[kaveh_h]

Some people do these type of contribution or charity work not just to do some good but also to feel some autonomy and mastery in a world were much of the regular top down driven drudgery work does not provide much of that feeling. These people are canaries in the coal mine. I expect more people feel a loss of purpose and rise of anxiety and depression in the world.

[ants_everywhere]

Conversely, it's a bit strange for a for-profit company like Mozilla Corporation to rely on volunteer labor through its non-profit parent Mozilla Foundation to perform customer support.

There was a period where every company was trying to "crowd source" free labor. It died off because people didn't like working for corporations for free.

I can see why they have it under Mozilla.org. And lots of companies have community support.

But I do think we should ask ourselves whether companies have some sort of moral obligation to continue relying on unpaid labor because it might make the unpaid laborers feel a sense of meaning. I'm very sympathetic to the need to have a sense of meaning. But I'm less sympathetic to for-profit companies relying on unpaid labor and especially to the idea that we should encourage more of it.

[iAMkenough]

There was probably a more tactful way to shift labor from passionate volunteers to soulless AI.

I too would be upset if an organization threw out a decade of translation work without any warning or discussion, in favor of a robot pretending to understand my language and failing.

[ants_everywhere]

I agree there could have been more tact, and I would probably be upset too if a bunch of my work got replaced by automation. I would even feel that way if the automation was better. I've criticized Mozilla extensively in the past, and I would see a clumsy rollout as consistent with my concerns about them.

The difficulty with a post like this is it brings out a primal anti-technology impulse in all of us. But once you clear away the piling-on and emotionally charged hot takes there isn't much here to talk about.

This post, aside from a statement of intent to quit, is a report that was made about the bot. Mozilla made an invitation to address the concerns. All of that seems normal. Rollout with mistake -> bug report -> attempting to understand what went wrong. But the bug report contains unrealistic demands that seem almost rhetorical and the attempt to figure out what went wrong is being met with scorn, as in the top comment of this HN discussion.

> passionate volunteers to soulless AI.

Humans don't have souls either as I'm sure you know :-P. To post this comment, you're using a soulless computer that took jobs away from human computers. You probably listen to music made with soulless synthesizers that took jobs from musicians. You no doubt take photos with soulless cameras that took jobs from painters.

I think we have to be clear to ourselves that, although the transition to automation will be painful, nobody is going to prevent technology from advancing. So we have to find a way to use it to build the future we want, not try to tear it down as soulless or evil.

[hitarpetar]

not converse, orthogonal

[rramadass]

Exactly right!

With the AI juggernaut picking up steam, i expect this is going to happen sooner rather than later.

That said, Mozilla clearly handled this the wrong way; they should have informed the volunteers before throwing the switch.

[crote]

> they should have informed the volunteers before throwing the switch

No, they should have involved the volunteers in the design process.

[Blikkentrekker]

Which I feel honestly in part explains why so many prominent figures in Free software development seem to have some mental issues to be honest. They in a way remind me of that person who at one point was responsible for over half of all edits on the Scots Wikipedia.

Even the paid professionals often started to work for free and then were hired by some company and the reality is that someone who is good at something and willing to do it for free is either a very good Samaritan, or there is some other issue at stake and in the end prominent free software figures often have fairly heated public keyboard wars over things with each other and most of all seem strangely fiercely loyal tribalists who suffer from an extreme case of n.i.h.-syndrome.

[crote]

Some people just want to contribute to a common cause. Some people just want to spend five minutes of their time to fix that one annoying papercut which been bothering them for ages, others just enjoy working together with friendly people to achieve something tangible they can be proud of.

In my opinion one of the biggest benefits of Github to the open-source community is that contributing now has extremely low barriers. It is absolutely trivial to put an "edit this page" link in your documentation which lets a complete stranger fix a typo and open a pull request within seconds - and seeing your fix go live within a few hours is absolutely magical. That kind of trivial contribution is a gateway drug to becoming a valued community member, and it is absolutely essential to maintaining a healthy ecosystem around open-source projects.

[jwpapi]

Yeah I’m not even sure it’s easy to decide which side is in the right here and it’s not as simple as people think it is.

Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.

What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads.

Unfortunately these things are really gray, but you really can’t expect a company to keep you paying in good will.

[jacquesm]

> I’m not even sure it’s easy to decide which side is in the right here and it’s not as simple as people think it is.

- No prior communications.

- No discussion about what uses the contributed information was being put to.

- No discussion about the release and the parameters around the operation of the bot.

- No discussion about whether or not this was a desirable in the first place (with the community, not just internally).

- Flippant tone to someone who is clearly severely insulted.

If it was a paid job and you treated the person who did it like this it would already be beyond rude, if it is a volunteer group then it is more than enough to throw in the towel. This isn't gray.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> if it is a volunteer group then it is more than enough to throw in the towel

I do a lot of pro bono stuff. Most of my work is free, and I spend a lot of time, trying to get others to pitch in, as well.

Treating "free" labor like shit, is a common, and self-destructive trait. Looks a lot like that's exactly what happened, here.

I could go on, but I won't.

[jwpapi]

Ohhh shit it was volunteer pardon me!

Yes no gray area!

My comment was assuming that it’s a paid role and also just commenting on the process of translating with ai vs without

[vintermann]

Who knows?

Everyone whose native language is not English knows. Seriously, people with this attitude should be forced to run their browser and mail client with a plugin to run everything through a couple of machine translation roundtrips. Give it two months, and I guarantee you'll understand.

[avhception]

My first language is German, but I've got most of my devices set to English. Because of that, Youtube started machine-translating German video titles and audio into English at random. The audio quality is just bad, everything sounds muffled. And the translations are often complete garbage. I absolutely detest this "feature".

[CalRobert]

I’m in the Netherlands and I get ads for Bol.com on YouTube now with narration that would be more appropriate to Fitter, Happier. I’m surprised advertisers are ok with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tepztGLNYcE

[avhception]

I have a feeling that advertisers have yet to catch up. In Germany, the supermarket chain Lidl recently started running a pretty heavy advertisement campaign on Youtube. Of course, Youtube auto-translated the advertisement into English. The effect is really, really uncanny. "LIDL IS WORTH IT! JA!"

If I were Lidl, I'd shut that down immediately.

[agos]

this is hilarious, thanks

[rtpg]

the wild thing is you _know_ there are so many people at YouTube who speak multiple languages and have issues with this. What engineering team is only filled with single-language-speaking people, especially at a prestige-y place like Google?

[greatgib]

It happened to me in French also, one day I was looking at a video that was trendy, podcast like, and the voices were more than shitty, like a badly translated movie. I looked at comments and everyone was praising this video, so it did not make any sense to me. Until I discovered that Youtube somehow decided to auto enable this feature that I never asked for.

[Gud]

Now imagine you are like me, someone who travels the world for work. I get everything in Dutch, German, Swedish, Finnish, Arabic and of course Schweizerdeutsch. And some other languages.

There used to be an “international English” setting.

[iAMkenough]

Pretty black and white to me.

Mozilla destroyed decades of work on a production server without even discussing it with the passionate volunteers that provided them free labor for decades. Didn’t even evaluate on a staging server to check for quality issues.

The AI isn’t the focus of the issue. The management decision to disregard and disrespect their own unpaid contributors and their organization’s history is a clear indication of Mozilla’s current and future priorities.

[pseudalopex]

> Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.

Mozilla should have discussed this with the translators in advance at least.

> What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads.

My impression was marsf was a volunteer.

[Symbiote]

> who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.

The Japanese translation community leader knows, as will many members of that community, and other Japanese speakers.

This is not difficult.

[crote]

> who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators

Everyone speaking more than one language knows. Human translations for things like software are bad enough as-is, but automated translations are universally horrible.

I set all of my software to English despite it not being my native language, simply because a lot of concepts don't translate cleanly and end up with forced and cringeworthy phrasing. Combine that with the un-Google-ability of translated errors and issues, and going for an interface in the native English verson is a no-brainer.

And that's with translations done by actual humans! Sites like Youtube have tried "helpfully" pushing machine translations on me for a looong time, and it is painfully clear to anyone speaking both the source language and the target language that the translation is absolute garbage and essentially unusable.

In fact, I barely speak any German (got a year or two of it in high school, but my grades were fairly embarrassing), but I prefer struggling with the native version over a machine translation. Given my knowledge of German-adjacent languages I can mostly make out the meaning of the original, and there's always the dictionary for the handful of words I'm not familiar with.