Hacker News Reader

As a native English speaker, I don't see it as condescending either. Yes it's a bit "corporate" in tone, but that is not uncommon at all in large human organisations (not just for-profit corporations but also government, NGOs, political orgs, etc). Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists. Which is often entertaining but rarely very useful.

But it's Mozilla. There is a segment of the community that will be pissed off by everything they do. Check the username of the person you're replying to.

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I am English and the phrasing used is a backhanded way to tell you to shut-up and go away. I've seen it used by both native and non-native speakers in this manner.

It is about 50/50 though as many people don't seem to pick up on backhanded way that many English people speak.

> Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists.

This is also sometimes done to shut you up as well.

The core thing here is the "I'm sorry you feel this way". This immediately deflects all sense of wrong-doing from the people actually doing wrong to the people feeling hurt. There are so many other ways to phrase this that are either more neutral or even acknowledging of some kind of mistake being made that's not on the volunteer's side, but that's not what's happening here. Essentially this means "We did the right thing and now we need to figure out how to make you understand this", not "Something went wrong and we need to figure out how to come to an understanding which might include us having done something wrong".

Exactly. I never ever seen it used in any other way.

Having a call is fine, but it's not like the original complaint didn't lay out in plenty of detail what the problem was.

Given the context of corporate doublespeak, I saw the response as "Oh shit, we can't refute your issues, but maybe we can bullshit you privately into putting up with them?".

(I see a few disagreements here, back up with "I'm a native speaker". Me too friend, but understand messages like this is (imho) more about the subtext than the text itself, so interpersonal knowledge is more important than linguistic.)

Or even worse, it's public posturing with full knowledge that the call isn't likely to happen, and it wouldn't resolve anything even if it did.

It's not really an apology - it's "I'm sorry you feel that way" and not "I'm sorry for the thing we did wrong".

As an English speaker, I 100% disagree. This does not come across as someone wanting to understand or to help. It’s someone wanting to avoid a scene. Private phone calls are not an appropriate way to deal with community issues like this. In other threads on the site (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...) it’s clear this change has received massive pushback for months since it was announced, and community members specifically called out the issues enumerated in the OP as potential problems. So the responder already knows exactly what is wrong. No clarification is necessary.

I dunno man, the "what you're struggling with" part is pretty condescending, perhaps unintentionally

Native English speaker and worked in IT in multiple corporations for over 30 years and none of this is condescending. The person is trying to reach out and talk.

This is not to dismiss what happened, but to just address the poster who thinks this is condescending.

Reframing someone's disagreement as them "struggling with something" is incredibly patronizing and condescending and dirty conversational pool.

No it's not. It's a validation of the fact that something is so frustrating they are quitting over it.

The idea that it is patronizing or condescending makes zero sense to me. It's a factual description.

Its framing the issue as something that should be fixed by a change in the mentality of Marsf, not by rolling back the changes.

No it's not. Where are you getting that? It's framing that there is an actual struggle, which is the acknowledgement that it's something they can work on resolving. Rolling back changes might be the answer.

I honestly don't understand where you're getting this cynical interpretation from. It's not in the words.

Not only the user name - that account was created specifically for this.

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