[thu2111]

Well, she did start the layoff message with something about systemic racism.

But you're right in general. To anyone who thinks Mozilla might build politically neutral products, case for the prosecution:

https://i.imgur.com/FN2L5ed.png

It's obviously very problematic for the CEO of a browser company to have such overt politics. Who can take Mozilla seriously when they claim to be defending openness and freedom on the internet? Their CEO writes op-eds about the problem of online misinformation whilst blaming her own layoffs on COVID. Actions don't match stated principles.

[layoutIfNeeded]

Yikes, that screenshot looks pretty bad. Are you sure they are not tailoring it to the individual users' tastes? This can't be the default of their recommendation engine...

[thu2111]

Why would someone bother to make that series of screenshots if it was something they'd explicitly requested?

Still, I figured I'd check to see what I get. I can't figure out how to get these "Recommended by Pocket" sites on my Firefox new tab page, but I only just signed up, so perhaps it takes a while to appear.

The Pocket Discover tab on their website seems like the closest thing to it. It has an extremely small collection of sources for its stories and with absolutely no range of perspectives at all. They're all metropolitan left outlets. I get: the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Quartz, James Clear (?), the Verge, Vox, the Washington Post, the Guardian and some Medium articles.

So, pretty good if you live in New York or Washington, I guess. I don't even live in America so this selection isn't so hot. Here's a sample of recommended story headlines:

"The Doomsday Invention: Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?"

"America's gun problem, explained"

"How exercise shapes you, far beyond the gym"

"Buying organic veggies at the supermarket is a waste of money"

"The true cost of being a black teacher"

"A pregnant woman with COVID-19 was dying, with one decision, her doctor's saved three lives"

"The rise of American authoritarianism" (it's about Trump, of course)

"One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgement of the child-free"

There are a few stories that might interest me here that I didn't cite, like "How vulnerable is GPS" (in the New York Times, of course). I personally seem to get more self-help and less woke content than in the screenshot I posted. But you get the idea. If you hate Trump, love any publication with New York in the title, eat quinoa, capitalise Black, and think children are a burden, you'll love Pocket. If you aren't like that, it has nothing for you.

Oddly, Pocket seems really buggy. A lot of recommended stories under Discover that come from Medium don't seem to have scraped the title correctly, so the title ends up being a raw HTTPS URL, complete with fragment specifier. One recommended story is just "Redirecting..." so they don't even follow redirects properly.

It feels like this experience sums up Mozilla under Mitchell Baker.