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Comment by drecked | Hacker News Reader

My issue with this post isn’t so much the post itself but with what it demonstrates about culture today.

20 years ago one would have written the same post on Blogger but the odds are it would have been framed as “here’s how you can clean up the Firefox menu”.

It’s not like vitriolic content didn’t exist. But the vitriolic content was usually limited to holy war posts, when a Mac user was disparaging PCs or vice versa, or if it was a vim vs emacs conversation. And even then there was an understanding that no one was being entirely serious.

But in today’s social media/political environment, every post is turned up to 11.

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I'm sure part of this is hindsight bias, but software was less intentionally user hostile in the before times.

Firefox used to release features that improved privacy. Today they add features that reduce privacy. Enabled by default, with no easy way to disable or remove the spyware link.

The tone should shift, in step with how much disrespect companies decide to inflict on their users.

This would be more relevant if the ui features being 'discussed' were privacy violating, but they're not. Anger about privacy violations (mostly by other software and companies) doesn't justify vitriol about right click context menus in an open source browser.

Objecting to your reply is exactly why I made my original comment. It's the same thing as the cliche; "we can talk about who's turn it is to do the dishes; but first we need to talk about why you're so upset about it?", or the other "you might not shoot the messenger, but you also won't invite him to dinner".

You might not feel the vitriol is warranted for this specific example, but you tell anyone that they are wrong to feel the way they do, at your own peril.

Is it that big of a deal? IMO, no and I say that as someone who was pissed off by it too. But then again the straw the breaks the camel's back never does seem heavy.

But in context:

> every post is turned up to 11.

Everyone is being disrespected all the time, from every direction. Here, it feels like Firefox is doing it too. Every one is already at 11, Firefox added an AI button nobody wanted, with no (real) way to disable it. And we now have an 11.05 post. As everyone paying attention would expect.

>intentionally user hostile

They want more users, so logically it cannot be intentional. More generally, we cannot know others' intentions, so the speculation is always redundant.

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