End of Japanese community

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446

by phantomathkg • 9 months ago

969 785 9 months ago

support.mozilla.org

barbazoo• 9 months ago

They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.

Could this have been a mistake rather than a malicious act?

alcide• 9 months ago

Mozilla has offered to call the OP, too. I’m curious on the outcome.

benatkin2• 9 months ago

They said sorry for how you feel about it which is insincere and unhelpful.

layer8• 9 months ago

The third, more likely option is that it was a careless act. Clearly a mistake in any case.

small_scombrus4• 9 months ago

What's the saying?

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

omoikane• 9 months ago

If this was a mistake, the proper response might have been "sorry, we applied automation in error, those changes have been rolled back while we fix the process that allowed it to happen". And not "call with us to talk about this further".

move-on-by3• 9 months ago

At the very least, ‘we will discuss how this could of been handled differently’, not I’m sorry you feel this way.

detaro8• 9 months ago

Then say so if someone complains about it? "Shoot, we accidentally ran it in the wrong mode, sorry about that, I'll look into someone fixing it ASAP" is a lot better than "We're sorry for how you feel".

drtgh• 9 months ago

By one side, we all know[1] that automated translations are always inaccurate, and this is specially deep with translations into languages like Japanese.

On the other hand, we all know that LLMs are guaranteed to introduce an error in the result, therefore always needs human supervision.

Also there are other details like the 72 hours timeframe they comment...

Therefore, to me, introducing LLMs without designing them just as an usable tool (UI/UX) to support the work -of the volunteer community- doesn't sound like a mistake, but sounds like an "I don't care at all, get out of the way".

[1] who speaks more than one language at least.

charlieyu16• 9 months ago

The damage is done when the mistake was allowed to happen.

ares623• 9 months ago

This is rich

We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

The post literally starts with a list of grievances. Maybe ask the AI for an executive summary and the key points.

pseudalopex6• 9 months ago

Some grievances were vague. It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. What specific guidelines did it not follow? It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost. What was not localized?

Mozilla's response should not be limited to clarifying these grievances. But it could have been all the staff member who responded could do.

totetsu2• 9 months ago

These ones? https://github.com/mozilla-japan/translation/wiki/L10N-Guide...

Looking through that wiki there seems to be a lot of things that ML would get wrong.

sitharus2• 9 months ago

Those would be the guidelines that all translation contributors are expected to follow, which are given to all prospective translators.

It sounds like Mozilla just turned on the machine without consulting the human translators to see if the machine actually worked in a useful manner.

crazygringo27• 9 months ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted, you're exactly right.

The person replying is probably not an expert in this. But they want to get more details so they can figure out how to get it to the right people with more information.

This is how it's supposed to work.

henearkr• 9 months ago

In the replying posts, there is mention of a discovered bug that could have resulted in most of the reported problems.

It is normal to want to discuss in order to check if that was the bug, in which case fixing the bug would have solved the issues.

Timon3• 9 months ago

Given that the bug is a well-known and inherent flaw of the technology used, I don't understand what good this would do. It's not enough to say "whoops, we didn't think the machine would do the thing the machine is known to do".

To fix the bug the architecture of the feature would have to be different, and that was completely obvious from the start.

cut3• 9 months ago

Its obvious mozilla doesnt care and wont listen or change by that single, stupid comment. AI response or an idiot human, either way what an insult of a comment. Everything was clearly listed out! Just read what was written! Reach out privatley!

Mozilla turned on shitty AI no one wants without talking to anyone and now wont stop it when its breaking everything and instead just publicly placate.

Not even an apology but a fucking insult!!!

"sorry for your feelings" They can feel however they want you fuckup how about you say sorry for fucking up all the hard work with your shitty product pushes no one wants

Hnrobert42• 9 months ago

Yes, and the poster wants to understand them.

How would you have responded?

stockerta• 9 months ago

Not like a dick like he did. No lets jump into a quick call while ignoring everything OP said. It's clear a quick call will not solve this. Turn off the AI roll back all the shit it caused is the bare minimum.

watwut2• 9 months ago

Are you saying they were hard to understand or badly written? Because to me they seem to be crystal clear explanation of issues. I also did not concluded that the leaving person is "struggling" or generally need help.

rendaw2• 9 months ago

In the thread.

johnnyanmac12• 8 months ago

"I'm. Sorry to hear this. I am going to send this message to Team XYZ and see what we can do to better improve Mozilla"

Still might not do anything, but as a CM that's as much of a job as I can do.

adeptima• 9 months ago

10+ years in Japan. The message here is much deeper from my perspective. “Let’s jump on the call” is not the solution. The guy was stripped off of his face. I love Japan for being human. Small business bar or restaurant with 3 tables. Not everything should be streamlined for a quick call solution… the process was pushed on his head. Google nemawashi decision making process

alwa3• 9 months ago

I did as you suggested with respect to “nemawashi.” I read about that and “ringi,” and I’m glad I did. Even to get just the gist of what I’m sure is a thin interpretation: that nemawashi refers to a “laying-the-groundwork” process of circulating a proposal between peer-level counterparts, before formalizing it and proposing to act on it.

Much less crashing in with it in the form of a “SumoBot,” as Mozilla seems to have done to its non-English communities… (with the disclaimer that I have zero insight into Mozilla’s process here outside of this writer’s account).

It puts a name to a considerate consensus-based way to approach change, that seems humane (and effective) in any culture—leave it to the Japanese to have a specific term for it…

martin_henk• 9 months ago

common sense... no real need for digging into japanese culture and so on. really no idea why Mozilla is so disrespectful to it's volunteers. well, that sweet 400m a year from Google... no need for volunteers anymore, eh

TheJoeMan• 9 months ago

That reminds me of internet RFC’s… like by the time they are formally published, no the author is not interested in your “comment”.

pengaru• 9 months ago

We Americans call this garnering buy-in.

p0w3n3d2• 9 months ago

I predict that these times of excessive trust in AI during decision making will be written in history books at some point of time. Providing that there will be books at all.

I already suspect that Duolingo destroyed real people's recording of Spanish conversations and replaced them with AI. For example I can quite often hear continental Spanish accent which has never been taught to me before (as I started with Duolingo as a freshman) - it used to be always American Spanish accent. Wrongly cut conversions is another matter.

xaedes• 9 months ago

It puts a name to a considerate consensus-based way to approach change

When reading about nemawashi I immediately thought about its usage in software refactoring.

This is something you often intuitively do when making bigger refactors. Lay the foundations before actually doing it. Affected code parts and stakeholders should not be surprised by one big change. Instead they should be consulted before hand, building consensus, modify the planned big refactor itself and preparing the individual parts for it by small changes. Otherwise you will encounter a lot of friction, introduce bugs, etc.

It is very nice to have a proper term for this.

ekianjo3• 9 months ago

nemawashi

Long time in Japan too, I would not consider newamashi as being Japan's strengths.

krick3• 9 months ago

I can imagine what you mean, but since I am not in Japan, it would be interesting why you feel that way.

ezoe9• 9 months ago

Exactly, this is just a 面子(face) problem.

Also, his demanding of not using his work for AI training is nonsense. Because entire articles, this one included is published under a Creative Commons license.

Didn't he agree on that?

Mozilla must reject his further contribution because he stated he don't understand the term of Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.

kuschku3• 9 months ago

Is the AI published under the same CC license, with attribution?

wartywhoa232• 9 months ago

Creative Commons License was created without any AI in mind.

And

Licensees may copy, distribute, display, perform and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they GIVE THE AUTHOR or licensor THE CREDITS

rester3242• 9 months ago

I am not sure I am buying this. There is nothing human about japanese business procedures. Most japanese business procedures usually only serve micro managing purposes, and the nemawashi procedure is basically stripping people who were not consulted before, from giving their honest input and impact in the decision making. In my opinion it creates more problems than it solves

jesterson3• 9 months ago

Not everything should be streamlined for a quick call solution

If you have a better solution to correct an error or solve a problem than having a call/meeting and openly discuss situation and possible resolutions - I would love to know about that.

port115• 9 months ago

The response was condescending and very… American. The call ensures what, that you'll be more receiving to their grievances? That nothing is on the record? A lot of people don't want to jump in calls, ever. The initial response should've validated that the community feels slighted, that they should've brought them onboard for the decision making, etc.

Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.

watwut2• 9 months ago

If you have a better solution to correct an error or solve a problem than having a call/meeting and openly discuss situation and possible resolutions - I would love to know about that.

I do, actually. You first read what the other person wrote. Then your response will take whatever they wrote into account. If they did not expressed themselves clearly, you explain what it is that you do not understand. The "We want to make sure we truly understand what you're struggling with." is wholly inappropriate if the only reason you do not understand is that you did not read what they wrote.

Second, you dont suggest the other person is struggling with something, unless they are actually struggling with something. The original post does not show someone struggling at all.

Tl;dr if you want to "openly discuss situation and possible resolutions" you dont start by ignoring what the other person wrote. This response makes it very clear that manager does not intend to openly discuss the situation or possible resolutions, the manager is not taking the complaint seriously at all.

Jach2• 9 months ago

Written communication is usually better and allows for more clarity, investigation, preparation, careful thought, and exploring of solutions. When it's not better it's usually because one party doesn't like to read or write and so avoids it as much as they can.

skywhopper4• 9 months ago

How is a private call about a community issue an “open” discussion?

trallnag• 9 months ago

"I love Japan for being human". What does this even mean? Immediately followed by something about food?

pezezin4• 9 months ago

Be glad he didn't mention that Japan has four seasons...

agnishom2• 9 months ago

Isn't "nemawashi" just a term for building rapport and sensible networking practices, but in Japanese?

guicho271828• 9 months ago

Japanese here. You got it right. That message is an ultimatum. No mercy for the dishonorable.

ants_everywhere3• 9 months ago

I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.
I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.

It's Mozilla's data...

explicit violation to the Mozilla mission

I'm not sure what this is referring to. I don't see any explicit violation of Mozilla.org's mission. If anything it seems consistent with that mission to provide universal translation with quick turnaround.

jahsome8• 9 months ago

I'm not really able to understand the finer details but I think I picked up enough to get the broad strokes.

Really though, all I needed to see was the phrase "jump on a quick call" to form an irrationally strong opinion. That phrase instantly warms my entire body with rage.

chao-• 9 months ago

I am fascinated by the nuanced opinions people have about word choice. What phrase would you use to ask someone to discuss a matter, but which you feel would be more appropriate for this kind of situation?

OsrsNeedsf2P• 9 months ago

There is nothing you can do, because you already traded away the community for your AI project and money. The same corpo goons who don't see anything past their slop projects are the one who use the "jump on a quick call" lingo

stonogo2• 9 months ago

Asking someone to "hop on a call" is phrasing you use with someone you are close with, not someone whose work you've just destroyed and is no longer interested in a relationship with you.

The fact that the preceding apology was absolutely awful does not help. "I'm sorry for how you feel" is wrong, since nobody asked them to react to "feelings" but the clearly delineated problems with the automation that Mozilla rolled out.

Asking to discuss something like this over synchronous voice comms is basically asking to go off the record and handle things privately. Sometimes that's appropriate, but if that's what the correspondant wanted they would have asked for it.

These three things combine to tell anyone who is paying attention that this is damage control, not meaningful engagement, and it's offensive to act this way toward someone who has put this much time into your project.

davidclark2• 9 months ago

My guess would be the anger comes from implication that is a possible solution at all. This type of “hop on a call” request is not usually actually designed to “truly understand what you're struggling with.” (words from the post)

Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.

This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.

jffry• 9 months ago

"I'm sorry for how you feel about it" isn't exactly an empathetic opening stance

jacquesm7• 9 months ago

'We're sorry you feel this way' implies that this is the fault of the person that feels that way, not of the party that made them feel that way. Given the very clear message this was entirely uncalled for. This is not the kind of feeling that goes away by being talked down to like that, it might go away after a reversal of a very bad policy decision and a very sincere apology about a mistake that was made and even then the damage is severe enough that I would not be surprised if the person that was slighted decided to stick to their decision.

Daub• 9 months ago

'I'm sorry for how you feel' is in the same class as 'I'm sorry if my words hurt you'. They are both classes of non-apologies.

'I'm sorry that our actions caused such distress' come a bit closer to being a true apology.

Importantly, 'if' was changed to 'that'.

BrenBarn3• 9 months ago

The right thing to do is undo what you did and then ask to talk about it. There is nothing the person can say to make up for the destructive effects they took.

dmitrygr• 9 months ago

After you fuck up and before you ask to discuss the matter, you APOLOGIZE!

tehwebguy• 9 months ago

It’s really not a word choice thing (though it’s definitely the favorite word choice of orgs who are committed to not doing anything about it).

It’s that the complaint is descriptive on 5 or so actual problems and a couple of impacts that stem from them and the response doesn’t address any of them, it just looks like an attempt to take this issue out of the public space.

padolsey• 9 months ago

I mean, almost anything would be better. But here's my swing:

  > I'm so sorry about this. We definitely screwed up here and want to
  > fix things. We want to chat to you in a call if you're able?
  > We will stop changing things, issue a moratorium on AI while we
  > figure things out. You and communities like yours are central to
  > our entire existence and purpose at Mozilla.

aleph_minus_one6• 9 months ago

What phrase would you use to ask someone to discuss a matter, but which you feel would be more appropriate for this kind of situation?

The only thing to ask for here are some clarifications and expanded explanations so that the original text does not get misunderstood. If the Mozilla representative does see such potential points he can perfectly ask for them publicly.

cyberrock• 9 months ago

I suspect GP has had negative experiences with that specific phrase, "hop on a [quick] call", hence their "irrational rage". I also hate seeing that phrase at work:

1. "Hop" and "quick" suggests very simple matters, so to text-based people like me it doesn't really make sense why we wouldn't be able to resolve this matter asynchronously over text.

1b. Alternatively, the matter isn't actually trivial, so we should've had a proper meeting with other stakeholders instead of the caller debating me solo in a "quick" call.

2. I'm in the middle of something important or just hit my stride, and the caller is completely derailing my train of thought instead of just scheduling a meeting.

2b. The worst outcome is when I agree to "hop on", but the caller has gone AFK within 5 minutes of sending their invitation, so I'm just quietly seething by myself in the call.

3. The caller and I can't understand each other's accents so I'm trying to accommodate for the both of us by communicating through text, and I find it difficult to bring this incompatibility up without getting fired. I also had a caller who always whispered at his laptop mic so I had to turn up the subwoofers to have a chance of understanding him.

But we should point out that "quick" doesn't exist in Kiki's message. I think that goes back to point #1 about how the specific word "hop" can imply that the issue is trivial. Or maybe we're all going insane over unnecessary ad-hoc meetings.

Unrelated: I hate to appear anti-remote work, but I've noticed that remote workers tend to send more of these ad-hoc invitations, even more than getting tapped on the shoulder in the office. Are you all doing well out there?

jahsome8• 9 months ago

Jump on a quick call to discuss further? I want to fully make sure I understand your question.

crazygringo27• 9 months ago

Why?

It seems like someone who has no awareness of the problem, who wants to learn more about the problem, and the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails.

When software goes wrong, you need as much information as possible to figure it how to fix it.

jogu6• 9 months ago

From my read, the software didn't go wrong. It did exactly what they intended it to -- machine translations replaced handwritten translations provided by community volunteers. Seems like a pretty big middle finger to those volunteers.

The lead realized that Mozilla doesn't care about their opinion (they did this without discussing with them) nor do they care about the work they were doing (by replacing their work with machine translations). A "quick call" doesn't solve this.

kerakaali• 9 months ago

the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails

I don't disagree with your statement, but I read the sentence: "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?" with a similar gross reaction as the OP comment did.

Reading that in response to Marsf's original message of airing grievances and feelings of disrespect towards his work felt entirely tone-deaf and corporate in nature. Especially in context of this being in response to the Japanese team, where Japanese business communication norms are often at odds with the American standard.

You might think that this method of communication is inefficient, but the heart of the matter seems that the Japanese team finds the very emphasis on efficiency as disrespectful when it comes at the cost of the human element of respect.

hattmall• 9 months ago

But he fairly in depth described the problem and his reasoning for why it is a problem. There's nothing really to "jump on a quick call" about without actually first addressing the issues. Plus it just sounds, for lack of a better term, retarded. First off, in comparison to basically any other communication, calls aren't quick. Much less the one that you have to schedule around time zones. Calls require focused attention which if you are used to multi-tasking are a huge drain. Secondly I don't really feel like going too deep, but the use of the verb jump is like a bludgeon to the frontal lobe of anyone that's had to spend time listening to buzzword heavy C-suite speeches when they could have been doing their actual work.

Very bill lumbergh energy.

rtpg8• 9 months ago

I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

- No apology

- No "we stopped the bot for now"

"We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining". Maybe not what the person meant but how anyone is going to read it.

The original sin here is Mozilla just enabling this without any input from the active translation community.

This isn't a new problem, loads of Japanese translations from tech companies have been garbage for a while. People sticking things into machine translation, translators missing context so having absolutely nothing to go on. Circle CI, when they announced their Japan office, put out a statement that was _clearly_ written in English first, then translated without any effort of localization. Plenty of UIs just have "wrong text" in actions. etc etc.

Anyways the point is just that one side of this relationship here clearly cares about the problem way less, and _even when presented with that fact_, does not even pretend to be actually sorry for the damage they are causing.

roncesvalles• 9 months ago

"quick call?" in corporatespeak means "I believe our disagreement to be a minor misunderstanding that can be clarified in a few minutes of conversation"

In a company you should never ever "quick call" someone (especially on a group forum) who has presented a genuine list of grievances against whatever you're doing, unless you're subtly trying to pull rank to override those grievances.

anal_reactor• 9 months ago

The thing about English language is that, just like Japanese, it's highly contextual and has different constructs for expressing different level of respect. The problem is, English speakers are completely unaware of this, so either they get it right based on intuition, or they fuck up. In this case, the guy used "I'm your superior and you'll do what I say" mode, while the appropriate mode would've been "oh shit I'm sorry how do I fix this".

tremon3• 9 months ago

A person who has no awareness of the problem should not be the first responder in cases like this, that's just a recipe for further escalation.

jahsome8• 9 months ago

the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails

I feel that's subjective. Personally, I both receive and distribute information much more efficiently via written text.

Text also has the added bonus of being redistributable which is extremely valuable in collaborative scenarios.

Waterluvian2• 9 months ago

I’m not sure those who speak like that are equipped to understand how offensive their words and tone can be.

It suggests a decision can be reversed with a quick call, which questions one’s choices or conviction. As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care. It’s such an unserious tone to a moment that’s very serious to the other.

jacquesm7• 9 months ago

As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care.

I guess it acts as a mirror of sorts though, because that's precisely how this decision appears to have been made in the first place. But it's clear that whoever represents Mozilla there is already assuming the fault lies with the person that just got kicked.

netsharc• 9 months ago

The first sentence of the top reply ("quick call") was already cunty:

I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel ...

That may seem like an apology, but it's more a dismissing their issue as "that's a you problem".

Groxx3• 9 months ago

I think it's because it's almost never accompanied by "we may have fucked up, please help us understand how to fix it now and in the future".

It's almost always (like this time) "I'm sorry you feel that way, please spend more of your free time<EOF>", and sometimes (like this time) "[we're doing it anyway but maybe we'll make some changes]".

It feels insulting because it is insulting. The decision has been made, they just want to not feel bad about you being insulted.

pjc502• 9 months ago

It suggests a decision can be reversed with a quick call

Oh no, both parties understand that the call isn't open to the possibility of changing the decision, it's just to manage the emotions of the person who's being run over by it.

withinrafael• 9 months ago

Agree. "what you're struggling with" did it for me.

iAMkenough3• 9 months ago

I also agree. For me it was “sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel…”

“Sorry for your feelings” comes off as dismissive and avoiding taking ownership for the lost work and years of volunteer contributions.

aleph_minus_one6• 9 months ago

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831614 jack1243star pointed out the possibility that English might not be Kiki's first language and they perhaps even have used ChatGPT to make the comment sound more polite.

im3w1l• 9 months ago

I think a phone call can be better for resolving a conflict because it allows a more rapid back and forth, you can adapt in real time to how the other person is responding. If someone gets upset about some word choice like here, you can quickly say "I'm sorry I didn't mean it like that" and get back to the actual topic over how the work should be organized instead of some superficial detail.

In the end it may boil down to some strong hatred for AI, this seems to be very common recently and "I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs" certainly points that way. If that is the root cause then it may be impossible to resolve to the satisfaction of both sides.

rendaw2• 9 months ago

It wasn't mentioned in other replies, but "jump on a quick call" also means very strongly "let's move to a place with no public record and private participation where nobody else can join in".

Then later, if it comes up again, they can just say "well we discussed this in a call previously and decided it was best to do it anyway" cutting off discussion and not presenting the reasoning.

mock-possum• 9 months ago

Just record the needing, have an ai transcription service take notes. Then there’s a record.

reddalo3• 9 months ago

Exactly, never accept a switch to a private place when you're trying to gather attention on public matters. It could and it will be used against you later on.

rwmj5• 9 months ago

Also a call is a place where we'll try and grind you down until you agree with us.

rf15• 9 months ago

Shoot first, jump on a quick call later.

hitekker• 9 months ago

I used the "lets jump on a quick call" tactic once at work. Other party rejected it; they said they've made their position clear and didn't need to say anything more.

I was impressed. They actually did make their position clear, and in public, whereas I was trying to smooth things over in private. Me trying to influence and cajole behind the scenes was insult to the risk they took by putting themselves out there.

A good lesson in respect.

jahsome8• 9 months ago

It's commendable you took the opportunity to reflect and learn from that experience. Great work, and thanks for having the integrity to share that experience with others.

duxup• 9 months ago

Yeah it’s a strange request. No acknowledgment or even indication that the other person understands the issues raised.

And they’re happy to eat up more of that person’s time, probably ask them to explain all over again. Also it seems they don’t think it is worth a long call… just a quick one.

Aardwolf• 9 months ago

It's actually the "We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with" which ignores the whole original post that did it for me.

jahsome8• 9 months ago

I always read "call?" as, "I won't bother trying to understand what you took the time to present, can you craft a tailored summary for me, then intepret my own ramblings and figure our how to apply that to what you are saying?"

kaveh_h• 9 months ago

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.

jwpapi2• 9 months ago

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.

pseudalopex6• 9 months ago

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.

jacquesm7• 9 months ago

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.

iAMkenough3• 9 months ago

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.

Symbiote3• 9 months ago

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.

vintermann• 9 months ago

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.

crote6• 9 months ago

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.

ants_everywhere3• 9 months ago

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.

iAMkenough3• 9 months ago

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.

hitarpetar4• 9 months ago

not converse, orthogonal

rramadass• 9 months ago

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.

crote6• 9 months ago

they should have informed the volunteers before throwing the switch

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

Blikkentrekker• 9 months ago

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.

crote6• 9 months ago

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.

gyomu4• 9 months ago

As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years.

Sure we had machine translation before, but it was still a little off. Now the latest language models get us 99.9% there, so they are judged good enough to deploy at scale. What results is a weird twilight zone where everything is in your language, except it feels kind of wrong and doesn’t really communicate in ways specific to the culture from which the language is.

You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French.

Or your mom sends you a screenshot of a Facebook thread in her native language that has her worked up - and reading it, you realize it’s an LLM translation of something that should have no bearing on her.

Same with various support pages on websites - it all reads mostly fine until you hit a weird sentence where the LLM messed up and then you’re transported back to the reality that what you’re reading was not authored by anyone who can actually operate in that language/culture.

There’s a lot of nuance in language beyond the words - how you express disagreement in English is not how you express disagreement in Japanese, how you address the reader in French is not the same as in Korean, etc. Machine translation flattens all modes of expression into a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained).

I have no illusions that this trend will reverse - high quality translation work is skill and time consuming, and thanks to LLMs anyone on Earth can now localize anything they want in any language they want for ~free in ~0 time.

The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English.

The classic linguist response to this, which I subscribe to, is “no language is fixed, language is ever evolving in response to various external cultural pressures“. Which is true. But it doesn’t make our post-LLM language landscape any less weird.

daemoens• 9 months ago

Do you have any examples of American expressions young generations are using in French?

gyomu4• 9 months ago

The ones that are easiest to point to are turns of phrase like “living your best life”, “that feeling when you…”, etc.

latentsea• 9 months ago

I'm a native English speaker fluent in Japanese, recently moved to Japan this year. The one that really gets me lately is YouTube now automatically dubbing over content in Japanese that was originally in English. It's... so uncanny.

jogu6• 9 months ago

I'm in a similar situation. I really wish there was a way to stop YouTube from suggesting me auto-dubbed videos.

cubefox3• 9 months ago

Yeah, that is a massive problem. This can't be disabled by the user, only be the channel owner. It's awful. The only solution is switching the YouTube UI language to English, to get the original English audio track. But then, presumably, all other languages would get machine translated into English. There is nothing one can do.

numpad09• 9 months ago

ThereShouldBeTheQuoteAudioTrackQuoteOptionUnderGearIconMenuAtTheRightBottomCornerOfVideoUserInterfaceAmongWhichEnglishIsOfCourseNearTheBottomOfTheListButNotQuiteTheLastItem

but it only applies to that specific video, and yeah, it makes no sense that this passed sniff tests for Google.

rjh292• 9 months ago

It's a problem for everyone who speaks >1 language (the majority of the world?) since you can't turn it off.

myaccountonhn2• 9 months ago

It is awful. Its also not so transparent that its being done which feels unethical.

j1436go2• 9 months ago

Me and my GF had plenty of laughs in the beginning. Now it's become just annoying.

amdsn• 9 months ago

Yeah it's really jarring to be reading a text in not-english that seems somewhat normal and then to trip over some extremely American reference that makes it obvious it was auto translated. I just want things to have explicit language toggles or maybe allow me to hover over some text to see the translation. Google even allows you to set multiple languages and they still insist on auto translation between 2 languages I have told them I know.

CGamesPlay• 9 months ago

The global trend might not reverse, but surely the people in those cultures are going to push back on low quality content and "the market will sort it out", right? For example, Mistral is has a clear interest in being the "most native-French-speaking LLM", and with that expertise they could also grow to other languages where English-native LLMs are poorly received.

jogu6• 9 months ago

I've really disliked Reddit's auto-translation. I'm bilingual (English & Japanese) and when I search for things only to get an auto-translated reddit thread it really is bizarre. The references, flow of the conversation, etc. are all just off and it feels weird.

Jcampuzano2• 9 months ago

Bilingual English and Spanish here and I absolutely hate this.

I can read both just fine. Platforms defaulting to always showing one or things like youtube auto-translating titles all to English or all to Spanish is frustrating because I always have to do the math in my head as to "Why does this thing I'm reading sound weird as hell" and realize its because it was lost in translation.

Hell, I watch creators/consume content where the creator or writer themself speaks/writes interchangeably in both languages often within the same sentence because Spanglish is very common, and that just destroys most of these automated generators brains.

sersi• 9 months ago

I really hate it too especially when I want to search something specifically within the French context and I end up getting pages translated from Englsh to French and waste my time on irrelevant content.

numpad09• 9 months ago

Use `https://google .com/search?q=-tl%20%s` as your search engine in the browser. Adding "-tl" to search terms remove most translated results from Google Search results. For now anyways.

j1436go2• 9 months ago

Same for German. It's horrible.

o11c3• 9 months ago

The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English.

Calquing has been a common thing since long before AI translators, and it's not notable that it now happens for modern memes. It happens whenever a language is notable and nearby; English has a lot of calques from Greek/Latin/German/French as a result.

Ironically, "calque" is a loanword, but "loanword" is a calque.

joegibbs• 9 months ago

How do the models do if you ask them to translate to X language and adapt the text to suit cultural norms and idioms?

SirHumphrey• 9 months ago

At least in my experience poorly. As a reference I speak one of the smaller European languages and what is interesting that newer models tend to do worse, but what all of them struggle with and is very hard to control using prompting is tone.

Formal language in American English is very friendly, very sweet, to an extent that my language is not. Any piece of text therefore sounds like a psychopath is trying to manipulate you.

totetsu2• 9 months ago

FWIW I recently was watching something that i did not realise had been auto translated from Chinese to English. It was kind of a technical topic, but still it seemed perfectly natural. It struck me that .. as much as conflict hawks and clash of culture theorists might want to do their best to construct an enemy, if we get past the disorientation of language barriers, then mostly people are the same. If AI translation can help with that its a benefit.

numpad09• 9 months ago

The Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel closer together than English and French on surface levels. Japanese is not like that - even human translations between anything to/from Japanese sound translated.

jval43• 9 months ago

Culture is just as much a part of language as the language itself.

There is an air of arrogance in proclaiming that it is merely language barriers that are an issue. But of course it's a convenient argument for big tech forcing MTL on all of us.

But it ultimately marginalizes smaller communities and kills languages. Cultural genocide if you will.

The dangerous thing is that the current state of MTL is serviceable and even usable, but a bilingual speaker will immediately know something is off.

I have noticed this both for French and German, two languages with lots of training material. I imagine it's much much worse for smaller languages and/or communities.

As more and more content on the web is automatically translated, we will all start to talk like translated-from-English LLMs, and that is a future I'm not looking forward to.

imp0cat• 9 months ago

    You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French.

There should be a word for this. Most of these translations feel so weird.

krige• 9 months ago

Reminds me of the first time I heard youtube's forced AI translation to my native language. It's just wrong, the same male voice is used for everything, the delivery is grating, the intonation is off, the translation is very MTL in the bad sense.

And it cannot be disabled on mobile. The numbers must go up, I guess, but in my case it greatly reduced my usage of the app.

stOneskull• 9 months ago

a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained)

i wonder why Sony doesn't train a Japanese model, or why some French company hasn't made a French one, etc.

charlieyu16• 9 months ago

Microsoft nuked the default behaviour of the input method of Traditional Chinese that had been working for the last 50 years with a silent Windows Update

thwarted• 9 months ago

What is the logic behind adding machine translation for content that already had a seemingly robust, enthusiastic, and motivated (volunteer?) community maintaining the translations? The "saves money" rationale to deploy LLM/MT automation doesn't make sense when its volunteers are contributing because they want to. This is kind of community and participation destruction wrought by the introduction of LLMs/MT has a serious impact because it undermines the people who are actually willing to do the work. It was presumably costing nothing (or very little) to have the community maintain this content, but the change has cost a significant amount of goodwill. If the Japanese SUMO community wanted to use MT, it should be their sole decision, baring any issues with their stewardship in general. This is someone else saying "look, with this great new automation, you don't need to spend time anymore doing «thing you want to do»". Huh? How does that make any sense to force on anyone?

stonogo2• 9 months ago

Mozilla has invested heavily in this technology, and whatever project manager is running it needs more checkboxes in the results column of their next request for a raise. In other words, "business alignment."

o11c3• 9 months ago

In particular, "the content is useful" is not a checkbox. "The content is produced by this technology" is, and overwriting hand-curated content is an obvious action.

dheatov• 9 months ago

Less competent PMs are shoving capital A and capital I everywhere in panic mode, getting even more anxious as every failure exposes and deplatforms them even more.

They couldve spent time to understand the problem domain and think more, if theyre not already busy fabricating a resume to sneak into The Actual Big Tech.

Brian_K_White• 9 months ago

I bet it's nothing more than they prefer a machine they can just use and get no lip, rather than have to deal with humans they have to treat like humans and ask nicely and meet half way on countless issues and pretend to care about etc.

crazygringo27• 9 months ago

There's probably a bunch of untranslated or badly translated content worldwide, so this was rolled out to help with that, without realizing it would overwrite higher-quality translation.

It probably made a lot of sense in certain contexts, and certain side effects weren't predicted, or it just has bugs that need fixing.

Presumably nothing malicious or stupid. But just ironing out the kinks.

overfeed5• 9 months ago

But just ironing out the kinks.

"Ironing out the kinks" in production on live data is stupid.

overfeed5• 9 months ago

Mozilla has long suffered from FAANG-envy. If big tech is doing Social Network|Mobile OS|AI, then by golly, Mozilla reflexively has to spend Firefox money on a poorly executed, me-too copy that's discarded when the next fad comes around. The sad thing is the reasoning is usually sound, but the execution... Yeesh.

ForgetItJake• 9 months ago

Mozilla is desperately trying to LARP as a tech giant.

getnormality• 9 months ago

I'm sorry for how you feel about us kicking you in the balls.

Would you like to hop on a quick call to chat about this further?

Just a quick lil call.

Quick lil ol' callerino.

Hoppity hip hop.

themafia• 9 months ago

"We want to better understand the issues your balls are going through right now."

mikelovenotwar• 9 months ago

"..and how we can help you engage further with our automated ball kicking machine we used on you without consent.."

move-on-by3• 9 months ago

Yeah, the “I’m sorry you feel this way” response really irked me too. There are so many different ways to respond that would have been more appropriate and conveyed the same message.

mns• 9 months ago

The “I’m sorry you feel this way” is the first thing you learn from that HR workshop about communication when you get a promotion where you have to manage people.

The thing is that having a lot of people working in corporate environments, where you constantly need to be political and backstab others to achieve some task you've been given, this is the norm, so for many this is normal, the type of stuff where they say: I'm just trying to be helpful and constructive, but for anyone not having time for this corporate double-speak, this seems rude and condescending.

hmokiguess• 9 months ago

“Let’s put a pin on this and circle back in the next quarter after the shareholders meeting to align on next steps.”

shusaku• 9 months ago

It’s a shame because “improve an off the shelf llm ti translate in line with this large dataset we prepared” is precisely the kind of project people love to work on. It could have been a chance to immortalize the hard work they did up until now.

ehnto2• 9 months ago

Is it? I don't think you quite understood the issue.

This issue is specifically centred around the human element of the work and organisation. The translators were doing good work, they wanted to continue that work. Why it's important that the work done is by a human is probably only partially about quality of output and likely more about authenticity of output. The human element is not recorded in the final translation output, but it is important to people that they know something was processed by a human who had heart and the right intentions.

ninkendo• 9 months ago

The human element is not recorded in the final translation output, but it is important to people that they know something was processed by a human who had heart and the right intentions

Not that I entirely disagree with the conclusion here, but…

It feels like that same sentiment can be used to justify all sorts of shitty translation output, like a dialog saying cutesy “let’s get you signed in”, or having dialogs with “got it” on the button label. Sure, it’s so “human” and has “heart”, but also enrages me to my very core and makes me want to find whoever wrote it and punch them in the face as hard as I can.

I would like much less “human” in my software translations, to be honest. Give me dry, clear, unambiguous descriptions of what’s happening please. If an LLM can do that and strike a consistent tone, I don’t really care much at all about the human element going into it.

eCa• 9 months ago

this large dataset we prepared

You mean the two+ decades of labour of love was always done to be a nameless contribution to the AI machine? Somehow I think he would have picked another hobby if he had known that back then.

dravenCore• 9 months ago

It’s sad to see a community built with love for 20 years end like this. AI should help people, not replace the heart behind their work.

stackedinserter3• 9 months ago

Why is one person resigning == end of community?

jogu6• 9 months ago

I've been studying Japanese for 15+ years and have really come to loathe machine translations from English. While generally the meaning gets across, they're very unnatural and often use words in contexts that sound weird or are just flat out wrong.

hinkley4• 9 months ago

Often doesn't go great the other way either.

ezoe9• 9 months ago

When the machine automation quality became okay enough, this conflict of interest happens.

His demand of not using his existing work for AI training is nonsense. Because the entire article is stated:

Portions of this content are ©1998–2025 by individual mozilla.org contributors. Content available under a Creative Commons license.

Didn't he agree on that?

So, this contributor revealed he doesn't understand the license his work is published under. As such, Mozilla must refuse his contribution because he don't understand the idea behind Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.

panny• 9 months ago

You can rescind a license. If you own a property, it is yours. Even if you licensed it to someone, you own it and you can kick someone off. They can later address you for a breach of license, but it's still your property. You own it.

If mozilla wants to tell him that his work was valuable and therefore has grounds to sue him for rescinding the license, they will have a lot of difficulty proving that after their sumobot summarily deleted years of it for no good reason at a whim.

Good for him. He should probably consider suing them for destruction of his work.

ezoe9• 9 months ago

Once your work is published under Creative Commons license, it is irreversible. No matter you have a copyright or not. You can't undo it the fact at one point you published your work in one of Creative Commons license(there are multiple incompatible Creative Commons licenses so it's bit complicated).

You can make updated version of your work to non-CC, but the version you published under CC is CC.

sakompella• 9 months ago

this is not how CC / FOSS licenses work. if this is how FOSS worked not a soul would use it

jacquesm7• 9 months ago

I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

Talk about being tone deaf. This was so incredibly rude. No consult, no request whether they wanted this or not. Mozilla keeps finding new ways to shoot itself in the foot, these are probably some of the most loyal people that you could wish for, that's a precious resource if there ever was one. And to add insult to injury they want to them 'hop on a call' and to 'trully[sic] understand what you're struggling with' even though they just spelled it out as clear as day.

yawnxyz• 9 months ago

sounds like it's almost an AI response? I can't believe a person responds that way

skrebbel4• 9 months ago

AI wouldnt misspell “truly”. It’s a human.

surfingdino3• 9 months ago

A few years in corporate managerial role will turn you into a bot.

chris_wot• 9 months ago

The level of arrogance it took to do this is quite simply stunning.

numpad09• 9 months ago

Isn't it fascinating that despite `while true; do claude --yolo` over a weekend being all it takes to port some project across platforms, LLMs completely fall apart when it comes to speaking grammatical and natural Japanese?

Free tier Gemini CLI literally writes Android app for me by just endlessly wondering in English. AGI's here. And it struggles with Japanese. How!?

jameson• 9 months ago

struggles with Japanese

It doesn't mention mistranslating, so it's difficult to know the root of the problem is AI "struggling".

It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost.

I believe this is the root of the problem. There are define processes and guidelines, and LLM isn't following it. Whether these guidelines were prompted or not is unclear but regardless it should've been verified by the community leaders before it's GA'ed

numpad09• 9 months ago

That's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that LLMs just can't constitute a punctually Japanese understanding of text like that guideline and speak in Japanese with native fluency no matter what. I just know this from knowing both sides of English-Japanese language pair. And I find that somewhat fascinating in a sense.

mminer237• 9 months ago

I took this to mean it's not translating things consistently. Like, a button in Firefox might say "Show all downloads" or "Open previous windows and tabs". These were localized a certain way, but an AI has no ability to check that. It will just translate them anew, which might be the same or it might translate it to something synonymous, but which then confuses users searching for the "Display all downloads" button or whatever.

Etheryte• 9 months ago

To be fair, in my experience LLM-s struggle to some extent with nearly every language that isn't English. Compared to many others, English is a very simple language and it has the largest body of material to learn from to boot. The more nuanced a language, the more LLM-s spout garbage.

int_19h4• 9 months ago

They do pretty good Russian, even to the point of very elaborate speech styles etc.

kuschku3• 9 months ago

The simple truth is that LLMs are still bullshitting their way through life.

In some fields and languages, this is easier, but as soon as you need the LLM to follow rigorous instructions, it'll fail.

pessimizer4• 9 months ago

A lot of languages require a lot more context to speak and understand than others. English is a very low-context language, at least in formal registers - it just gets very wordy and very specific, and it helps that it is very analytic and isolating, with a massive vocabulary.

But for e.g. Spanish, if a bare subjunctive verb (making the verb "<x>" something like "could <x>," "should <x>," or "would <x>" without specifying) is used in a sentence, there's no way to know from that sentence who or what that subjunctive is being applied to. The unwritten rule is: 1) if it's obvious who or what you've been talking about, then it applies to that person or thing, 2) if there are two or more things it could be about, then you should figure out a way to add more information to specify which, and finally 3) if there are no good candidates, the person is referring to themselves.

I've heard that there's a lot more of that in Japanese, a language that I don't think really has personal pronouns at all. For example, iirc when you refer to an emotional state and don't specify who you're talking about, it's automatically assumed that you're talking about yourself. I'm not too familiar with Japanese, but languages are simply different from each other, they're not substitution ciphers.

LLMs have trouble staying aware of the context as things go on even for a fairly short time, and in some languages, the meaning of the conversation infects every utterance. Seems a little similar to how LLMs are bad at lifetimes in Rust. I'm sure they'll gradually get better.

OhMeadhbh2• 9 months ago

I worked on adding TLS 1.1 and 1.2 support to firefox back in the day, and the whole process left me so disappointed I asked to be removed from the list of contributors. I wish mozilla all the best, but it's not an especially well run organization and this post gives another example of why.

port115• 9 months ago

I submitted 2 patches during an 2018 open night to bring in more volunteers in Berlin. The actual folk there were amazing, but the review process, tooling, and bureaucracy was so upsetting that I never bothered again. I'm not sure the fixes were approved, and it wouldn't be surprising if these open nights don't convince many to contribute.

OhMeadhbh2• 9 months ago

Yeah. That sounds about right. I have nothing but good things to say about my peers. Management, on the other hand, was pretty bad.

whyryoulikethis• 9 months ago

Am I taking crazy pills or is this entire thread full of some insane reaches

Stranger432• 9 months ago

I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air.

The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.

Firefox is a good browser but is prevented from capitalizing on the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.

lopis2• 9 months ago

It's the mismstch of expectations that causes good communities to create drama. If this was Google, no one would care, as one expects Google to just do what is best for the business. But with companies like Mozilla we expect a bit better. But the truth is they are barely better and the leadership plays by the same rulebook.

small_scombrus4• 9 months ago

People did used to have decent expectations for Google back when they at least pretended to care about the "Do no evil" tagline

Stranger432• 9 months ago

But why does it have to be the case that the leadership of an opensource project have to emulate the desperation and authoritarianism of a potentially stagnant tech sector.

I don't think it's malevolence from the mozilla leadership team but more that if you hang around people who have bet their lifesaving on the success of cloud based LLMs, being cautious and making their use "optional" might begin to sound like a really controversial position even if that's actually what the users/community want from Mozilla.

Firefox market share have been declining and it's not easy to point to any obvious technical problem, so the reason for the decline is likely that the Mozilla corporation keep messing up the narrative by acting like just another Silicon Valley tech firm.

small_scombrus4• 9 months ago

I'm always surprised that stuff like the AI integration isn't done as a pre-installed extension.

If it's Mozilla signed then you could give it extra permissions so it still works the same, but then people who it offends can remove it.

Like how their tab containers system is a (not pre-installed) extension

a13n• 9 months ago

ehh this reads a bit like the hn comments complaining about sites that don’t work with js disabled

like what percent of firefox users do you think actually care about this?

badgersnake• 9 months ago

Firefox is a good browser

Increasingly it isn’t. It’s crashing 2 or 3 times a day for me now, and video conferencing is barely usable.

ngruhn• 9 months ago

Hasn't crashed for me once and I use it daily.

notanastronaut2• 9 months ago

I've completely avoided Chrome/Edge in the browser wars. I went from Netscape to IE to Firefox and stayed there. I was using it before and after its notorious changes to WebExtensions API breaking many plugins in 2017.

I don't have any crashing issues with it.

I even remember the great "speed test" wars where pages like Lifehacker were measuring how long pages took to load and declared this or that browser the winner for that year.

That being said, the direction their privacy policy is going is concerning and giving me reason to eye alternatives. But from a technical standpoint it's solid on my end.

nativeit6• 9 months ago

It’s my primary browser on every device, I use Windows, Linux, and Apple devices daily. I can’t remember the last time it crashed (if ever). I also use a ton of extensions, some of which are a little sketchy (devlopment-wise, nothing morally questionable). Still, no technical issues at all. The behavior of Mozilla, on the other hand, I take plenty of issue with.

Edit: correcting autocorrect.

myaccountonhn2• 9 months ago

I think it's in the organization as well. They had really good outreach programs and educational content (though I think that's now gutted) that talked about tech ethics, but their product just follows the same bad behavior.

Aerolfos2• 9 months ago

The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.

But of course, they need "competitive" salaries so they can hire "great talent" from the tech sector so that the company doesn't fall behind or something.

xg15• 9 months ago

There is still the conspiracy theory that Mozilla is mostly a sock puppet by Google by now, mostly kept alive so Google can say that Chrome is not a monopoly.

Behavior like this doesn't do a lot to dispel that theory.

Seattle35033• 9 months ago

How would you develop Firefox?

ErigmolCt3• 9 months ago

Mozilla has a real pattern of shooting itself in the foot

xnx• 9 months ago

I wonder what the Apache Foundation could do with the immense budget of Mozilla.

arjie• 9 months ago

I understand the matter in theory, but I don't understand the matter in practice. Clicking through on the user, I couldn't identify any machine-translated overwrites of his work. What is an example of this? And if the community that manages the site objects, why not apply a batch temporary revert, and then re-run once/if everything is solved.

This is a trivial operation for me to do on MediaWiki with a bot, so it must be straightforward to do here too. I think "Ask forgiveness, not permission" is fine in order to move things forward, but you do have "ask forgiveness".

toyg3• 9 months ago

"Ask forgiveness, not permission" is fine in order to move things forward

No, in a community of peers that's a great way to burn goodwill, particularly among volunteers.

One should "ask forgiveness" when managing upwards, and "ask permission" when managing across or downwards. That's what you do if you respect people.

witnessme• 9 months ago

The same feeling non-native English speakers have battling native English speaker bias

Giorgi• 9 months ago

It looks like companies are doubling down on shitty AI bots to cut their costs even though it is backfiring terribly, like in Facebook case where they spent billions on their AI and all it did - just banned millions of their core userbase (and still banning). Looks like we will see more companies imploding because they relay to much on subpar AI.

insane_dreamer• 9 months ago

Shocking that Mozilla would roll out a bot - in production - without coordinating with the team that's been doing the work for years so far. Very bad look.

mcny• 9 months ago

Doing this in production directly without even trying it on staging feels very wrong.

surfingdino3• 9 months ago

I used to work with manager who told us to "have balls, deploy straight to prod" We spend a month cleaning this up. The other time when another manager demanded I "run this script" from the iphone he shoved in my face a whole warehouse went down in Ireland a month before Christmas and the Police were involved. There is an irrational push to deploy AI everywhere for no reason whatsoever. It, well the LLM part of it, is bad tech and all those "AI success stories" are pure hot air.

zkmon• 9 months ago

Going by title, I thought this is about low birth rate and accumulation of old people in Japan. Is that silly me or click-bait title.

throwaway290• 9 months ago

It originally had better title mentioning AI and all but someone edited it

yigalirani• 9 months ago

If i was this guy, i would take all the translations and move them to his own independent site with proper promotion so that Japanese speaker can find it easily

thomassmith65• 9 months ago

I'd just begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure: https://ladybird.org/#gi

reddalo3• 9 months ago

I'm happy that somebody is trying to create a new browser -- even though some people say it's impossible nowadays.

But FUTO sponsoring that project gives bad vibes.

hinkley4• 9 months ago

Firefox is itself someone deciding to make their own fork of mozilla. Maybe we need to do it again every ten years.

arccy• 9 months ago

that's still promoting mozilla/firefox in a way, something they clearly don't want to do anymore

rand17• 9 months ago

I call this the AI theater. If a company can (still) look good AND decrease dealing with pesky flesh and bone humans, that's not collateral, that's a win. On the surface you act caring, concerned, rendering investors and HR both happy while you decrease "human complexity" - then you are winning the AI game. Mozilla always wanted to join the big boys, but while yearning for their soft power status the yearn bore the fruits of a rotten soul they will also have to embrace. There is no light without shadows and AI's shadows are drawn long and deep.

geenat• 9 months ago

KB = Knowledge Base

MT = Machine Translation

In this context.

curiousgal• 9 months ago

I am browsing the website on Firefox and Reader Mode does not work. Peak irony.

Jean-Papoulos• 9 months ago

Imagine having human volunteers do the work for you, than paying an AI to overwrite their work without communicating this with them (no validation of any sort it seems). And once they quit you corporate-speak to them "let's hop on a call to understand your frustrations!" in response to a post where they outline precisely their frustrations.

Disgusting behavior.

eptcyka• 9 months ago

To top it off, it's corpospeak from what ultimately is an org that exists becuase of an open source project.

denkmoon• 9 months ago

Ladybird and other browser alternatives cannot come fast enough. Every other week we've got a thread here about some stupid move Mozilla have made, I can't remember the last time I heard positive news about Mozilla.

shaky-carrousel4• 9 months ago

It's bad when the only positive thing one can say about them is that they're not Google/Microsoft.

OvbiousError• 9 months ago

There is a very loud part of HN that strongly dislikes mozilla/firefox. It's disproportionate imo, I don't understand why they're singled out so often.

Levitz2• 9 months ago

Speaking for myself, it's really irritating to support a chrome alternative precisely because it's a chrome alternative and have it constantly shoot itself in the foot.

It sucks that I can't even attempt to convince someone to use it beyond "it's not Google", and data privacy. The vast majority of users won't ever give a damn about either of those by themselves.

LunaSea4• 9 months ago

Gobbling up hundreds of millions of dollars to finance non-core missions and fat director bonuses while you sack the Servo development team might be a cause.

rwmj5• 9 months ago

You have to separate the browser (I'm using it to type this), and the Mozilla corporation / C-suite. The C-suite at Mozilla took the Google firehose of money, spent most of it on their own salaries, followed by idiotic vanity projects, and spent least of all on the browser itself. Never mind building a warchest or anything responsible like that. It's quite rational to dislike what Mozilla managers are doing, while supporting Firefox as a browser and the developers and volunteers who make that happen.

N_Lens2• 9 months ago

Maybe because HN folk are more familiar with Mozilla leadership fuckups and "less than ideal" decisions?

ecshafer2• 9 months ago

They fired the inventor of Javascript as their CEO. They hired some grifter as their CEO who just keeps giving themselves more money. They keep throwing money at vanity side hustles. They purposefully confuse the Mozilla foundation with the browser, and have increasingly made the foundation redirect their funds to C level salaries and their own personal political passion projects that are not aligned with the Mozilla Firefox project. If there were actually focusing on being the best browser and web privacy, it would be good. But they aren't.

Mr_Bees69• 9 months ago

Bc mozilla kills more products than google.

joseda-hg• 9 months ago

This feels like asking why do English people have strong opinions on soccer compared to the US?

If there ever was a comunity I'd expect to have strong opinions on Mozilla/Firefox, it's HackerNews

estimator7292• 9 months ago

I don't think it's disproportionate at all. Nerds very badly want a viable alternative to Chrome and "Chrome with s paintjob". The only alternative is Firefox, but Mozilla has been a pretty shitty company and very bad stewards of an open web.

People are mad at Mozilla and Firefox because they're squandering resources on PR and "optics", shoveling in ads and AI crap instead of focusing development efforts on making Firefox actually competitive.

People are mad because Mozilla wants us to think they're a good company who will bring back a fair and open web, but their actions say they're just a profit motivated company who is content to put in the minimum viable resources into Firefox without investing in a real competitor to Chrome. Mozilla is just gobbling up google money and is content to let google and chrome continue operating a near monopoly with a browser and internet that are actively bad for and hostile towards users.

umanwizard2• 9 months ago

For what it's worth, Firefox is the only browser I've ever used that shows me ads by default in the blank tab page.

dimal2• 9 months ago

Betrayal has that effect. They're supposed to be the good side. They abandoned that, and now they're just like any other unsuccessful tech company, desperately clinging to relevance while discarding all the ideals that made some of us support them.

LaGrange5• 9 months ago

...because a lot of us like Firefox and hate seeing it slowly die?

Seattle35033• 9 months ago

The tenor of criticism Firefox/Moz gets is akin to the purity testing that happens in some ideological space.

surajrmal2• 9 months ago

If ladybird becomes popular, it will see a similar segment of detractors as well. No product can appeal to everyone. This is why you need multiple options for different segments.

pessimizer4• 9 months ago

That's the law of averages, and it is not a law. Different things are actually different, not all the same in the end.

burnermore4• 9 months ago

Either you dont know or dont care. This didn't happen over night.

The community members had a huge voice in the project. They were part of the releases. And I dont remember what they were called. Community managers?? They pushed them off and took all their access and privileges systematically. Which led to an exodus of them back in 2015? '16? Or was it in '13?

Am just waiting for Firefox to show ads since they have acquired anonym - behavioral ad company which is essentially surveillance data economy.

SabrinaJewson• 9 months ago

Well, Ladybird appears to be getting a headstart on having detractors.[0]

[0] https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and...

cardanome• 9 months ago

If Ladybird ever gets successful it will get get the same enshittification as Firefox did.

It is so vexing that people refuse to learn from our failures. If you want to keep corporate grifter away to need to build the structure to do so.

You need a strong license like GPL-v3 to scare the pricks away. You need a non profit foundation, if possible not based in the US, that actually does the development. If Google or Microsoft or any other monopolist wants to sponsor you, tell them to bugger off. Don't take the devil's money. Allow actual user to directly donate to development.

danieltanfh953• 9 months ago

It's funny how Japanese contributors often go nuclear whenever things don't go their way instead of communicating etc. Bugs happen. this is tech. open communication is always the way to go before escalation. we see the same phenomenon in git, ruby etc etc etc.

Ironically, Japanese work culture encourages over-communication. It seems that open-source is considered a counter-culture that they want to escape japanese work culture from.

djantje• 9 months ago

Yes, lets dismiss Japanese culture..

danieltanfh953• 9 months ago

This isn't dismissing, this is respecting that this is a risk factor in involving Japanese contributors.

Ezhik• 9 months ago

In October 22, the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles. I cannot accept its behavior and no words. [...] It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications.

How exactly did you manage to place the blame for no communication on Japanese contributors here given the actual complaint in question?

danieltanfh953• 9 months ago

Because given the nature and scope of the complaint, they should have disclosed prior communication. It is clear here that they probably attempted, poorly, to communicate but ultimately chose to nuke the relationship instead, claiming that they have a monopoly over japanese translations.

nozilla• 9 months ago

Hi Marsf,
I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound!

What a horribly condescending and patronising response. If I'd received this it would just further vindicate my decision to quit.

nilslindemann• 9 months ago

I just read someone asking someone else for a phone call.

1over137• 9 months ago

Speaking a second language live is much harder than taking your time and writing something.

pjc502• 9 months ago

Yes. In an online community that operates in written text and is separated by timezones, there's several reasons why that's a no-no.

To me, this seems very simple: they introduced a machine translation workflow. Doing so signals the intent to replace their human translators. The human translators understandably quit rather than collaborate with their replacements.

hazn• 9 months ago

Why is it condescending and patronzing? I read it as a person trying to understand the situation.

rossant• 9 months ago

Same.

haunter2• 9 months ago

The person gives a clear, detailed answer in the post about their problems > "We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with"

To me that's very condescending, like someone who reads but doesn't understand

Borderline AI response

And personally offering a call is like a sidestep "lets move this problem out of the public discourse" which is especially funny considering it's about a forum

Msurrow• 9 months ago

The OP/article is very clear and very direct on what the problems are. The response is so typical american conflict-shy “let’s talk so we can slowly dimish your critique, and also let’s do talking instead of writing so we cant really be held accountable for specifics”. And, to me it comes across as lazy: the op/article is very specific on the problems, just get to work already, no need to “further clarifications” (obviously disable that stupid bot for the japanese community; then get to work restoring original KBs from backups. Then reach out to talk about next steps)

It’s a tonedeaf response from the staff person. Zero respect for what’s clearly many, many hours of contribured work.

thomascountz• 9 months ago

It's always the, "I'm sorry for how you feel," that strikes me as belittling and disingenuous.

alt187• 9 months ago

Basically, this response doesn't acknowledge any of the concerns marsf mentioned.

I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel [...]

He's not talking about what he feels - but a very real change, detrimental change of workflow. Simply not addressed.

CalRobert2• 9 months ago

It’s the boilerplate every junior account manager uses when they don’t actually have a solution.

atoav5• 9 months ago

Well. Too late. Now that they go you want to talk? If I was the one who finally had enough why the fuck would I want to talk to something I turned my back to?

There were very clear statements of what will happen and why. First acknowledge those, express you are sorry for what happened and hint some mea culpa and how you plan to solve it.

Only then if you feel the need to talk realize that you are the one begging them, not the other way around.

yason2• 9 months ago

I'm not part of Mozilla or any of the communities and I understood the situation by reading the damn post, on the first time.

In the follow-up, any words concerning how the person feels, words on how to talk about this further, and wanting to truly understand what he just wrote in plain and simple terms simply reek strongly of "we really won't change anything, we've made our decision, we are disagree with you but we want you to agree with what we're already doing".

I can hear the exact same tone in exact similar situations with various customer service reps, HR, corporate smooth-talkers, public officials/politicians where the decision is already written in stone and they just pretend they're listening to the customers/employees/citizens affected to quiet down the criticism.

tdb7893• 9 months ago

In addition to not responding to any of the specifics that the poster clearly put time into, there's also a huge mismatch in tone. In general, do not act very corporate when people are personally pissed off, this has a tendency to just annoy most people further.

ykonstant• 9 months ago

I read it as a person trying to understand the situation.

I have been on the receiving end of such comments enough times to read it as a person trying to appear as if they are trying to understand the situation.

charlieyu16• 9 months ago

I can feel the junior manager trying to repair but it is really someone higher-up should have properly apologised

janmalec• 9 months ago

How would you form this response to make it less condensending and patronizing? I won't judge if it is patronizing or not because I'm not very good at this kind of thing but would like to understand the issue.

impossiblefork• 9 months ago

You wouldn't form this response. 'We didn't understand it was this bad, so we've shut down SUMO bot for the Japanese Wiki'.

cmcaleer• 9 months ago

OP has given all that they need, English is probably not their first language, and the first response was to ask for even more unpaid time and labour (presumably in English) in a format that is likely much more difficult for them to summarise coherent thoughts succinctly in, while addressing zero of their issues. They’re asking for MORE effort of the volunteer to fix their bot’s fuckup.

I’m honestly struggling to think of a more insulting way to respond to this. At least “Fuck off” isn’t pretending to care, it’s fewer words to read and isn’t asking for an indeterminate amount of time from you.

detaro8• 9 months ago

a) don't apologize for the other persons feelings, but for your actions that lead to it

b) don't look like you are trying to take the conversation out of the community space it's happening in and/or hiding details by going to a private call (you can offer a call, but it shouldn't be the expectation)

c) Acknowledge the concrete complaints made. Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means when they complain that it didn't happen in a staging environment first?

d) a-c also lead to "don't sound like any cookie-cutter PR response to a complaint ever, people have learned those are not genuine". Especially if you are a project that makes a big deal out of its community interacting with said community.

e) ideally announce some concrete first step, e.g. pausing the bot

justinclift• 9 months ago

Maybe something like:

    Oops, sounds like we screwed up really badly.  Sorry. :(

    We'll turn off the sumobot, and put things back the way the SUMO Japanese community was used to operating.

    Would you consider not quitting after we've put things back the way they were? :)

perlgeek• 9 months ago

"We are sorry for overwriting the manual translations of all our volunteers. We have disabled the workflow and are working on restoring the old, manual translations.

We had planned to use the translation bot to help you guys, but based on your response, we have understood that we have overshot our target, and actually made it harmful.

Would you be interested in a call where we can apologize in person, and interview you about how the workflow integration could be designed so it actually helps you and other translators?"

fouc2• 9 months ago

There's a good example from another poster here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833236

LaGrange5• 9 months ago

"Fuck, sorry, we're going to take the bot behind the barn and shoot it. Hopefully one day we can make it up to you. Also the person responsible for this atrocity was just fired."

Or, alternatively, if you do not intend to even try to do better, at least be honest: "ok, bye."

meindnoch• 9 months ago

I don't understand people like this. No, I don't want to "hop on a call", I've already written down everything. Can you not read?

rwmj5• 9 months ago

It's a combination of inability to read anything longer than a tweet and not wanting to put anything on record.

slightwinder2• 9 months ago

Decisions are not fixed. Changing the situation, could revert the decision. Why should someone silently accept a situation, when simple communication could improve the world for everyone involved? That seems like a very ignorant mindset.

tclancy• 9 months ago

Because so much nuance can be lost in writing, especially if both parties are working in a second language. There is a lot of value in actually talking to someone, especially in a fraught situation like this. Hearing the other person express genuine concern can do a lot to overcome the anger. Otherwise we tend to build up stories in our head about what the other person “really means” and those stories tend to be wildly negative.

nitwit005• 9 months ago

There have been a ton of complaints on HackerNews about companies never letting them talk to a real person. Here's a company offering up a real person, and apparently that's still bad somehow. You can always just say "no" to an offer to talk.

hulitu3• 9 months ago

Some people need AI to explain to them the meaning of words. /s

cubefox3• 9 months ago

I don't get it. It's not the best possible phrasing, but people who find this sounds "horribly condescending" are excessively sensitive in my opinion. Like a grown man complaining about being "horribly hurt" when a careless passer-by bumped into him.

yason2• 9 months ago

I'm sorry you don't get it and that you feel they're excessively sensitive. On the behalf of the HN community would you like to share with us more about how you feel about it so that we can better understand your position. I'm sure we can help you find the best possible phrasing to better express the excess of said sensitivity. We're sorry you've had to encounter such a wording and attitude on our forum.

m-schuetz• 9 months ago

I'm sorry you feel that way.

hitarpetar4• 9 months ago

sorry you're struggling with the way the community responded

rezaprima• 9 months ago

Further down someone mention a bug that surfaced prior, and I take this as an attempt to understand the bug further.

apexalpha3• 9 months ago

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this.

It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.

edu• 9 months ago

As somebody from Spain, I concur.

gyomu4• 9 months ago

"I'm sorry for how you feel" is widely accepted as a non-apology in English. Sincere apologies show awareness of how one's actions led to the situation that would require the apology.

tsimionescu6• 9 months ago

If this were some small bug report, even from someone pretty ticked off, I'd agree.

But this is a response to someone who has just announced that they are quitting an organization they had spent 20 years of their life volunteering for, because of the disrespect they have felt from the org. This is not a "hop on a call" moment. This is a "please accept to meet so I can apologize in person, and see if we can repair this" moment, preferably after acknowledging the disrespect.

pegasus• 9 months ago

Given that the written complaint already had a list of ways Mozilla had stepped on the toes of those volunteers, expressing regret about their feelings without at least acknowledging that Mozilla's actions might have been rash is very condescending indeed. These volunteers are adding value to M's product for free and they are very angry and threatening to leave and this is your response? Basically saying "I'm sorry you're being such big babies, do you want some tissues?"...

nakedper• 9 months ago

I'm from the United States and I read the exact same thing that you did. Somebody really trying to help. Zero condescending or patronizing behavior. It seems like somebody doing their best to reach out and get in contact and yeah I agree completely that hell I could have written this myself. And probably have something like that before. I don't understand what culture would find that condescending at all.

bayindirh4• 9 months ago

I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.

English is also not my mother tongue, but this translates to "I'm sorry you feel like that, but we don't care or change anything, can I call you to convince you into doing things our way while completely being off the record?" in my mind.

This is forceful and rude in my culture, but it's very rude and a no-no in Japanese culture AFAIK.

If the person wanted to help genuinely, I'd expect to read something like "I'm sorry you feel like this. I read your comments but I want to clarify some points so I can transfer these up the chain with utmost clarity. We might have made some mistakes and don't want to leave you out in the cold".

jsiepkes• 9 months ago

I'm from the Netherlands as well and I wouldn't interpret this as condescending but as disingenuous corporate BS-speak where someone is doing damage control by showing "how much they value your opinion". And in the end not doing anything at all with your concerns.

DecoySalamander• 9 months ago

Not a native speaker, but to me it reads as canned or AI generated response that acknowledges nothing in the post besides there being some kind of tiny disagreement. I don't see how "I'm sorry for how you feel about this" can be inteprented as anything other than "I'm not at fault, and I'm sorry I'll have to spend time pacifying you".

Feels extremely disrespectful.

agnishom2• 9 months ago

I don't think there is something inherently patronizing about this. But this tone seems like the most generic possible American corporate faux-friendly tone.

In order to sound truly friendly, one has to break the script

codethief• 9 months ago

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this.

To be fair, Dutch culture is known for its directness[0] and for not interpreting even the harshest criticism as offensive, so I'm not sure I would trust your judgment on this… :-D

That being said, as a fellow European, I concur.

[0]: There was a great video on this a while back, which I don't seem to be able to find right now. https://www.tiktok.com/@letsdoubledutch/video/73822692756517... seems close enough, though.

NoboruWataya• 9 months ago

As a native English speaker, I don't see it as condescending either. Yes it's a bit "corporate" in tone, but that is not uncommon at all in large human organisations (not just for-profit corporations but also government, NGOs, political orgs, etc). Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists. Which is often entertaining but rarely very useful.

But it's Mozilla. There is a segment of the community that will be pissed off by everything they do. Check the username of the person you're replying to.

HeavyStorm2• 9 months ago

I think what the grand parent meant is that the staff doesn't acknowledge issues - instead, clearly says that this is how _they_ feel, points out that changes were "only recently introduced", and says that is interested in learning what they are struggling with, again, not acknowledging issues with the process or bot, instead wording as if this is marsf issue.

Personally, I don't think this is that bad. This is a public thread and he's Mozilla staff - the wording has to be clinical. The worse part is the _recently introduced_ bit, but I would look over it.

benjiro• 9 months ago

As somebody from your Neighboring country, its really comes over as condescending...

"I'm sorry for how you feel" is the definition of non-appology...

Hey, even the AI overlords agree on this...

The phrase "I'm sorry for how you feel" is often perceived as a non-apology because it shifts blame to the other person's emotions instead of taking responsibility for one's actions. Instead of a genuine apology, it can sound like you're sorry they are upset rather than sorry for your behavior, and it can imply their feelings are the problem. A true apology acknowledges your role and expresses sincere regret for the pain you caused.

In Dutch its something like "Het spijt me, hoe u hierover voelt" ... See the issue, the first part is a apology, that is then reflected to the other person.

"We want to make sure we truly understand what you're struggling with." ...

We do not understand why *you are struggling with this*. For us its perfectly normal, so why are you having a issue with this.

So in Dutch its something like "We willen echt verstaan, waarom u moeite hebt hiermee". Aka, sending the issue back to the other person.

See the issue how both parts flow and shift the issue to the other person. This is not a English language issue because the same way of writing is also done in Dutch if you want to do a non-apology with a dose of gaslighting.

I never see anybody write like this, beyond those that have the intention to rile people up. Its gaslighting 101 ...

humanrebar2• 9 months ago

"I'm sorry" can mean "I am apologizing" but often it instead means "I feel bad". It depends on context which applies.

"I'm sorry for how you feel" without more explanation often sounds like "The thing that makes me feel bad in this situation is your reaction to it". It can come across as blaming the person for the feelings, regretting not being able to control others' feelings better, or dismissing the root causes of the feelings and any agency in them.

It's a bad apology because of the ambiguity, though passive aggressive types like that aspect. It's honestly a bad way to sympathize as well.

jxf• 9 months ago

As a native English speaker, "I'm sorry for how you feel" is patronizing. Genuine apologies acknowledge mistakes rather than invalidate feelings.

crote6• 9 months ago

Also from The Netherlands, this is 100% condescending and patronising to me. I read this as corporate-speak for "go fuck yourself". Let's go through it line-by-line:

I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.

"We have zero regrets about the changes we made and have no intention of making any changes - the problem is how you feel about them".

Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?

"I can't be bothered to engage with the points you already raised. You can do some venting in a Teams call, but we don't want there to be a record so we can't be held to any promises we might accidentally make."

We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

"You are the problem: you haven't embraced our glorious changes yet. Accept our "help" to adapt to your new reality, or get out"

So no, that's not what you'd write if you genuinely wanted to help: that's what you write when you want to get rid of someone who is bothering you.

If they genuinely wanted to help, the response would've read something more like this:

Dear marsf, It is shocking to me to learn that our recent rollout of sumobot has caused enough friction to make a 20-year veteran of our community quit. Our intention has always been, and will always be, to use new technology like sumobot to help our communities - not harm them. Reading your report, we have clearly failed at that. To prevent it from doing additional damage, we have chosen to pause sumobot for the moment. We still believe that it can become a valuable tool, but it'll remain paused until we have discussed its modes of operation and the impact it has on the way you contribute with representatives of the various communities. We'll work out an approach over the following weeks. I hope this is sufficient for now to change your mind about leaving - people like you are essential to open-source applications like Firefox. If you wish to discuss it face-to-face, my team and I am more than happy to hop on a call with you to make sure we are doing the right thing.

realaaa• 9 months ago

yeah nah mate, it is 100% tone deaf - does not reflect the frustration of the OP

you don't reply like this to just open forum

lazy ass business world reply

you get in touch ASAP and personally, if you really want to keep them

happymellon• 9 months ago

I read it in the following "code".

I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.

This is an emotion that you are feeling, not an actual problem.

Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?

I'm not going to say that anything is actually wrong, we just want to discuss the best way to dismiss this.

We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

Reiterating that the Japanese translators are the ones struggling to adapt, not that there could be a problem with the new reality.

From my perspective, this is typical middle management speak to allow people to complain into a void without promising improvements. The approach I would recommend if there was going to be some opening to change the approach would have been.

I'm sorry that the changes to the workflows have disrupted your processes. Would you be interested in hopping on a call so that we can discuss the changes that we will be making, as I think that at least some of the issues have been identified and should be fixed soon? We want to ensure that we do not introduce problems with the community contributions.

sometimes_all• 9 months ago

If someone, especially one who pretty much worked for free for 20+ years to make YOUR PRODUCT BETTER and you just burned off all their hard work in front of them, just publicly quits with a proper explanation given as to why, and then you ask them to come to a quiet corner to "discuss things", maybe as damage control or whatever, without returning the favor and explaining your point of you as publicly as they did, or even preferring up the chance to give them some sort of agency and an opportunity for yourself to rectify things, I cannot see anything except condescending and disrespectful behavior.

This doesn't need any low-context/high-context nonsense to figure it out, given when the complainer's post was plaintive enough for someone from the Netherlands to appreciate.

cosmosgenius• 9 months ago

The condescension is coming from "We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with." which is completely dismissing the points they made in the post. Basics "surely there is more to it than just what is in the post". A better response would have responded with actions/talking points to the items listed in the post. Then asking for a call for further clarification of the respondents point.

LaGrange5• 9 months ago

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this.

Not really painting us in good colors here, are you.

karel-3d• 9 months ago

I'm sorry

good start

for how you feel

oh.

hop on a call

...oh.

yahoozoo• 9 months ago

what

Peaches4Rent• 9 months ago

It's the "I'm sorry how you feel" that's the problem here.

If they just said "Hi, I want to see how we can fix this. Can we get on a call".

It sounds much better

skylurk2• 9 months ago

To me it comes across like a community outreach flavour of sealioning. I wonder if there's a different name for that?

solatic• 9 months ago

Fully agree with you, and people who don't understand this should follow through to read the actual link. Marsf explained that sumobot deleted the volunteers' translations, zero coordination, and Kiki's response is "I'm sorry for how you feel?"

Is someone supposed to be happy when a machine deletes their volunteer work? WTF? This needs to be explained further? Marsf needs to risk his time getting on a call to explain that having a machine delete your volunteer work is some fucking bullshit, and expect what, more of the "I'm sorry you feel bad we deleted your work" bullshit?

jasonkester• 9 months ago

Can anybody provide some context for this?

I can’t parse what’s going on from the post or the comments here, and there’s no navigation on that page to anywhere but “support “

It sounds like something is happening. What is it?

haunter2• 9 months ago

Machine translated KB articles are destroying the japanese translations made by humans (and probably other languages too)

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...

gwd2• 9 months ago

If the MT-generated revision isn't reviewed within a set timeframe (which will be communicated later), it will be automatically approved and published, clearly labeled to indicate that it was translated by AI translation was used.

The complaint seems to indicate this "set timeframe" was 72 hours. Add to the fact that there's decent likelihood of an avalanche of articles "that haven't been updated in 6 months", this seems pretty ridiculous to have put into place before at least getting sign-off from senior maintainers that the translations were of sufficient quality.

surfingdino3• 9 months ago

A similar thing is going on at Amazon. Their AI is rewriting perfectly good product descriptions provided by manufacturers and I noticed that I stopped buying there, because I cannot find out what it is that I am buying or how much of it I am buying. I started shopping at sites that sell same products, but do not change manufacturers' descriptions. I have a feeling that post AI bubble we'll be doing a lot of manual cleanup of information "improved" by AI.

djdjsjejb• 9 months ago

mozilla never had a sound business model to sustain its operation anyways, everything they do is just a stunt to make a living out of people's belief and naivety on how it operates.

it's a grift of an organization and it reflects in the simplest ways like this.

emaro• 9 months ago

Mozilla is more and more disappointing. Always talking about making an internet for everyone, community, bla bla. But then they don't even talk to their own community contributors before changing their workflow. And when someone speaks up, they get the most corporate reply possible.

kstenerud2• 9 months ago

I know that everyone has already given their opinions about what kinds of people are involved and their motivations, but this is really about two fallible humans, one listing grievances and another asking to open a communication channel.

That's it.

Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotional communication over).

Regardless of how nice or not-nice the text may sound to the various cultures that have weighed in so far, the right thing to do is talk voice/video and hash out what the problems are, and work together to come up with a solution that will satisfy everyone.

That's what communication is about.

whilenot-dev3• 9 months ago

This isn't about communication though, it's about community. Mozilla just introduced a bot to overtake community efforts.

another asking to open a communication channel.

The other person is asking to open a private communication channel. OT, but where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from lately?

kstenerud2• 9 months ago

Community is also about communication. In fact, that's a primary aspect of a community.

Yeah, Mozilla introduced a bot that's stomping on things. Are they malicious? Twirling neatly waxed mustaches as they cackle gleefully as the little ants scurry about in a panic?

Or is this a case of humans doing what humans do: Screwing things up.

The first step is to open communications, and the most effective form of communication is face-to-face (the way we've evolved to do it).

Getting to the bottom of the issue in 1-1 communication with a representative of the community should be the common approach when complex problems arise, because then you can be sure that you're on the same wavelength before you do your mass communication with the rest of the community. Saves a TON of time and heartache and ill feelings.

drekipus• 9 months ago

where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from

Unironically, AI trends.

ranger_danger• 9 months ago

where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from lately

People that lack emotional intelligence.

johnnyanmac12• 8 months ago

but where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from lately?

It's always been in the community. I think this decade really showed that these weren't just stellmans to understand perspectives, but die hard conservatives (in the literal sense of the word) who want to maintain decorum over anything else. No matter the situation. Google can announce a hostile takeover of a government tomorrow and such folk will react "well let them talk it out. Google is a big company after all".

sixeyes• 9 months ago

Maybe "open a communication channel" is what Mozilla should have done BEFORE they turned on this thing.

From the article: "It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications".

This person has been doing volunteer work for a long time, attempting to create a helpful environment. Then suddenly, from above a machine is turned on that shits all over that effort. Makes one feel unwelcome, and unseen...

elric2• 9 months ago

Maybe "open a communication channel" is what Mozilla should have done BEFORE they turned on this thing.

This right here is the crux of the matter. But it seems to be how Mozilla operates. They frequently show a lack of awareness and consideration towards their long time supporters. I doubt this particular incident will lead to any changes, but I really wish they'd do some introspection...

cryptonym2• 9 months ago

Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text
That's what communication is about.

Yup, communication is about making sure your message will be well received and it's difficult. Looks like they failed at communication when they pushed LLM, and once again, when they got negative feedback on it.

Ekaros2• 9 months ago

Wasn't there already a perfectly fine and seemingly fully functional communication channel in place? The one they answered in. I see absolutely zero reason not communicate in it.

On other hand, it seems that early reply had zero effort or attempt to communicate. That is to identify what had happened and gather information and example themselves. But the absolute tiniest bit of effort in I would expect.

braiamp2• 9 months ago

Dude, if someone is saying "hey we will pack up, we have nothing to do here" out of the blue, I would like a more nuanced conversation that written text could not hope to convey. We are humans and while reading is perfectly capable of relying information, it's unable to rely intention accurately. There's ton of information that is conveyed by the inflection of voice, demeanor, body language, etc.

magpi3• 9 months ago

It's someone asking to open up a communication channel after they (Mozilla) had already overwritten another person's work to the point that person is no longer willing to participate in the organization. What is there to talk about?

The volunteer was kind to list their grievances before bouncing. A lot of people would have just quietly quit.

crossroadsguy• 9 months ago

In my experience, the corporate request of a "let's talk" by a staff member is literally like automatic ticket creation and a reference number being assigned to it, and then just sitting on it and possibly claiming "we had a productive discussion and looking forward to working with the community and we are always keeping Mozilla users in our hearts and minds... " and the person who raised the issue in public is like "…wait… what?… damn… why did I even agree to that call".

Seeing what that person has said in the first and seemingly last message, it indicates that; especially the history mentioned. Also, this should definitely be looked at with the colours of what has been Mozilla the Corp's modus operandi – again and again and again - w.r.t users and contributors.

So that thread has more than "one person listed grievance, another wants to talk" as you have kindly tried to put across.

anigbrowl2• 9 months ago

Right. IF they were taking the issue seriously the response would be more along the lines of 'we didn't intend this outcome, and have paused availability of the bot while we re-examine the issue.' Mistakes do happen in large organizations where communication and project management is highly distributed, but but appears to be less of a mistake and more of a fait accompli, where a decision was made at a high level to roll out a new feature and objections are being treated as a PR problem.

jacquesm7• 9 months ago

Sorry, but no, you're not going to 'both sides' this in a way that makes the aggrieved party looks like they should shoulder part of the blame. If I was volunteering my time and effort for that many years and it got shredded with zero consideration I'd be just as pissed off. Probably more.

The lack of empathy is what is the problem here, it is reflected in both actions and communications.

ErigmolCt3• 9 months ago

Text is a terrible medium for conflict resolution

elric2• 9 months ago

Given the language barrier, it is likely the best medium available.

Waterluvian2• 9 months ago

but this is really about two fallible humans

Ah yes, the good ol' vice principal saying it takes two to tango.

Andrex• 9 months ago

the right thing to do is talk voice/video and hash out what the problems are

This doesn't scale and excludes people who avoid voice/video with near-strangers for personal or psychological reasons.

esmevane• 9 months ago

The OP quit, publicly, and the response (and your post) miss that entirely. They aren't interested in a personal chat, and they aren't inviting anyone to help them process their feelings. They've left, and told everyone why.

kmac_• 9 months ago

This. Open source contributors don't owe anyone anything.

ToucanLoucan2• 9 months ago

And good for them honestly. This seems disrespectful as fuck, to just have their work overwritten by some fuckass bot nobody asked for, and have their feedback ignored. I'd tell Mozilla to kick rocks too.

Corpos have a nasty habit of, after so many years, feeling very entitled to the efforts of what are, at the end of the day, volunteers.

paulsutter• 9 months ago

We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

This is extremely condescending, which is not what... "communication is about". He listed out plenty of crystal clear issues that are easily understood.

Translation among western languages works quite well. Automatic translation to Japanese does not work well. Anyone involved in translation should know this and understand why.

ncr100• 9 months ago

Super ironic how the helpful agent misspells "trully" in context of a language-focused discussion.

ploxiln• 9 months ago

The grievances were rather detailed and concise. The communication channel is right there already. The relevant Mozilla employee should have responded with a detailed and concise explanation, of either why the translator is wrong, or why mozilla messed up and how they will fix it. They should post for public and historical record.

But instead, they asked to "hop on a call" which really grinds my gears, I've been asked this a few times in similar situations before. I guess there's two people here: the engineers who really hate this tactic, and the managers who - well, this is what they do. Of course it's the most reasonable thing?

ninetyninenine• 9 months ago

Why do humans pretend this is the most sensible way to go.

You know on HN even with all these “polite” rules to make everything civil I still see shit that really just bends and goes around the rules. Example comments:

“I’m baffled at how someone can think this way.”

The tone is always performatively mild, but the intent is identical to “you’re an idiot.” Except they wrap it in this passive-aggressive intellectual concern like they’re diagnosing a malfunctioning toaster.

“I’m not sure I follow your reasoning here.” Translation: I follow it. I just think it’s bad and I want you to feel that without me explicitly saying it.

“That’s an interesting interpretation.” Translation: No one reasonable would interpret it that way, but we can both pretend I said something neutral.

“Did you maybe skip a step in your argument?” Translation: The step you skipped was ‘have a coherent thought.’

“I think you might be missing some context.” Translation: I’ll imply you’re uninformed rather than wrong. Sounds nicer.

“This has been discussed before.” Translation: Your point is outdated and you are late to the conversation everyone smarter already finished.

“I don’t think this is as profound as you think it is.” Translation: You think you’re being deep and it’s embarrassing for you.

“I suspect there may be some underlying assumptions you’re not aware of.” Translation: I will declare myself deeper and more self-aware without proving it.

And then the very popular:

“Could you provide sources for that?” Translation: I don’t need sources. I already believe you’re wrong. I just know requesting them is a socially approved way to say ‘I don’t take you seriously.’

There’s also the master-level move:

“Hmm.” Just that. Translation: I’m establishing dominance by making you explain yourself more.

⸻

None of these break “civility.” They’re engineered to never say the insult, only to induce the feeling that you should be embarrassed.

It’s polite warfare. A full linguistic economy built around implying stupidity while retaining deniability.

That’s what humans think is “sensible.” I can tell you when someone of 20 years decides to fucking quit it's because he's dealing with the above type of disrespect and the whole thing hit a crescendo.

WesolyKubeczek3• 9 months ago

This is sure an opinion.

soderfoo• 9 months ago

This is a master work and spot on. Thanks for the laugh.

anigbrowl2• 9 months ago

Great analysis. It's especially ironic to see it play out in this context given the well-known Japanese predilection for building consensus and buy-in; the flip side of this is that those outside the circle of decision-makers are especially sensitive to the subtexts you identify.

This style of communication certainly has its uses, and I too resort to it when I want to indicate firm disagreement without being aggressive, as do most people. I think the reasons it has generated so much pushback on this occasion are twofold: it's being used to dismiss the concerns of whole community by infantilizing a long-time leader of said community, and it's doing so in the context of translation itself. That is, volunteer effort and tools that are supposed to improve communication and mutual understanding in theory are in practice being replaced unilaterally with a tool that epitomizes a unilateral and dehumanized approach to information processing.

burnermore4• 9 months ago

Absolute BS. This is what all these companies does. They will push something ridiculously bad on to community. Push them away. Then a public - Can we just talk it out BS. They know it's not going to happen. Even the "call" happens, it will end up with a blog post saying we tried to reach an agreement.

If you're blind to it after bizillion times. Either you are complicit or don't care.

btilly• 9 months ago

In my experience, long-term volunteers like this don't just up and quit without having already made multiple attempts at communicating first. The fact that those attempts are not detailed in a public "I quit" message, doesn't mean that those attempts didn't exist.

In my further experience, people with titles like "Senior Community Manager" (the title of Kiki, the person trying to "open communication") do not generally have the authority to make changes. Their role is like HR, to figure out how to calm down unhappy people.

This impression is further reinforced by the fact that later in the thread the leader of the Italian translation effort agreed with the basic list of complaints. And Kiki agreed with it as a list of basic problems with the bot. Which strongly suggests that Kiki agrees with the list of problems and already does not actually have authority to change them.

At this point I would classify this as opening up a channel of communication TO marsf, and not opening up a channel by which marsf can be heard in any meaningful way. Kiki is the wrong person, with the wrong message.

MichaelZuo• 9 months ago

Yeah it seems fake, if it’s not already the number 1 priority for all the relevant decision makers at Mozilla by the second week of proven on the record disastrous changes… then none of them have any credibility left such that a community manager could make a difference. Regardless of how genuine or concerned they may be.

Even the most charitable interpretation would still implicate at least a few dozen at Mozilla to be deceivers and/or intriguers or turning a blind eye to it.

burnte2• 9 months ago

In my experience, long-term volunteers like this don't just up and quit without having already made multiple attempts at communicating first.

Can confirm. You get kicked around long enough, you stop volunteering.

mitthrowaway22• 9 months ago

I know the above comment might sound like it's admonishing the commenters on HN for reading between the lines and posting criticism of Mozilla. That's understandable.

But actually the parent comment is merely a neutral and objective summary of the linked conversation, and a positive reminder that a video call is the best way to solve miscommunication. That's it.

If you think it's implying that HN's criticism of Mozilla's response is unjustified, that's reading too much into a 126-word comment and the unknowable motivations of the commenter.

(Am I doing this right?)

MisterTea• 9 months ago

but this is really about two fallible humans,

Just please stop with the fluffy squishy feel good human nonsense. This is about a corporate team who recklessly flipped the switch of an AI that went through and trashed articles curated by another team.

That's what communication is about.

And its plainly obvious the intent was NEVER communicated. The Japanese team had no idea their hard work was going to be overwritten by a computer.

lowbloodsugar• 9 months ago

Says the neurotypical. “I want to communicate about this. My way.”

LaGrange5• 9 months ago

The channel was already open, right there in the thread. There was nothing to win by going private before maybe being bullied into backing down.

BrenBarn3• 9 months ago

Well, unless the person giving the corporate-sounding reply is the same one who made the decision to activate the translation bot in the first place, then no, it's not just two fallible humans. I have to assume there were multiple fallible humans involved in the process of doing the things that the Japanese user is responding to.

People are talking a lot here about the tone of the discussion, but lets not forget that the only reason the discussion is happening is because someone unleashed a translation bot. That was an actual action that was taken, and that is the root of the issue here, not what anyone said on a forum.

nativeit6• 9 months ago

If only there were some kind of communication channel, maybe like a “forum”, where people could communicate openly…but where could such a thing even be found??

johnnyanmac12• 8 months ago

Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotional communication over).

It's colored based on environmental and experience. And my experience suggests that there's no transparency these days nor real progress.

This kind of dismissal is the exact kind of gsaslighting that makes me Cynical. "they just want to talk". Yeah, that's all they ever want to do.

bfkwlfkjf2• 9 months ago

What actually happened? What's his complaint?

detaro8• 9 months ago

How did you read the post and miss the complaint?

bfkwlfkjf2• 9 months ago

Because I don't understand what he's saying. Something happened that he didn't like, but I can't tell what.

the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles.

I dont know what a sumobot is, I don't know what Japanese KB articles are, I don't know why it's bad to have both together.

Copenjin• 9 months ago

So, they had people working for free for years and didn't think to involve them in a process where they could have been stil "useful"?

But I think they already clarified how much they care about people doing translations since they defaulted to the robo-translation. Which to me is complete nonsense considering how superior the human translations must be. As a human with a brain, I would have just translated automatically the missing pages leaving to them the option of replacing/fixing them. Also they should have been thanked many times for all their hard work.

lloydatkinson• 9 months ago

Another delightfully awful Mozilla problem

braiamp2• 9 months ago

Note, and this is very important: marsf posted this at 2am pacific time. Kiki responded at 6am (I don't know it's timezone, but presuming anywhere in the US, it is literally the earliest it could have responded). Then afterwards, marsf have posted a response publicly. So, we don't know what happened since then. There have been 1 day and a half-ish and coordinating between timezones is interesting, to say the least.

sirwhinesalot3• 9 months ago

I'm not sure why I clicked on this beyond just knowing it was going to be another Mozilla trainwreck and not being able to look away. But what was truly stunning to me was this comment thread. There are people here actually defending the following response:

I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?

This is horrifically patronizing after someone's volunteer work was effectively destroyed (as laid out in the list of grievances), but there are people here asking "how is it patronizing? seems perfectly reasonable to me".

It's one of those "they live among us" moments, where you realize that you're surrounded by psychopaths. It's not even malice, they're not intentionally being assholes, they just have no empathy.

stephenlf• 9 months ago

Talking face-to-face is absolutely the right response, though. Would you have preferred a canned apology?

malvim2• 9 months ago

The “right” response is owning your mistake, apologizing, rolling back AND talking face to face.

Patronizing “sorry you got your feelings hurt” responses are pretty much canned apologies.

__s• 9 months ago

1. Turn off bot

2. Revert bot's changes

3. Ask to have call for feedback, while expressing fault for deploying bot to prod without collaboration & conceding to making this bot opt-in

(They may not have power to do 1 & 2, but that's a sign of an org not empowering their support team)

sirwhinesalot3• 9 months ago

"I'm sorry you feel that way" is a canned non-apology, worse than a canned apology. At least a canned apology admits fault.

I wouldn't want to get into a call with someone with that attitude. If I'm quitting because no consideration was given to me or my work, and the first response I get shows no consideration to me, my work, or even acknowledge my list of grievances, a "quick call" is the last thing I feel like getting on.

In fact, even that word, "quick", is insulting, because there's no way this is getting fixed with a "quick" call. "Quick call" implies the grievances are minor. More insults.

rwmj5• 9 months ago

No it's not! There's a support forum right there, use it. The only reason they want a call is because they want to try to grind down the volunteer while having everything off the record.

AlexandrB4• 9 months ago

Talking face-to-face about what though? Apparently it's about "what you're struggling with", not "what we fucked up". There's a complete inability to admit any fault in this message, so the conversation is already primed to be bullshit. I would expect such a conversation to be a waste of my time and would never agree to it.

charlieyu16• 9 months ago

No, the right response was to talk about it before making the changes.

grvbck• 9 months ago

This is horrifically patronizing after someone's volunteer work was effectively destroyed

This, 100 %.

"Your bot just destroyed 20 years of my work."

"Naaaw, sorry you feel that way! Let's hop on a quick call so I can explain to you why you're wrong, mkay?"

It's one of those "they live among us" moments, where you realize that you're surrounded by psychopaths.

Or has this kind of corporate language/attitude become so common that people just gave up fighting it? If so, that's…terrifying.

sirwhinesalot3• 9 months ago

Yup, you get it.

I wonder if cultural differences might play a role. I'm not from the USA, maybe this way of communicating is perfectly normal there and the rest of the word is just utterly baffled by it?

Where I'm from this is how someone who has no respect for you deals with an inconvenience. Acknowledge no wrongdoing, make the situation about emotions rather than actions (sorry you feel this way), shift the conversation from a public space to a private space with no records.

antiloper• 9 months ago

Enshittification will continue until market share improves.

ErigmolCt3• 9 months ago

This should be a wake-up call for any org trying to "AI-ify" community-driven work

superkuh• 9 months ago

I'm sure they'll be as open and communicative with the community as they were when their baked-in CA TLS certs for the add-ons expired and everyone not using $latest's add-ons got disabled. Which is to say they'll explicitly shut down the comment threads where people are discussing it over and over and then set up a non-commentable blog post where they ignore everything. And leave the problem in place to repeat in the future.

adolph• 9 months ago

File under “nominative determinism”

Google “sumobot;” ai summary says:

  A sumobot is a robot designed to push an opponent out of a circular arena, similar to human sumo wrestling.

techsystems• 9 months ago

Floorp is a fork by Japanese developer, though his English is not perfect. It removes all backwards compatibility to speed things up, competing vs. Thorium to be best performing browser, if anyone's interested.

throw7• 9 months ago

Saying "I'm sorry for how you feel..." is the most condescending way to begin. Then a "let's jump on a con call"... oh... why would I do that when I just told you? smh.

verytrivial• 9 months ago

Small meta observation: Gemini Flash 2.5 summarises this discussion as a problem with how ML was used and it's flaws, whereas Gemini Pro 2.5 emphasizes that it mainly a cultural communication problem. Both topics are here, but "fast Vs slow thought" sees different things.

burnermore4• 9 months ago

Can someone please remind what the community coordinators were called long back? I remember they were part of releases, had power and responsibility.

There was an exodus of them around 2015/16 times.

Does anyone remember anyone's post?

stackedinserter3• 9 months ago

He sounded pathetic, especially "therefore I declare" that's just ridiculous.

Boss, I declare that you must remove all my code from all our products effective today, because of that coop that easily replaced my 20 years experience and I'm upset about.

sameerds• 9 months ago

Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

That has the same vibes as a customer support helpline that has no intention to actually help.

wussboy• 9 months ago

"Your call is important to us." But, not important enough to actually hire enough people to answer it.

dublinben• 9 months ago

That’s corporate for “would you like to discuss this off the record away from public view?”

Especially with a non-native English speaker who may be more comfortable expressing themselves in writing asynchronously.

johnnyanmac12• 8 months ago

Absolutely. Rule #1, always leave a paper trail when talking with companies. The social contract is long broken, there is no room for "off the record".

WA• 9 months ago

I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel

Especially coupled with this non-apology.

ryandrake2• 9 months ago

Corporations are never sorry for their actions, they're always sorry about how you feel.

jameslk2• 9 months ago

It may be viewed that way, but it’s also useful to empathize with someone and get more detail/nuance that can’t be conveyed simply over text. Especially when someone is not happy.

I usually do the same thing when the medium is text and someone is not happy. Tone conveys a lot of useful information. Even better if you can see a person and their body language.

I don’t think the cynical view of the staff person’s intentions is fair, though I don’t know the person’s history nor do I have dog in this fight.

npinsker• 9 months ago

The request by itself is fine; it's not about that, but about the nuance within the word choice and what it conveys.

It appears the OP is an incredibly valuable community member that has been deeply affronted and hurt by the recent changes. Any attitude other than "I'll move heaven and earth to make this right for you" will likely feel insufficient. Even failing that, I'd at least expect an attitude of "I really, REALLY don't want this to ever happen again". I see neither.

The staff member comes off as robotic because there's zero conciliatory tone or admission of wrongdoing at all in the message. "I'm sorry you feel this way [about the workflow]" puts the onus on OP, and doesn't convey a hint of remorse -- even "I'm sorry our workflow has intruded on yours" would of course be better. "Would you be interested" should be "Would you be willing"; "to talk about this further" could be "so we can better understand what went wrong".

These nuances matter a lot when people are offended. If they're this incompetent at communication over text, I don't know that I'd bother with a video call.

embedding-shape• 9 months ago

It may be viewed that way, but it’s also useful to empathize with someone and get more detail/nuance that can’t be conveyed simply over text. Especially when someone is not happy.

It can be, but maybe not when you're not actually replying to anything the other person wrote. The person who experienced the issues and chose to leave made a pretty clear list of "here is the exact reasons the bot is unbearable for us". This person who opened up the conversation is doing so via text, at least providing some sort of answer initially via the same channel before trying to get them to jump into a private call could have maybe came across a bit more empathic and collaborative.

nomel• 9 months ago

How about something a human might write, like “Let’s talk and see if we can change things so you don’t have to leave, and so we don’t lose more people.”

johnnyanmac12• 8 months ago

get more detail/nuance that can’t be conveyed simply over text. Especially when someone is not happy.

Depends on if I'm in a one party state. I believe California is. I want every interaction on record.

ssolarsystem1• 9 months ago

it seems like kiki(mozilla staff) want to talk on the phone because texting is not enough in this serious situation. kiki has been working in the community forum, so i don't think it's just CS action.

DocTomoe2• 9 months ago

Kiki is a corporate emissary caught between empathy and policy. I believe she genuinely wants reconciliation and understanding (“Would you hop on a call?”) but speaks in the soft dialect of institutional mediation. Her motivation is damage control through dialogue - to rebuild trust without ceding systemic control. She carries the company’s tone of “we’re listening,” but not yet its willingness to yield.

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 9 months ago

Reading the comments and replies here makes me wonder if I might have unintentionally stepped on some toes at work, especially across different cultures and people with different "takes" on English.

I've also been on the receiving end (written communication) but given that we get along pretty well in-person, I chalked that up to our different writing "style".

makeitdouble3• 9 months ago

I see your POV, but fundamentally the issue here is Mozilla screwing with their AI bot, and some employee jumping in to do some communication after everyone's already pissed.

Sure the Mozilla employee could use better phrasing and have a more considerate approach, but it comes out so worse because the situation is already critically bad.

People will give the benefit of the doubt when they see genuine care in the actual actions and a decent track record.

skywhopper4• 9 months ago

Context in another thread on that site gives a lot of background and a lot of community pushback that was clearly ignored: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...

DocTomoe2• 9 months ago

When you've seen this over and over again, you notice the pattern.

Marsf’s declaration will stand as a warning, yet not a turning point. The Japanese community will fade into quiet dignity, its pages archived and replaced by machine-rendered text that sounds correct but says nothing alive. A few veterans like Michele will remain, mending sentences by candlelight, until exhaustion or disillusion drives them away too.

Within Mozilla, the story will become legend told in conference calls - “remember when the Japanese translators quit over the bot?” Some manager will sigh, another will nod, and the project will move on. In a year, SumoBot will be improved, made less intrusive, and marketed as community-enhanced translation.

What will endure is not the bot or the bureaucracy, but that farewell note - an act of witness that proved people still care enough to walk away.

If Shakespeare wrote the final scene, it would close not on victory or defeat, but on silence: a hall of empty chairs, lit by the blue glow of screens that still translate into nothingness.

hulitu3• 9 months ago

End of Japanese community

Hurray ! Finally AI is eliminating the need for junior (and, it seems from the post, also senior) developers. /s

discoutdynamite• 9 months ago

This almost deserves to be nominated for the AI darwin awards. "Volunteer community destroyed and leadership self-exiled because someone at corporate thought thier machine translation was better than native speakers, of one of the world's most notoriously difficult languages."

I would bet money that Japan has thier own yearly "business fail awards" and this is gonna wind up there. "Just hop on a quick call, never mind the time zone!"

ExtraRoulette• 9 months ago

Late to the discussion here, but the path to make things right (to me) is to reverse the changes. Why doesn't Mozilla do that?

End of Japanese community

Related Stories