Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Pacabel 4326 days ago
I've been seeing these ultra-defensive "Are you an astro turfer or are you just really angry at Mozilla for some reason?"-style responses more and more from the Mozilla community lately, especially when somebody has raised some perfectly good and legitimate points about deficiencies with one of their products.

When discussing Firefox OS, it's perfectly reasonable and relevant to bring up issues surrounding the quality and the ease of acquiring devices that run Firefox OS. These factors have an absolutely massive impact on the experience of everyone involved, from developers to end users, and will directly influence the ability of Firefox OS to capture any substantial share of the market.

Attacking the people who raise awareness of these very real problems with these unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about "astroturfing" or weird accusations of "anger at Mozilla" won't do Mozilla or anyone else any good.

Instead, maybe listen to what people are saying! The limited availability of phones running Firefox OS is causing people problems, and affecting its adoption and usefulness. The devices it has been available on so far have not been very good, even compared to where Android and iOS were years ago. People aren't just making these problems up; they're very real problems! The same goes for problems that people bring up about Firefox, or Rust, or any of Mozilla's other offerings.

Admitting to the existence of these problems, and then resolving them, will have a much more positive impact than attacking anyone who happens to bring them up. The fact that people have to bring them up again and again indicates that they aren't being resolved properly, and that more work is needed.

1 comments

As I said above, what does any of this have to do with the article at hand? This article was not about adoption or competition. If I were being defensive I would have tried to explain all the things I like about Firefox OS, or talked about things wrong with Android. My issue was that it didn't have anything to do with the article and I have a hard time understanding why anyone would bother.
You do realize that the submission discussion doesn't have to pertain solely to what was in the linked to article, right?

The topic is Firefox OS. Anything having to do with Firefox OS is worth discussing, and is perfectly valid discussion. That includes its problems. That includes how it is (or is failing to) compete with established players like iOS and Android. That includes the sorry state of the devices it comes with.

Deviation is perfectly fine. The point of the discussion is to share ideas. It's not to engage in mindless affirmation of whatever the linked-to article may say.