user17843

quite a caricature they have become. It was still different when Occupy Wallstreet happened.

I think this is basically the GDPR rules, but I would need to look into the details more.

Google is not allowed to collect PII data of users who visit google services without registering. So everytime you delete your cookies, you are a new user, and they also are not allowed to log the ip address of non-users indefinitely.

I just implied it is different because the industry was so young, it is solidified now, thus resembling other industries. (i.e. in the corporate world the hierarchies in big tech now resemble the hierarchies in big [insert any other industry])

The biggest irony I see here is Microsoft being unable to gain control of their IE user base in any meaningful way.

We still see this today with the fragmentation of IE and Edge.

of course there was oversight. Those with experience had privileged access. Basically meritocracy. Today innovation and movement is stiffled by large corprate and legal structures where engineers only recieve commands.

This is not comparable imho.

No medical or financial company has this vibrant engineering IT culture like the web startups 20 years ago had.

Everything was new and exciting, and things moved foreward exactly due to the flexibility of all involved, the uncertainty, the flat hierarchies, and the fact that many rules either didn't exist, or only existed on paper.

This is what happens everytime a new market emerges, where structures need some time to settle.

Once they have settled down, procedures become standardized, but they also become so boring that all innovation is lost.

What happend at Youtube 12 years ago is exactly what happens right now at some Cryptocurrency start ups. The start ups that are succesful are exactly those start ups where people like this Youtube engineer do not get fired. If YT had such an authoritarian attitude in 2009, they would never have become succesful.

It's easy for the blog author to say "I have no idea why we weren't fired" but I bet back then it was all fun and games. (Getting fired isn't even that bad, what really harms people is when everyone around them starts to tell them things like "You could have ruined everything!")

And something similar to the excitement and fluidity within the Youtube of 12 years ago happened 80 years ago in pharmaceutical companies, or 200 years ago within a Bank, when such structures were still freshly formed.

Yes, I agree. Within 1-2 years Reddit will be a collectivist utopia where controversial topics are banned outright and everyone who does not conform to the majority opinion is being made invisible through downvoting.

This is already the case in the big subreddits but there are still islands of freedom here and there.

The solution to a social problem can be social in nature.

If you apply this to the OP blog post you can see that the desire to get away from IRC to "safer" products comes from the desire to deal with the social problem in a social way, but in a hidden way:

The technical solution will supposedely make it easier to apply the social solutions, i.e. the barrier of entry for undesired participants will be higher.

An undesired participant can be someone who questions Mozilla on a fundamental level (i.e. on the topic of meritocracy, privacy, inclusion, activism, etc.)

The proposed solution is reverting to a "safe space", i.e. something that promises to automatically protect against undesired participants, because Mozilla has long ago decided that it does not tolerate being questioned on a fundamental level.

This ultimately results in a reclusive filter bubble, where a significant part of the audience is no longer allowed to exist.

Since Mozilla does not seem to want to invest in moderating these spaces in a democratic and open way, which is very costly (but human relationships are always costly), the proposed solution is to build a fence between "us" und "them".

in the nightly version of the browser you can.

Will that also help with the 10% or so users that are not on up-to-date versions?

It looks like the user base is still a bit fractionated.