@firefoxwebdevs

What Mozilla did: ⬆️

What the users actually wanted: ⬇️

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@duke_of_germany/115853330852766984

Regarding "[...] I'm not personally in a position to action results of such a poll":

Are you in the position to bring up the results of such a poll in a meeting with your team & boss?

And if so, did you?

@jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs

No, Jake, I am not aware of this, and I do not believe this to be true.

Mastodon users might be special in the way they articulate their opinion, but by no means does this represent a fringe notion.

See for example the links in the reply of @jonny, or the ongoing AI-vote by DuckDuckGo: https://voteyesornoai.com/.

Ask an arbitrary group of people head on if they want genAI directly built into their software, and they will overwhelmingly say "no".

@jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs

Stop portraying Mastodon users as the "anti-AI crazies".

Instead, ask yourself: "What is the relation between Mastodon users & Firefox?"

The answer:

An overwhelming number of Mastodon users used to be your champions.

They are tech people who used to recommend Firefox to the normies in their life. A crowd of mini-influencers, recommending your product.

And I don't understand why you go out of your way to alienate exactly these people.

@jonny @jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs
@davidgerard

Ah, ok, this is the route you take. Of course. I should have know, my bad.

Can't believe I have to tell this to an adult on the internet, but quotation marks (despite their name) have countless uses other than quoting people, for example to highlight slang terms or sarcasm.

And, Jake, seriously:

This is your main takeaway from the message?

You honestly see this as a good use of your time?

@jaffathecake @jonny @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard

To make one thing clear: I am not your mate, Jake.

By now, I am just a guy wondering what you are trying to achieve here, using both your work- and private account, working hard to alienate ex-Firefox-fans.

If this is your actual job: I feel sorry for you. Honestly. No sarcasm.

If not: for the love of god, go outside, touch grass, pet a dog, call a loved one.

Do literally *anything* except for whatever it is you are doing here. For your own sake.

@jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard

@jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard @jaffathecake This is disgusting. You've spent multiple discussion threads ignoring central issue(s) and going off on tangents, focusing on irrelevant details, and just generally avoiding even mentioning the things people are actually concerned about. And now you're trying to turn this around by claiming Duke is avoiding an issue? And putting words in his mouth by claiming he is putting words in your mouth when no such thing happened? All that just to avoid talking about the core issues in this thread?

Are you a professional gaslighter or something?

Before this AI nonsense, I used to recommend (or straight up install) Firefox to friends, acquaintances and family, but I don't think I ever will again. I feel grossed out.

@jaffathecake @barubary but are you capable of actually directly addressing and engaging with the fact that multiple people keep on telling you "no, I don't want that thing that you're talking about"?

it appears that you have an impression that people here are hostile towards your responses. I posit that _your_ continual evasion and non-engagement of this matter is why. as many others have.

so, y'know, maybe try other, better responses.. up to you tho

@froztbyte @barubary I don't doubt the honesty of people saying they don't want a particular feature to be available to them, or anyone else. Given it's more of a statement, I'm not sure what the acceptable response is, other than "ack".

I posted this a few weeks ago which I felt was a broad acknowledgement https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115859962325484652

@jaffathecake @barubary “Not able to action” is quite load bearing

I offer to you: you could’ve made another poll, such as the one that outperformed yours. And then you could have taken those values and said in a meeting “hey, it kinda seems none of our users want this”

So I want to ask: are you under a directive that explicitly told you not to do that? Or perhaps under some implicit kind of situation (e.g. “I know $manager won’t listen”) which made you not even consider that?

@froztbyte @barubary

> are you under a directive that explicitly told you not to do that?

No.

> Or perhaps under some implicit kind of situation (e.g. “I know $manager won’t listen”) which made you not even consider that?

No, but a poll that gives me the evidence to say "hey, you know that place that has a strong representation of people who don't like AI? They don't like AI." did not seem like a good use of my time.

@jaffathecake @barubary okay so if the (for lack of a better term) problem is that gathering data from the fedi might be biased, what about shipping a survey and linking it in update notes?

Firefox 148, pop it into the release notes. "hey, we've done this update. also, we want to know whether you want us to work on this stuff". you'll get answers from a fairly solid bit of your userbase. it'd be quite interesting to see those numbers, don't you think?

@jaffathecake @barubary just to clarify, with "user research" do you mean the polls on bsky/fedi/etc, or were there other surveys conducted in places?

(asking because I don't think I saw any such surveys anywhere, and I'm _moderately_ on top of seeing this stuff go around)

@jaffathecake if it's not information you currently have, doesn't that leave the possibility that they might in fact reflect a negative or inconclusive outcome in polling?

I mean, I get that you don't have eyes on this yourself and that you can't speak to it, I'm not putting this on *you*. but do you see how it could be possible that, without these results being open, someone could be going full steam ahead _in spite_ of the findings?

@froztbyte I suppose that's literally true. But, I also think a mountain is made out of the molehill that is AI in Firefox. The vast majority of the dev time is on other things.

To be clear, I'm not someone who has personally found AI generally useful in browsers (aside from a couple of one-off automations), but my feelings aren't strong enough to deny those features to others.

@jaffathecake @froztbyte
To be clear. Making commercial chatbots available as first class citizen of the browser knowing their baggage in terms of ecological and social destruction is OK with you ?
Making non-authored, non-reviewed translations/summaries available as a first-class citizen of the browser doesn't even light an ethical warning ?

These could be available to users *who want them* without being promoted on the level of a standard experience of the web browser, who's denied anything?

@ddelemeny @froztbyte I don't personally use the chatbot feature.

I do use translation, with full awareness that it's a machine translation, and I consider being able to read parts of the web that aren't in my native language a wonderful thing, and I'm glad it's done in a privacy-preserving way.

The models were downloaded when I asked for the translation to happen. They weren't there beforehand.

@jaffathecake @froztbyte you aren't reading a part of the web. The translation was never on the web. Nobody had the opportunity to make sure it's right and nobody ever will. Ethics go farther than privacy.

I don't care if you personally don't use the chatbot feature. The existence of it in the default build will actively normalize and promote it to a userbase larger than the population of Brazil. Is social irresponsibility part of the manifesto here ?

@ddelemeny @froztbyte how do you feel about a11y tooling that analyses images to describe them? Therefore providing people with visibility into things they otherwise wouldn't have.

That also is generating content in a format that was never on the web. Nobody had the opportunity to make sure it's right and nobody ever will.

@jaffathecake @froztbyte exactly the same. You don't go around the ethical problem of the absence of authorship by invoking pathos (and borrowing legitimacy from disabled folks is morally sketchy to put it mildly).

Even more so as available technologies are far remote from being able to convey intent, context and nuance. This is misplaced half-baked solutionism.

@ddelemeny @jaffathecake @froztbyte Why do these creeps routinely weaponize users with accessibility needs to make their case when those users on balance are also *against* this shit?

This is so damn intellectually dishonest. Every time I see it in some AI Bro's socail media thread, youtube comments, etc people who use accessibility tools state definitely to not use them to make their case.

And yet you assholes won't stop. And you get furious when someone supposedly puts words in your mouth!

@reflex @ddelemeny @froztbyte There's no dishonesty here. Using a local model to help with alt text in PDFs is one of the features controlled by Firefox's AI control, so it's relevant to the topic.

I asked a clarifying question and got an answer.