That has the same vibes as a customer support helpline that has no intention to actually help.
Especially with a non-native English speaker who may be more comfortable expressing themselves in writing asynchronously.
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.
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.
Mozilla could of certainly handled it better as an org, that I would agree with.
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.
Depends on if I'm in a one party state. I believe California is. I want every interaction on record.
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.
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.
Can confirm. You get kicked around long enough, you stop volunteering.
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.
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...
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...
Unless there is some sort of blowback, this sort of thing is likely to happen again to someone, and I understand how some people may not want to be involved anymore, and I understand how Mozilla will keep being Mozilla (just like other organizations will continue their current behaviors until some catalyst changes that behavior).
This person is already a stakeholder, you don't have a choice to add or not add them, you have a choice to include or not include them. And it's a gamble to not include them for this exact reason.
I'm all for keeping stakeholder counts as low as possible but you can't do it by just pretending some of your stakeholders don't exist, that's no good and in my experience, usually ends exactly like this.
Mix that with incidents like this and you basically are seeing the real time stagnation of open source contributions. You'll only contribute if you work at a top company who chooses to have staff support it.
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.
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.
> 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?
People that lack emotional intelligence.
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.
This communication in particular is about how one member is sharing their "discomfort" of the non-communicated automation efforts done by Mozilla, and is also expressing their resulting action - leaving that community.
Please don't conflate the efforts of institutions (Mozilla) with the ones of communities (SUMO). Transparency is a big factor that marks their difference. So yes, community is also about communication.
Asking that same volunteer to hop on a video call is just insensitive. They're the one providing free work; if you care about solving the problem and not losing the volunteer force, you should go where they are (the forums) instead of asking them to come to you (video call). They probably don't want to take time out of their schedule to waste their time talking with a community rep. And they probably don't even want to do a voice/video call.
> Or is this a case of humans doing what humans do: Screwing things up.
Whatever else they might be, they're clearly out of touch. You'd have to be living under a rock to not realize that AI is controversial - especially in the more OSS/FSF parts of the internet - and rolling it out like a bulldozer is going to create outrage.
As soon as you get Wi-Fi back up, let's hop on a call.
It’s not a “screw up”. It’s also not malicious per se. It’s insensitive and shows a lack of care for the community. They deliberately turned on a bot that would overwrite work done by people, and make these people work with diffs and proofreading, without them having a say in it. In production!
It’s not like they can’t test it. Or involve everyone. There are locale leaders, as the Italian person alluded to.
This is shitting on community, and then going “sorry not sorry”, because they’re not rolling it back and they’re saying “I’m sorry you got your feelings hurt, wanna talk”?
This CAN be sorted out. And I believe it will. But it WAS insensitive and it WAS a case of not caring for the people who put their time and effort in voluntary work that benefits you. It’s really bad, no matter the intentions.
Where are you getting this from, specifically? The claim I can see is that Mozilla didn't care enough to check first. So this looks as if it might be a straw-man argument. I think those are specifically prohibited in the FAQ.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
And never start with "I'm sorry for how you feel about". Say how would these work on you:
"I'm sorry for how you feel about death of your family"
"I'm sorry for how you feel about us destroying your work"
Throw in some (proper) communication before you try to fix things with a hammer or start firing people and I'd agree. It's also unlikely the community support manager has any of this power, they are looking to roll up an accurate summary capturing all of the details to the people who do.
Fully agreed there are better wordings/phrases to engage on that kind of communication though. The choice of words here is very easily taken as dismissive, regardless of intent.
information which mostly gets scrambled by a phone or video call
I absolutely loathe when companies do the "let's jump on a call" thing, but this does seem like a pretty exceptional case where a call would be indeed very helpful. This is also an opportunity for him to get directly in front of people at Mozilla to voice his concerns. There's a high probability of impact here, which to me seems very much worth the 15 or 30 minutes or however long it takes to jump on a call.
The volunteer was kind to list their grievances before bouncing. A lot of people would have just quietly quit.
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.
The lack of empathy is what is the problem here, it is reflected in both actions and communications.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This doesn't scale and excludes people who avoid voice/video with near-strangers for personal or psychological reasons.
Ah yes, the good ol' vice principal saying it takes two to tango.
If you're blind to it after bizillion times. Either you are complicit or don't care.
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?)
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.
It sucks. I absolutely don't want Google to have total control over the web and still want Firefox to succeed, but at this point it's clear they have failed. I still use Firefox, but much less than I used to and I stopped recommending it to non-techies a while back when they broke a bunch of functionality on mobile.
This may be a canard but I was under the impression that Google maintains Mozilla through default search payment in order to have a bare minimum competitor to head off regulation. By that interpretation, dysfunction at Mozilla is preferred if not explicitly part of the plan.
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.
But the sad part is all the hassle I go through gets it to about 80% of where it was a dozen years ago. A lot less crashy, though, I'll have to give them that - although everything is less crashy now. But they haven't destroyed the browser.
That's in a way even sadder: they decide every day to wake up and be bad, when any day they could decide to be better. Instead they've entered the modern massive predatory nonprofit space. Which usually is a vehicle for insiders to get rich off government grants, but Firefox have chosen the even eviller alternative of running interference for google as a product.
Any day they could choose to center the user and the health of the internet again. Every day they choose not to. They're just a valve that keeps paranoid and aware techies from going berserk and seriously competing against chrome, and that keeps antitrust away from google (not that there's anything for big business to to fear with horrible Obama judges like Amit Mehta on the bench.) It's their only serious source of income.
I find this confusing. Why is Firefox so much effort? Install it + badger + adnauseum. Done. Why so hard for you? I am not a power user, is that why I don't see the effort?
The new UI sucks (titlebar highjacking, tiny scrollbar), phones to Google by default (safe browsing), a lot of bad defaults.
> Install it + badger + adnauseum
So you need to install other stuff to make it usable. /s
The only reason Google gives money to Mozilla is because they don't want to get sued for monopoly.
Firefox ad block use: 17.81%
Remaining addressable Firefox market share: 1.78%
So essentially peanuts.
Especially since most of said users would have used Google anyway.
If there ever was a comunity I'd expect to have strong opinions on Mozilla/Firefox, it's HackerNews
I think lot of the HN browsers strong opinions more akin to "Why do historians have strong opinions on geopolitical intrigue X" or "Why do doctors have strong opinions on the effectiveness of pharmaceutical Y". Strong opinions, because they are experts who care for important objective reasons.
Fire 80% of the C-level employees (make them justify their positions, DOGE-style); investigate and publicize the internal decision-making processes that lead to Mozilla becoming a de facto subsidiary of Google; do a full auditing of the financials and determine how much money the organization really needs to fund browser development (Servo and Ladybird seem to be getting shit done with a lot less money than Mozilla. How is that possible?); do an auditing of all non-browser related initiatives (stuff like MDN is worthwhile, but what other BS is sucking up money and time?); talk to the existing development staff about what's working and what's not and what opportunities exist that an outsider wouldn't know about. I would listen to the developers. Developers are often an underutilized business resource.
This would give me a basis to start thinking about revenue. Once it's clear what fat can be cut (and I think the cuts would be huge), then it'd be clearer exactly what revenue model might work.
At this point, it's worth going for broke. Mozilla is effectively dead, so there's nothing to lose. If it fails, that's still better than the status quo.
Monetization definitely isn't easy. It'd be a mix of donations, fundraising, and corporate deals that align with the mission. With a very lean team it should be sustainable, though. The goal is to become an objectively better experience than any other browser, and there's still a lot of jank to work on to achieve that.
Also, the reason HN has so many people ready to gripe about Firefox is because HN still has a large number of people using Firefox. I never complain about technical or policy decisions from Chrome or Safari because I don't use those browsers! The only reason I have complaints about Mozilla is because I actually use Firefox.
At least when Rider asked me about it, I say "no" once and that's the end of it.Cool, no hard feelings. You're $15 a month is earned.
Mozilla has had 13 years to do that post Eich and they just don't. Every step forward has an asterisk to it if you dig a little.
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.
[0]: https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and...
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.
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.
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.
Because they live in the same places. They go to the same restaurants, they have the same conversations, they have personal friends at FAANG... they live and breath the same ideas, the same opinions, the same perspectives. They are in a bubble, and think "their" org should partake in the same behaviours as all the other companies out there - if anything, because it will be useful for their CVs when they inevitably look for a new job next month or next year. I don't blame them, it's inevitable human behaviour.
Maybe Mozilla should relocate the bulk of their leadership outside the US.
They don't even have to leave the state. Just don't be stuck in that same stagnant SV bubble and bring in people with genuine ideas and initiative.
Wolves see the community sheep build and then move in under wool coating. Doesn't mean they still are not in fact a wolf.
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.
Not being obsessed with rapacious growth, not chasing trends and features that look good on delivery metrics but instead building a stable product would go a long way.
And frankly, for descriptions on what the product should be, standards to implement (or not), and overall strategy for a project that tries to do its best for tech as a whole - Mozillas own writeups are spot-on! They just don't seem to act in accordance with the "vibe" and ideals that blog posts etc. talk about.
Any answer that’s not fully bulletproof immediately rules any other opinions you may hold illegitimate.
/s
Behavior like this doesn't do a lot to dispel that theory.
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
like what percent of firefox users do you think actually care about this?
Fortunately, history has shown you don't need a majority of users decrying something to get noticed.
"Do you want the most minimal stripped down version of FireFox? Well you can have it!"
*and after all, isn't that what's really important /s
Increasingly it isn’t. It’s crashing 2 or 3 times a day for me now, and video conferencing is barely usable.
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bp-208cc026-e144-46e7-a891-aaddb0250804 2025-08-04T08:50-07:00I 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.
Edit: correcting autocorrect.
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…
I have to say it feels like a really familiar, NGO-flavored disrespect, though: “we’re doing this favor for underrepresented language communities,” regardless of whether they want/need it or not.
“There’s only X number of you having to shoulder the load in XX sub-community, don’t you want us to impose a bunch of ‘help’?”
Well, no, if the choice is between a formidable volume of slop and a smaller but well-executed volume of volunteer labor-of-love…
(…I say as a person very much without all sides of the story, and shooting from the hip a bit. I don’t mean to impugn anybody’s intentions, and I imagine at the end of the day we’re all on the same side here.)
For any RFC, there will be a "comment" after publication from someone who did not take earlier comments seriously enough to read them.
Mind boggling
You can't just arrive after publication, ignore what others said before you, and expect anyone to listen to you.
"many of the early RFCs were actual Requests for Comments and were titled as such to avoid sounding too declarative and to encourage discussion.[8][9] The RFC leaves questions open and is written in a less formal style. This less formal style is now typical of Internet Draft documents, the precursor step before being approved as an RFC." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments
At this point, as we close in on 10,000 final-stage documents, it's better to pretend that "RFC" is just a name, not an acronym.
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.
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.
Long time in Japan too, I would not consider newamashi as being Japan's strengths.
The sort of consensus building ultimately involves having to do stuff to make people's opinions feel taken care of, even if their concerns are outright wrong. And you end up having to make some awkward deals.
Like with all this "Japanese business culture" stuff though, I feel like it's pretty universal in some degrees or another everywhere. Who's out there just doing things without getting _any_ form of backchannel checking first? Who wants to be surprised at random announcements from people you're working with? Apart from Musk types.
But of course some people are very comfortable just ripping the band aid off and putting people in awkward spots, because "of course" they have the right opinion and plan already.
Why context matters in judging whether some practice is good or not.
To be clear this is Japan we’re talking about with the twenty years part. The same thing applies in the US but on smaller timescales though. If people feel appreciated and respected and you have good relationships, they will basically back whatever you want.
I tend to lean towards thinking backchanneling makes sense as a general vibe, if only because it's a way of doing things that lets people have dignity, and the costs _can be_ low.
Just that lacking context one really can't make that many blanket statements.
I think the difficult cases come when people's interests aren't aligned. If you're coordinating with a vendor to basically detangle yourself from their vendor-specific tooling to be able to move away from them, at some level it doesn't really make sense to read them in on that.
There are degrees to this, and I think you can argue both sides here (so ultimately it's a question of what you want to do), but parties are rarely neutral. So the tough discussions come from ones where one party is going to be losing out on something.
IMHO the only correct way to measure the effectiveness of decision making is from the quality of executed outcomes. It is somewhat nonsensical to sever decisions from execution, and claim that decisions have been made rapidly if the decision doesn't lend itself to crisp execution. Without that, decisions are merely intentions.
How do you know what "the right thing" is at the outset without talking to the stakeholders?
I'm dealing with someone's "the right thing" that is actually wrong and dumb. They didn't ask us before rolling out the new "standard."
I think most people have at least one issue where they discount one of the stakeholder's judgement, it's all fairly contextual. But hey, if you're the CEO of some company you have the ability to act on that discounting.
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.
Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.
It ensures you truly understand what the crux of the grievance is and what they would like to happen to get it resolved, instead of being distracted by tangential points.
> That nothing is on the record?
If you’re already assuming malice before the resolution process even had a chance to begin, the conversation has little chance of being productive. Do you know this particular person? Have you interacted with them before?
> A lot of people don't want to jump in calls, ever.
Then say no! But being preemptively mad because someone asked is absurd and does nothing to fix the problem. The asker shouldn’t assume what the other person wants or doesn’t, they should ask. Which is what they did.
> Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.
Yes, very much agreed. But you can’t take back what you did, only try to make amends. And that’s very difficult if the other party demands perfection while you’re still even trying to understand the situation.
in your own opinion
>and very American
from an American company? that's what I'd expect. Should they have brought up some Japanese PR consultant just to reply to a community post?
>acknowledging the mistake immediately
Who says a mistake happened? You? Before apologizing maybe we should understand the problem?
Yes! It wouldn't even have had to have been a good one to have done a better job. Shit, just find the closest weeb and run it past them.
A developer relations person needs to understand developers so why shouldn't we expect the community person to understand the community they're interacting with?
Mozilla doesn't have the community goodwill to burn, it's hanging on by a thread - so not hiring someone with an idea if how to actually do that job would be penny wise pound foolish.
I understand people have sympathy inclination to victims, so everyone would assume the victim is good and other side is bad. I have worked long enough with japanese people knowing they can throw unpredictable tantrums.
As a manager, what would be your best course of action to deal with similar situation?
Life doesn't always have to be from the perspective from “a manager”, these are community volunteers doing untold hours of unpaid work. Just be a person, whose acquaintance is upset you replaced their handmade postcard with an AI-generated one.
Agree on manager view, I was rather putting situation in a wrong perspective. It doesn't change the questions though - what would you do to resolve the situation (not to make the other side feel good)?
This feels very wrong to me, I'm sorry, but I'd be very pissed if you told me such a thing in a personal context. Reminds of Stanley from The Office, who claims he never apologised to any of his wives.
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.
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.
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
The Japanese copyright law clearly stated decades ago and recent US court favors Anthropic on this regard.
Copyright isn't granted on mere information or thought.
If you take somebody's copyrighted writing, analyze it and publish information such as how many words or sentence in it or other information about that copyrighted work, that's not a derivative works of original copyrighted work.
> 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.
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
First you have to stop the destruction. Then you can talk about how to make the bot work for humans, instead of against them.
"Explain what's wrong and how to fix it" is the wrong approach. if you need it explained to you what was broken, then you're not the expert here, just the local tinpot dictator.
How would you have responded?
Still might not do anything, but as a CM that's as much of a job as I can do.
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.
To fix the bug the architecture of the feature would have to be different, and that was completely obvious from the start.
Mozilla's response should not be limited to clarifying these grievances. But it could have been all the staff member who responded could do.
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.
Yes. And someone should make a real apology. But learning what the machine did wrong is part of fixing a machine.
Saving zero dollars and making the product worse is not important, only that there doesn’t seem to be a browser monopoly is.
This happens all the time, in every US company I know. It's as if the Americans where entirely oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world exists.
Looking through that wiki there seems to be a lot of things that ML would get wrong.
I'm sure some translators were using ML before it was integrated, and those guidelines are here in particular to tell them about those problems.
Also, ML is now really good to translate between European languages, but Japanese is very different in its structure so ML from English to Japanese is not as good. I'm sure some people who only know English/French/Spanish/German saw that ML is pretty good, and don't realize that for some other language it just doesn't work.
As somebody who has to regularly bear "German" machine-translated UIs and manuals that originate in English, I can only say: No, it's not. It's atrocious.
Typically, when a new page is written in English, don't automatically generate a version in all languages. When a translator starts creating the page in their language, provide a button to pre-fill with ML translation if they want to.
And for users, you can display the English version with a message, "this is not translated in your language yet but you can read an ML version if you want".
The core issue here is the way the bot was deployed. The fact that they had the poor taste to make it auto-replace articles written by their own volunteers is idiotic and disrespectful in the extreme. A new bot should work entirely in the back end, sending proposals for translations to the volunteers, who can choose to accept them or ignore them. Once the rate of acceptance is very high, for a specific individual language, then you might consider automating further.
And yes, this effort needs to be done for each language separately. Just because the bot works well in Italian doesn't in any way guarantee that it will work well in Japanese. Machine translation quality varies wildly by language, this is a well known and obvious fact.
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.
No, some of us can see into the future, because it flows from the past. When management shits on 20 years of work and breaks everything after not listening to your warnings, they don't suddenly start listening and understanding out of nowhere.
If the bot has the power to overrule the volunteer translation teams, the entire power structure is wrong from the get go.
Saying "the entire power structure is wrong from the get go" is a huge conclusion to draw here. People write internal tools and make mistakes. Mistakes can be fixed.
I have had to cooperate with coporate
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, even in the best "sorry we screwed up" scenario, the quick call covers their butt and let them leeway to backtrack as needed. That's also part of why we viscerally react to opaque meetings IMHO.
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.
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.
> 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".
It would be such irony if they asked GPT to reword it to a more polite tone though...
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.
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.
- 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.
- No "we stopped the bot for now"
"We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining".
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.
This is just a single initial reply from a "community support manager" in Indonesia. It's not from the Mozilla CEO or the leader of the project. They surely don't have the power to stop the bot. But what they can do is find it more over a call, and then who to escalate it to. Then maybe it does get turned off before it's fixed or changed.
You seem to be confusing someone in customer support with someone who holds power over entire projects. I don't understand how you think a customer support person should be able to just turn off software across the globe in response to a single short message on a forum with few details.
Regardless they are representing the company. If they aren't the right person to respond - they should not have responded and kicked it up the chain/over the fence to the right person - instead of responding by offering to waste the complainants time on a call with someone you are asserting is not the right person to be handling this. Supposing you are correct about their position, it makes their response far worse, not better.
It is true both they and the person they are responding to are marked as "SUMO Locale Leaders"... but it seems rather clear from the context that is not the role they are inhabiting in their (non) apology and request for a "quick call" with the complainant.
The language they use is certainly not the language a peer would be expected to use either.
I do get what you're saying, and it's not like I think the CSM should be fired for the message. I just think it's bad comms.
Here are some alternative choices:
- post nothing, figure out more internally (community support is also about vouching for people!)
- post something more personal like "Thank you for posting this. I'm looking into who is working on this bot to get this information in front of them". Perhaps not allowed by Mozilla's policies
- Do some DMing (again, more personal, allowing for something direct)
But to your point... it's one person's message, and on both sides these are likely people where English isn't their native language. I'm assuming that community support managers are paid roles at mozilla, but maybe not.
And like... yeah, at one point you go into whatever company chat and you start barking up the chain. That's the work
Second, this "community support forum" isn't just a corporate help desk. It's a forum for community supporters of Mozilla, an open source organisation for which community contributions are hugely important. Mozilla can't just fuck over parts of it's community and expect that to be business as usual.
Your knee-jerk cynicism saddens me. If someone doesn't want to help, they generally just ignore. They generally don't suggest hopping on a call ASAP. When they want to call you is when they're taking it seriously.
No it is not. The particular phrasing that was used I have never seen used in any other way than to be dismissive towards people.
> Your knee-jerk cynicism saddens me.
My cynicism isn't knee jerk, My cynicism stems from roughly 20 years working as a developer, being in and observing the industry.
> If someone doesn't want to help, they generally just ignore. They generally don't suggest hopping on a call ASAP. When they want to call you is when they're taking it seriously.
Not if it gets noticed and talked about on forums. It is then used as damage control.
> My cynicism stems from roughly 20 years working as a developer
That saddens me. It seems like you've worked at some rough places, I'm sorry. But they're not all like that, and I wish you could see that.
> Not if it gets noticed and talked about on forums. It is then used as damage control.
I don't see how it's going to work as damage control. Can you explain how? Either it helps resolve things (good), or it doesn't and people keep complaining in the thread. I don't see any scenario where it controls damage. Damage control is things like locking a thread or shadowbanning. Not offering to call.
I'm really sorry you see everything through such a cynical lens.
I suspect that you didn't understand the subtext of the conversation. If you aren't used to dealing with it, you will take the comment on face value, if you are like me that had to deal with it most of my life, you won't.
> That saddens me. It seems like you've worked at some rough places, I'm sorry. But they're not all like that, and I wish you could see that.
I got paid well enough. I prefer to be a gun for hire and deal with the reality. I actually prefer these environments, I can assume everyone around me is a snake.
> I don't see how it's going to work as damage control. Can you explain how? Either it helps resolve things (good), or it doesn't and people keep complaining in the thread. I don't see any scenario where it controls damage. Damage control is things like locking a thread or shadowbanning. Not offering to call.
I am sure other people have explained this to you. However it is extremely simple.
1) Feign concern. This fools enough people so it gets quieted down.
2) Call up, pretend to care, person calms down as they feel like things are being addressed.
3) Do nothing.
4) It gets forgotten about, person that initially instigated complaint doesn't bother following up.
> I'm really sorry you see everything through such a cynical lens.
I don't see everything through a cynical lens. I see communications of this type as cynically because they have almost always been disingenuous.
I suspect you're inventing a subtext that simply isn't there.
> I actually prefer these environments, I can assume everyone around me is a snake.
Again, I'm really sorry. That's a very, very sad thing.
> I am sure other people have explained this to you. However it is extremely simple.
This process you're describing doesn't make any sense. People who are quitting a volunteer position don't get fooled. They're not going to feel like things are being addressed if they aren't. They tend not to forget, but rather tell others, write long blog posts, share them on social media, etc. If the phone call doesn't try to address things but just ignores them in a call, it only adds fuel to the fire. It wouldn't be a good strategy.
> I see communications of this type as cynically because they have almost always been disingenuous.
And I'm sorry. If you think an offer to delve into a complaint over the phone to get more information is a cynical ploy, I really am sorry. It seems like there's nothing that could convince you someone is really trying to help, because of the lens you're choosing to interpret everything through. And because of the lens you've chosen, it seems self-reinforcing, which makes it extra-sad.
No I am not. I don't appreciate being gas-lite about this.
How this office politik is used is covered in blogs, covered on YouTube. My parents, friends and colleagues are aware of it. Maybe you need to open your eyes.
> Again, I'm really sorry. That's a very, very sad thing.
Stop apologising, I find it patronising and insincere, even if that isn't your intention.
BTW. I've done the best work under those circumstances, I got paid a lot and it made me HTFU, which helps with personal growth.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/HTFU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book)
> This process you're describing doesn't make any sense.
It makes perfect sense. You are assuming they care if the get a small amount of negative press about it. They don't.
This will be forgotten about within a week, even by most people commenting even here.
> And I'm sorry. If you think an offer to delve into a complaint over the phone to get more information is a cynical ploy, I really am sorry. It seems like there's nothing that could convince you someone is really trying to help, because of the lens you're choosing to interpret everything through. And because of the lens you've chosen, it seems self-reinforcing, which makes it extra-sad.
Firstly. Speaking to me like this is quite honestly patronising. I am quite capable of doing value free analysis.
Secondly, The sort of language people are complaining about almost always been used as a way to deflect valid criticism back on person making the critique. Almost always for disingenuous reasons. Feigning concern about my cynicism doesn't change that fact.
In any event I am tired of being patronised by you.
>> I suspect you're inventing a subtext that simply isn't there.
> No I am not. I don't appreciate being gas-lite about this.
It's not gaslighting to simply disagree. So please don't throw around accusations like that. Subtext is by definition open to interpretation.
I wasn't trying to be patronizing, and I certainly wasn't "feigning concern". Again, that's the response of a cynic who refuses to believe that sincerity and good intentions are possible. But you are making it clear you don't want to continue the conversation so that's fine.
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.
Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations. They are often trying to put machine translations in where there are no translations, though. Getting the balance right requires fine-tuning. And fine-tuning requires a quick call to start to better understand the issues in more detail.
Seems that this is exactly what Mozilla did? And Microsoft, and Reddit, etc.
Companies are absolutely falling over themselves to replace high quality human translations with lower quality machine translation. I’m not sure how a hacker news poster could miss this trend.
How would you handle updates to an article? Would you blindly replace all existing translations or would you notify the maintainers and wait for them to get around to it?
I wouldn't be surprised if orgs blindly opted for the first, which also means that a single spelling correction would be enough to overwrite days of work.
> They are often trying to put machine translations in where there are no translations, though.
And at what point are all of the translations done by machines and the work the community is doing no longer needed? At the very least, the nature of their work will change and I think they're not interested in participating anymore.
Let's just assume it is how you say it is. (The only assumption I am not willing to make is that people at Mozilla are already convinced it was a bad idea after all.) What in your opinion would be the right move now, after they rolled this bullshit auto-translator out and pissed off a lot of people in the community, including a major contributor for the last 20 years? Surely they could just ignore him and go on with this auto-translation initiative (BTW, thay don't even have to worry about whatever he wants to "prohibit" to do with his translations, because he waived off his rights by posting them). Would it be better than trying to set up a call and discuss things, try to find some compromise, gather a number of recommendations she may then pass onto people working on the auto-translator initiative (because surely this Kiki person, whoever she is, is not the sole person responsible for this and cannot magically just fix the situation)?
I think it's clear that Mozilla wants machine translation to take a bigger role in producing localized content, and this new process will be a large shift in the way things have been done. I think it's fair for Mozilla to do this, but I also think it's fair for the maintainer to be upset with this decision and no longer want to volunteer his time to clean up slop.
The initial response feels premature and tone deaf which is why people are irked by it.
Given that Mozilla "shot first" so to speak, the onus is on them to take action first e.g. disable the bot, revert changes to articles, etc. Only after doing this can discussion on a path forward happen.
Because a lot of people in this thread are whin… ahem, expressing their discontent with Mozilla, as we all usually do, but I've yet to see anybody to propose anything realistic at all, let alone better than ask an offended community member for a call and at least to try to talk it through and establish what could be some actionable steps to remedy the situation.
In Japan? Sincere appology followed by resignation.
No, the Japanese absolutely do not set up a call to discuss things after you've scerwed and disrespected them. They respectfully give you the cold shoulder.
Mozilla should not be surprised if their market share dwindles in Japan after this.
Are you serious? First, make a decision without consulting anyone, foist it on people that don't want it, then 'try to find a compromise'? If you care about people, you consult them before you make a decision, not after they've been burnt by it.
There many, many translating teams. When they designed this, it would be normal to consult with some of them. Not every single one. Maybe they sent some plans to every team and many of the teams never read them. Maybe the plans were hard to understand.
People aren't perfect. Setting up a call to discuss things is how you start to fix things.
that's the problem. stop thinking about the org and think about the person. these are volunteers who feel taken advantage of, being met with corporate jargon
fly out and take him to dinner if you actually give a shit. or write a check. a "quick call" is so insulting
A quick call is a courteous first step. The other person might not have time for a long call, so you want to show you're respecting their time. Then you follow it up with a longer meeting with the relevant engineer and manager, etc. "Taking someone to dinner" is not the first step here. The way to show you care is by trying to understand the situation before anything else.
There is no world in which this is insulting.
Suggesting that such an offence can be resolved by a "quick call" is extraordinarily disrespectful. A courteous first step would have been to apologise profusely, revert the damage that the bot did, and ask to set up a call to discuss what it might take to re-enable it in the future.
The steps that you describe might well be taken after the "quick call" gathers more information and figures out the people to escalate it to.
You are being entirely unreasonable in what you are demanding. This isn't a response from the Mozilla CEO. This is sometime in customer service, responding to a short post in a forum. Their response is entirely appropriate as a first step.
I doubt "take them out to dinner" is the right solution in this situation, but any attempt at redressal must understand the above point and acknowledge it publicly.
"Ask for forgiveness rather than permission" is far from universally true, and carries massive cultural baggage. You cannot operate within that framework and expect all humans to cooperate with you.
Had I been thrown in this situation:
"Dear Marsf,
I'm sorry that sumobot was introduced to the Japanese SUMO community without consultation. I have disabled it, and the development team are working to undo the changes it has made. We will revert articles to how they were on 21 October. Contributions made since then by the Japanese community could be retained in the staging system, where they can be approved or rejected. Please let me know whether you would like this, or would prefer them to be discarded returning the whole system to the 21 October.
We very much appreciate the Japanese SUMO community's contributions and your work as locale leader, and we hope it can continue. Sumobot will remain disabled on the Japanese translation. If, with some changes, it could be useful to you, we can discuss that here, or schedule a meeting if you prefer.
Thank you"
In this exact situation, before sending I'd check it with my Japanese colleague.
Very bill lumbergh energy.
No, he didn't. I'll repeat a comment I made elsewhere:
The problems are nowhere near actionable. A lot more information is needed. E.g. literally the first bullet: "It doesn't follow our translation guidelines". OK -- where are those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc.
These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
> Calls require focused attention which if you are used to multi-tasking are a huge drain.
Solving important problems requires focused attention. Which is why you get on calls to solve them when they're urgent and important, and not something that can be multitasked.
People don’t have a problem with real-time communication via audio or video in general. They have a problem with the suggestion that it’s a trivial issue that can be easily fixed by "jumping on a quick call."
The point about there being a "fairly in-depth" description of the issues isn’t that there’s nothing more to discuss - fixing those issues would obviously require talking through the specifics. The point is that this is a real problem that requires action and commitment, so suggesting it’s a non-issue that can be clarified with “a quick call” comes off as dismissive and unproductive, whether that’s intentional or not.
Where are you getting this from? Nowhere is it suggested that a quick call will resolve it. You're inventing that. The actual text is:
> 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.
This is the first step towards fixing something. Understanding it.
The idea that this is dismissive or unproductive is frankly absurd.
"Your AI just deleted 20 years of my hard work"
"Let's hop on a quick call so we can truly understand what you're struggling with".
The response doesn't acknowledge the severity of the problem at all and the wording of "what you're struggling with" suggests that the original poster is somehow at fault (or too dumb) for "struggling" with Mozilla's terrible decisions.
This is the kind of reply you'd get if you contacted Dell tech support because your computer is not turning on.
I assume it didn't. I can't imagine it's not versioned.
> The response doesn't acknowledge the severity of the problem at all
Offering to escalate to a phone call immediately seems to acknowledge the severity to me. Not really sure what you want here. The person came in with complaints, the response is to dig into them over the phone. That's ideal.
> the wording of "what you're struggling with" suggests that the original poster is somehow at fault (or too dumb) for "struggling" with Mozilla's terrible decisions.
This is a bizarre interpretation. I read it as validating that the person is having a rough time. There is zero indication of whose fault it is, or that it has anything to do with intelligence. That's coming from you, not the text. The fact that you are reading empathetic wording as an insult to someone's intelligence baffles me.
If I failed to make myself clear, at a minimum, presenting me with a list of things needing clarification is helpful for me to take the time to prepare.
"Hop on a call" is to me almost always shorthand for "I don't respect the issue enough to attempt to organize my thoughts ahead of time, but I'll ramble about it and let you pick my brain." Or in the most malicious cases, the other party is seeking plausible deniability.
In my experience it's not that way 100% of the time, but it's damn close.
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.
The person is a "Support Community Manager" in Indonesia if you click on their link. They're not the CEO of Mozilla who is supposed to be an expert in intercultural communication. I think you're being kind of harsh on someone who is presumably not high-level and just trying to do their job and get more information to be helpful.
This is completely backwards. The CEO is not expected to manage intercultural communication. You know whose job that is? The community manager.
The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan, but managing local contributors is absolutely a job for the community manager and not the CEO.
Sorry, you're wrong. Intercultural communication is very much a core skill for the CEO of a global organization. They're expected to know how to communicate appropriately so some international deal doesn't get torpedoed due to a faux pas.
> The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan
Right. So on that, we agree.
Moreover, OP chose the very thread as the venue, and attempting to switch it to a different, intransparent one is a disservice to the community. Community is very important context of this message, and the response seems to validate the proposition that it's really the end of it, per the subject of the thread.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If they truly think they're in the right, they can discuss it in public, like the poster already did.
There might be an element of personality there. I was texting with a real estate agent (for apartment rental, not purchase) in China once, when he decided that as long as we were talking he might as well call me. He didn't bother mentioning this to me beforehand.
Of course, all I could do was hang up on him. It's not like I could understand what he said. And I don't think that was especially difficult to foresee.
So he wasted some time and seriously annoyed me in the most predictable way possible. Why? Not for any reason specific to the situation. Maybe there's emphatic training somewhere that says "always call". Or maybe the type of people who become salesmen have a deep, deep instinct to call.
And I've learned that there is a reason to make a call besides the publicity aspect: A call (and I mean call with voice and possibly video) forces immediacy. It puts both parties on the spot. Or rather just the party being called, because hopefully the caller did prepare for the call. Also, this immediacy enables rash and uninformed decisions, whereas asynchronous communications enable more deliberation and research. In sales, you don't want deliberation. You want to get this over quick and easy. And if you've dealt with a long long email chain that goes back and forth quibbling over minutiae, a call can reduce this kind of indecisiveness and inhibition.
So I see this whole thing as insulting in even more ways: A "quick" call means that it is an unprepared one. Also emphasized by the lack of real topic or agenda beyond what the original post already stated. No way forward for the other party that is possible to prepare for. No prior chain of communications, so if the call is really the first reaction in the first short email, this means "you are unimportant, I don't want to waste time, let's get this over with".
Also, in many cultures (I've only had to deal with European ones, so no idea if this really applies to the rest of the world), setting a stage is important. There is a cultural meaning to CC-ing a manager, to inviting more people than necessary to a meeting, or to do things publically or in private. A bigger stage formalizes things, gives importance, emphasizes seriousness. A smaller, private stage can mean the opposite: you might want the other party so safe face, because what you are going to tell more informally them is that they fucked up. You might want to get them to agree to something they could not easily agree to in public. Announcing publically, that there should be a private meeting is the worst of all kinds: Basically, this signals to the public that this person fucked up and is getting scolded, more serious than a totally private scolding, less serious than a totally public one. Why else would you widely announce a private meeting invite?
I don't know if the resignation in the original article is really a final resignation or rather some kind of cultural signal. I've seen that kind of drama used as means to an end, just think of the stereotypical italian lovers' discussion where both are short of throwing each other off the balcony, just to get very friendly a minute later. But in any case, whether it is deliberate drama or a genuine resignation, the necessary reaction has to be similar: You need to treat it as if it were a real resignation publically and respond with all the usual platitudes that they are very valuable, you are so sorry to see them go and you'd do almost anything to keep them. Then you privately meet in private and find out which one it is, and maybe fix things. It is a dance, and you have to do the right steps. If you don't know the right ones, at least think hard (you have the time, it is email) on how not to step on any toes. The Mozilla people failed in that...
More specifically, she's used a level of formality below what would be appropriate for most communication between strangers. Someone speaking in an official capacity (almost anywhere) who went much more informal than that would be at serious risk of getting fired. There's a similar effect to what was complained about in this meme tweet: https://xcancel.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594
> Can websites please stop the trend of giving error messages that are like "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!"
Forced cheerfulness and fictional intimacy are a bad call as a response to "after having 20 years of contributions overridden without warning, we can no longer work with you". That's true regardless of whether the complaint is meant as a dramatic opener to a negotiation or as a severing of relations.
It was this exact part of the conversation that touched me negatively too. marsf expresses some very valid criticism that, instead of being publicly addressed, is being handled by "let's discuss it privately". This always means that they don't want to discuss, they just want to shut you down.
This stuck out to me as rude. I would never say that to someone on my team who expressed serious concerns, far less than this person quitting after years of dedication.
I would offer an apology, explanation, and follow up questions to understand more in public, then say I’m happy to set up time to talk privately if they would like to or feel more comfortable.
Very much so, and I'm German ;)
In my experience, and in my feeling as someone reading such things, you need to tone-match. The resignation message was somewhat formal, structured and serious in tone. Replying in such an informal tone means that you are not taking things seriously, which is insulting. Even more so because that informal answer is public.
I'm tone-deaf by culture and by personality. I often make those kinds of mistakes. But a public resignation like this is a brightly flashing warning light saying: "this needs a serious formal answer".
For the reasons I stated above, the response comes off as faking understanding to manage a PR issue rather than genuine empathy and possible negotiation, but I am often wrong about many things.
'I'm sorry that our actions caused such distress' come a bit closer to being a true apology.
Importantly, 'if' was changed to 'that'.
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.
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.
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?
I'd add the following at an even higher priority than those you shared:
0. Folks whose first, and often only, reply to text comms is "quick call?" are often just unwilling/unable to organize their own thoughts and instead seek to offload the cognitive load by "talking through" the issue which just results in unproductive and circular discussions.
> 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?
I chortled at this! I have made the same observation and I have the same question.
When you're remote, you don't have that context, so everything you need from somebody has to be either scheduled (with the overhead and delay that entails), or potentially randomizing. When you need 5 minutes of somebody's time, it can be hard to do that in a respectful way. (Personally, I do try to do a "do you have some time today that we could talk about X," and try to handle stuff over text with coworkers who prefer text.)
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.
> 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.“Sorry for your feelings” comes off as dismissive and avoiding taking ownership for the lost work and years of volunteer contributions.
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.
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.
> 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.
It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.
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".
While I have written that comment somewhat quickly, that's not AI at all, I can assure you about that. :)
For instance, if I followed the principles of indignation culture, I could be offended by your "I can assure you about that :)" statement. I could say "Are you making fun of me?!?!"
To be clear, your statement is perfectly fine. I understand what you're saying, despite disagreeing.
Also, this happened in an English language forum. It's reasonable to expect that foreign speakers would be somewhat versed in the conventions of the English language and see that the comment was not offensive at all.
Some cultures value relational power in leadership, and so their language reflects preserving relationships as a base resources. Some cultures value authority, and so their idea of being polite might involve some maintenance of authority at the expense of perceived care or relationship.
I'm just saying the words that convey rudeness are not necessarily just a superficial dressing on the same thing. Politeness is a shorthand that is also about alignment with a cultural value. Cultural values differ. My being annoyed at someone else's cultural posturing as default, that's not just mindless indignation. Values matter.
It's of course impossible to say if this was just an unfortunate choice of phrasing or if it's a sign that Mozilla has become that soulless corporate entity (I say this as a Firefox user for more than 20 years).
What, specifically, about that phrasing is "very rude" and a "no-no" in Japanese culture?
I am genuinely curious.
Japanese are the latter. There's a polite dance of disagreement. Every side listens others with respect (with respect to the process even if they don't respect the others) and answer politely yet firmly.
This comment smells like there's already some disagreement under this, and none of them have been listened and they are steamrolled with the new workflow.
Implying "Hey you're overreacting, let us convince you" doesn't help on top of it.
The issue has nothing to do with Japanese culture, but with how you work with a community of volunteers over the web. "Let's jump on a call" is what you say to a coworker, not to a volunteer in an online community.
Let’s jump on a call is something you say when you feel that the tone and intention of your communication is getting lost in text. And whether it’s common in all cultures or not, tone and intention getting lost in text is universal.
I'm afraid you skipped this part though
I mean, that question is already well answered within the first (opening) comment of marsf, so that part smells "tl;dr. Can I call you".
This sentence makes it even worse. All the pain points are openly written there.
No, it's not. Half of the listed reasons are obvious enough, but the half is very vague. I don't know if they are something you would understand as an insider, but as an outsider there would be many open questions if it would be my task to make this work.
The whole communication seems like people on one or both sides lacking information, and one trying to fix this to start the process for solving the other sides' problem. Nothing wrong with this in a professional environment.
But it is not "forceful and rude" by any means and your interpretation is way over the top for what looks like two people from different cultures trying to communicate in a mutually non-native language using words on a screen.
Written messages can feel cold even when it's two native English speakers communicating over email or text and it's best to assume good faith until you see clear evidence to the contrary.
Nope. Start by apologizing for the impact of what YOU did. Contributor of 20y just quit and provide a clear list of what is wrong. "your feelings" and "your struggles" is not respectful.
You should be sorry that YOU pushed changes on them in a way that impacted badly their work and made them quit. Thank them for the feedback and try to open a discussion on finding a positive outcome.
Being sorry about how the bot works implies an intention to change/remove it.
"your struggles" (it's your fault that you were harmed by our bad behavior.)
"Hop on a call" (we are the boss, you aren't, and your concerns are trivial.)
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.
It is about 50/50 though as many people don't seem to pick up on backhanded way that many English people speak.
> 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.
This is also sometimes done to shut you up as well.
Given the context of corporate doublespeak, I saw the response as "Oh shit, we can't refute your issues, but maybe we can bullshit you privately into putting up with them?".
(I see a few disagreements here, back up with "I'm a native speaker". Me too friend, but understand messages like this is (imho) more about the subtext than the text itself, so interpersonal knowledge is more important than linguistic.)
This is not to dismiss what happened, but to just address the poster who thinks this is condescending.
The idea that it is patronizing or condescending makes zero sense to me. It's a factual description.
I honestly don't understand where you're getting this cynical interpretation from. It's not in the words.
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.
Doesn't seem weird to me, seems apt to ask to escalate the method of communication when a serious issue like this arises.
Would you consider it more respectful to deal with this issue just by posting in the thread?
Also while it's phrased as a question, it doesn't offer any alternative next step. So a better approach would be writing down the initial questions you have and then offer that you'd be open for a call if the OP prefers that. If they don't, they can immediately engage with your questions, and they are open to everybody else in the community. Whereas right now if they say "no, I don't want to call you" that's all you've given them.
(To be clear I can easily believe the writer of the response is not intending any of that and means well, but that's how it comes across)
It comes across very condecending. Maybe it is a US problem
It's like how you say "How are you" when you really don't care but it's just how you start a conversation.
The "I'm sorry you feel this way" is quite a recent phenomenon. It started showing up in public apologies by companies and celebrities, purely for PR. It's basically a deflective euphemism for "I'm sorry that you don't like whatever happened" without really admitting culpability, sidestepping all responsibility.
With that said: I don't even know if the author (Kiki) is a native english speaker, since she's part of other language translation groups, so it might be 100% without intent. But that's how a lot of people perceive it today.
"I'm sorry I did that" is an actual apology.
To be clear, I'm agreeing with you. I think that the former version emerged as it's litigation proof. Corporate PR can say that without it being an admission of anything if whatever they fucked up results in a lawsuit.
It has spread to personal communications from corporate ones and it's now so prevalent that it is possible someone might use it and actually mean a real apology. But it's ... tainted.
Feels extremely disrespectful.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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 ...
Trying to dissect why it comes across, I think it's just me kneejerking to the 'pattern' of specifically "I am sorry you feel that way". I think my kneejerk disdain of that turn of phrase is correct, though.
Being blunt here: Because that's a terrible apology! You are sorry that I feel this way? We're barely using the same dictionary here; how I feel about a thing is textbook 'stuff you cannot change or barely even fathom', so what is there to be sorry about? You might as well say "I'm sorry for the fact that 2 + 2 is 4". It's not apologetic in any way. It says sorry without taking even a millimeter of responsibility.
A minimal apology that is slightly less condescending might be "I am sorry how our choices led to you feeling this way" because at least now you're sorry about your choices instead of being sorry about how I feel.
I wouldn't want to be buoyed by false hope either, so taking as axiomatic that the moz team wants to hear how to improve matters but are not willing to completely 180º on their sumobot policies, something like: "I apologise for how we've kinda steamrolled y'all with rolling out sumobot. We were trying to improve the state of translations of our knowledge base articles and might have gone too far. We shouldn't have done it without keeping you out of the loop either. Is it possible to have a video call, apologise in person, and try to work out if there's a way sumobot can be helpful for all japanese language users of firefox in a way that works with your excellent work maintaining the KB so far?"
I get that it's just american corpospeak, "hop on a call". But the number of times something that's perfectly normal in dutch culture (a bit brash, but not at all intended to be rude) gets jumped on by americans as being ridiculously rude... well, trying to write a way to be culturally aware of the recipient has to be a two-way street, right?
I dont think this 'apology' is rude, not at all. But it's not apologetic. If you're peeved off at mozilla for foisting sumobot on you, you've already decided to cut ties, and then team mozilla tries to mend the relationship, this is a very poor attempt. In the context of an attempt to mend the relationship this is condescending. Or at least bad diplomacy.
At this point getting on a call is seen as a major chore for a majority of people. It's an already tense situation, trying to defuse it by "hopping on a call" is just not great IMHO. They should at least acknowledge they're putting undue burden on the other side and are asking them to go the distance when they're already volunteering their time.
I'm saying that setting aside the opacity of moving from an public to a private setup.
This is a pointer to a somewhat US related POV, but this is nether a generational thing nor a limited phenomenon:
> 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.
In particular I think your alternative response is excellent and what I would have hoped for in an ideal world.
In order to sound truly friendly, one has to break the script
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.
Not really painting us in good colors here, are you.
"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.
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
If someone is frustrated, the following chats won't do much really. They have already built a wall, and we need to meet around it, not throw our letters over it.
My life experience does tell me that this is often not the case: if people are already frustrated and have built a wall, it is better to use something more impersonal, like such an online text discussion.
But I agree, if after receiving such a message someone is saying "let's hop on a call", there's little chance of things going right on the call.
I don't follow. Some of my most important friendships were built on forums and text-based communication. We never felt any need to have video calls. Some of them I met in person once, 15+ years after we started messaging each other, and we're great friends regardless.
I don't mean to say you're wrong in an absolute sense, but I can't relate to your post at all. Not a single one of my friends has video calls as their preferred method of socialization with online peers.
No, it's pretty easy, actually, people did that since writing was invented, with mediums much slower than a modern mailing list.
It _is_ much easier to manipulate people behind closed doors, as well as lie about what happened there.
**
First of all, I'm shocked to learn about what happened. We at Mozilla had no idea that sumobot is wreaking such havoc on your work. Please accept my sincere apologies.
It would be a great pity to have all your precious work done, so we'll do our best to fix it. I would be very grateful if you could schedule a meeting with me so that I could understend the issues you described better so that they are fixed asap?
Once again, I'm very sorry for what happened and I hope in spite of that you can continue doing great work for the Japanese Mozilla community. **
They HAD a relationship: it was 20 years of volunteer work. That relationship was broken by Mozilla's actions.
It is clearly this. Management hates written communication.
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.
The whole organisation was very efficiently structured with two separate layers of managers - those who had actual decision power, and a separate layer whose task was to 'deal with us employees' but no decision power. All communication flowing one way, the same way shit drips (the only resource following 'trickle-down' mechanics). The only time I got into contact with the former level, was after I had put in my resignation; then they suddenly wanted a 1-1 to "see if there was anything they should learn from this" (presumably to sharpen/hone their skills in mistreating the employee level more efficiently in the future).
it's american english for "oh this must be hard for you. how can we help you to cope?" and no intent to change.
a better response would rather be:
"We're sorry, we were not aware. please can we meet and you help us understand? so we can fix this situation? We'd also like to share our intentions and we hope together we can improve the situation."
telling
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
Maybe. But that’s also assuming the worst from the get go, and that’s no way to settle a dispute.
For all we know (which is very little, and thus should offer the benefit of the doubt), offering a call is an admission that text is an awful medium to resolve conflict: It’s time consuming for both parties and a poor conveyor of tone and nuance. Even writing this unimportant comment I had to stop and think and rewrite some parts to get it closer to the meaning I intend, but even so I fazer zero doubts someone will misunderstand it in the worst way imaginable.
Calls aren’t perfect either, but they allow you to understand in real time when a point is not getting through to the other person and calmly resolve each issue as it surfaces. It gets you on the same page faster.
After the call they can still decide to post their conclusions publicly if they so wish, but not every discussion needs to be public. It’s fine (and productive) for two people to discuss something in private and only have to worry about making themselves understood by the relevant party, not worry about having each word scrutinised by every internet rando.
Offering a call would've been totally fine - if the rest of the reply hadn't been a borderline-insulting cookie-cutter corporate non-apology. If they start by showing bad intentions, why suddenly assume the best for the phone call?
“The rest of the reply” is basically one sentence, so let’s avoid reading too much into it. I very much agree it was a bad non-apology and that that is infuriating, but let’s not let irrationality cloud judgement in the pursuit of a resolution.
> If they start by showing bad intentions, why suddenly assume the best for the phone call?
Why are you assuming bad intentions from the start? For all we know this person may just be a bad (textual?) communicator or trying to avoid miscommunication (which seems like a perfectly valid concern, since the original comment isn’t exactly the clearest English). Worse still, the comment I replied to assumed a specific malicious reason for the offer to a call with no evidence, it was just speculation.
Is anyone here familiar with this Mozilla staffer? Do they even know if they interacted with this Japanese user before, online or offline? Do they have a pattern of bad behaviour? Or is everyone just piling on and assuming the devil from a single reply from someone they don’t know? Maybe this staffer is indeed an asshole. Or maybe they’re trying their best and just don’t know how to do better but are open to recognising their mistakes and learning from them. Maybe they would have preferred to be more open, human, and honest in their reply but corporate policy prevents them from doing so. Maybe they have personal issues on their mind and jut couldn’t do better this time. I don’t know. Do you? If anyone in this thread does, they’re not saying it.
This thread is populated by (what seem to be) uninformed commentators throwing fire at the situation from the outside, and that’s unhealthy. Let me ask you: What is, in your view, the desired/best outcome of this situation? Is it to bash Mozilla and/or this staffer? Or is it to provide a solution that would fix the situation in a way the original Japanese commentator would feel valued and happy to come back?
E.g. figure out why this happened, express why it shouldn't have happened, why it should happen never again, how it is understandable how they feel, express that you cannot expect them to come back, make them an actual offer that would make them come back (e.g. by giving them a better place at the table or offering compensation), etc.
But "I am sorry you feel" is bordering on gaslighting. That is as if you are sorry your wife feels sad after you beat them. You should feel sorry and ashamed for doing the beating, not for how someone feels as a result of it.
The described things are clearly unacceptable and whether someone feels outrage or not doesn't make them more or less acceptable.
I can’t believe what I’m going to say now, but AIs are better at this. Granted, their apologies are good for shit since they have no agency and can’t really learn from their mistakes, but they at least leave no doubts at who is at fault and should be ashamed.
(Cue Gemini with its “I’m a disgrace” self-flagellation)
> 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.
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.
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.
A decent answer would have been worded among the lines of:
"I am personally deeply sorry to see you go [acknowledge you take their decision serious]. I don't know the details, but if what you describe is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), this is clearly unacceptable and should never have happened [acknowledge the issue is serious and confirm it wasn't intentional]. You feeling betrayed as a result of this is only natural and understandable, and it is Mozilla that should feel ashamed for it coming to this [validate feeling, admit guilt]. I will investigate why this happened and want to find ways to ensure something like this never happens again [show that you're willing to do something substential solbing the root of the problem]. Nobody should have their hard work just automatically replaced by AI, not you, nor anybody else [afirm you're on the same page as them by appeal to general principle]. I know you likely don't want to have anything to do with this now, but I would be deeply grateful if you had a moment to talk about this with me, personally, not as a member of Mozilla but as a member of the community [ask them about help, acknowledging you can't expect any, show that you care about this beyond any purely official duties]."
Of course that means some work, but this is how I would answer such a thing.
It’s a tonedeaf response from the staff person. Zero respect for what’s clearly many, many hours of contribured work.
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.
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
Don't answer when you haven't done your homework. Either you check for yourself if what they claim has happened happened and acknowledge the fuckup or you just trust them as go on "if this is true and we have no reason not to trust you, it should never have happened".
But not understanding? The description of the incident was pretty clear. Maybe think about it and investigate till you understand what the problem is, and then answer.
You've turned this around into a very different quote, and shouldn't use quote marks for that. They wrote:
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
I don't like their response and agree with a lot of people in the thread it looks like they are trying to do the call to take it private. But we don't have to make up stuff.
Sure there may be more fine detail to understand around the guidelines etc, but first you should acknowledge that (A) your bot fucked up big time, (B) everybody would be pissed if years of work would be overwritten in such disrespectful manner and (C) that this isn't how you want to treat your community.
If you don't manage that this person made the right call when they decided to leave.
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?"
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? :)Or, alternatively, if you do not intend to even try to do better, at least be honest: "ok, bye."
If they just said "Hi, I want to see how we can fix this. Can we get on a call".
It sounds much better
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.
Also I'd expect if a person volunteers as translator they'd be pretty decent at speaking.
Translators (of texts) are not interpreters.
I am not a translator and English is not my 1st language (technically) - I'd have no issues 'hopping' on a call.
I have no problem "hopping on a call" if it's a casual conversation between friends, but when stakes actually matter it would be stupid to put myself in a worse position than strictly necessary. Native speakers have a habit of talking a lot, talking fast, and talking with a lot of subtleties, nuances, and hidden meanings. In written conversations I can read a sentence twice and think a second about the right phrasing to use in response, but in face-to-face conversations this is simply not possible.
It would be like a professional debater like college kids "debating" with late Charlie Kirk: no wonder they end up "getting owned" - they are punching way above their weight class!
In my experience, it's quite the opposite: written language carries a lot more nuances than the (often more shallow) spoken language.
> My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time.
Mia maxima culpa!
There's also no reason as to assume that a volunteer translator is good at speaking, especially in regards to English, which pronunciation is not explicitly stated in its writing (like, say, Spanish).
You can't really ascertain how good I am at speaking, for an obvious example.
That comma, gives you away. The commas (and punctuation in general) in English are rather special in a way they convey the spoken language rather than designated rules.
Edit: As for the full immersion when I was learning English (as kid, 5th grade or so), I recall visualizing the words (letters) in my head while speaking. Certain mistakes like than <> then, it's <> it, their<>there etc. are unlikely to happen while writing due to the way language was initially perceived (and b/c I leaned if-then much earlier). Still, esp. with English I'd not consider translating anything unless my spoken version of it was good enough.
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?
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.
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.
Could this have been a mistake rather than a malicious act?
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.
Is there a slightly different phrasing that would make this better, or is it the sentiment that's crap?
"I'm sorry for how these changes impacted you"? Personally just the sentiment feels insincere to me haha.
The change did not fall out of thin air. It was something they did. If they do not own it explicitly then it’s insincere full stop.
However, "let's hop on a call" is just additionally dismissive.
* The infantile corporate-cutesy wording "hop on a call" is not appropriate when talking to somebody who feels that you deeply wronged them. It has the same vibes as cheery "Remember: At Juicero, we are all one big family!" signatures on termination notices, and Corporate Memphis.
* In the first sentence, Kiki says "about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced". Why is this level of detail shoehorned in? Everyone in that conversation already knows what it is about. It's as if Kiki can't resist the temptation to inject an ad/brag about their recently introduced workflow for any drive-by readers. "I'm sorry you were dissatisfied with your Apple(R) iPlunger X(TM), which is now available at major retailers for only $599!"
They don't know what exactly has gone wrong. All they can say sorry for is for how the person is feeling. Then they want to get on a call to learn more. Which is the start of helping.
The response is as sincere and helpful as it could be for an initial response from someone who wants to figure out what the problem is.
E.g. literally the first bullet: "It doesn't follow our translation guidelines". OK -- where are those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc.
These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
It's entirely possible that such information is well-known to everyone involved in the translation community.
I would consider it outright insulting if someone who ostensibly "wants to help" doesn't know basic information like that - if the people making decisions about SumoBot are NOT aware of basic information like "where to find the local translation guidelines" then they are presumably not qualified to release a tool like SumoBot in the first place.
They should have understood the guidelines before turning on their machine translation in a given locality.
> I would consider it outright insulting if someone who ostensibly "wants to help" doesn't know basic information like that
Well, the person who wants to help is a customer service manager in Indonesia. They presumably are not the leader of the machine translation product. They are trying to get more information so they can, you know, escalate to the right people.
So how is that "outright insulting"?
- 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.
Before fixing it and re-enabling it in some capacity, they could work with marsf to find a solution.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
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.
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.
"Ironing out the kinks" in production on live data is stupid.
Nothing has ever gone wrong in production in ways that were fine on dev?
You've never written code to improve one metric, only to discover in prod it made another metric worse that nobody had considered?
How about a little humility for the ways in which we're all fallible and usually just trying to do our best?
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!?
In some fields and languages, this is easier, but as soon as you need the LLM to follow rigorous instructions, it'll fail.
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.
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
That's very much in the past now. But it'll linger in the training data for a while.
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.
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.
https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/
Before I discovered it I was getting so frustrated with the lousy robotranslations on YouTube.
I recently found out DeArrow (an amazing extension to remove clickbait titles and thumbnails) also has an option to hide translated titles, off by default. But the extension you recommend can be used to force the audio track, which is very helpful.
but it only applies to that specific video, and yeah, it makes no sense that this passed sniff tests for Google.
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.
I have my own essay on this matter to post on the Internet, but, to say the least, I don't think this mode of failures happen nearly as often in most other languages, if ever.
1: https://twitter.com/inasoft_ayacy/status/1986739607237722409
It was a fun little tool, but I think that really drove home for me how different Japanese is from English in how it structures 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.
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.
This is caused by people active in English-speaking communities translating memes literally and spreading them in their native language communities as-is.
As the meme spreads, monolingual speakers begin using the same format and eventually they reference it off-line.
You're right that memes are getting translated literally and spreading, but in terms of pure volume, LLMs doing the translation dwarf humans doing the translation.
Building a bot that picks whatever posts are trending on Reddit/imgur/etc, automatically translates them, and then posts them in target languages on social networks is an easy way to accumulate likes+followers; then those high reach accounts get used to push whatever makes money.
Having said that, SOTA models got much better at this kinda stuff. They're quite able to write in a way that is indistinguishable from a native speaker, colloquialisms and all, with the right prompting.
But SOTA models are also expensive. Most automated translations are done with something way cheaper and worse.
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.
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.
i wonder why Sony doesn't train a Japanese model, or why some French company hasn't made a French one, etc.
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.
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.
The difficulty with a post like this is it brings out a primal anti-technology impulse in all of us. But once you clear away the piling-on and emotionally charged hot takes there isn't much here to talk about.
This post, aside from a statement of intent to quit, is a report that was made about the bot. Mozilla made an invitation to address the concerns. All of that seems normal. Rollout with mistake -> bug report -> attempting to understand what went wrong. But the bug report contains unrealistic demands that seem almost rhetorical and the attempt to figure out what went wrong is being met with scorn, as in the top comment of this HN discussion.
> passionate volunteers to soulless AI.
Humans don't have souls either as I'm sure you know :-P. To post this comment, you're using a soulless computer that took jobs away from human computers. You probably listen to music made with soulless synthesizers that took jobs from musicians. You no doubt take photos with soulless cameras that took jobs from painters.
I think we have to be clear to ourselves that, although the transition to automation will be painful, nobody is going to prevent technology from advancing. So we have to find a way to use it to build the future we want, not try to tear it down as soulless or evil.
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.
No, they should have involved the volunteers in the design process.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
I do a lot of pro bono stuff. Most of my work is free, and I spend a lot of time, trying to get others to pitch in, as well.
Treating "free" labor like shit, is a common, and self-destructive trait. Looks a lot like that's exactly what happened, here.
I could go on, but I won't.
Yes no gray area!
My comment was assuming that it’s a paid role and also just commenting on the process of translating with ai vs without
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.
If I were Lidl, I'd shut that down immediately.
There used to be an “international English” setting.
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.
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.
The Japanese translation community leader knows, as will many members of that community, and other Japanese speakers.
This is not difficult.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Patronizing “sorry you got your feelings hurt” responses are pretty much canned apologies.
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?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...
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.
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.
I'm trying to imagine the prompt here.
"Hey, ChatGPT, it looks like our org fucked up and now a hotheaded volunteer makes us look like idiots. Please generate a flippant response that pretends to show we care and meanwhile ticks them off even further. Oh, and I don't want my boss to know I'm using AI to generate this response, so make it good this time, and make it look human."
Disgusting behavior.
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".
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.
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!"
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.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.
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.
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.
But FUTO sponsoring that project gives bad vibes.
Drew’s position that interacting with people with bad opinions makes you evil by association doesn’t strike me as mainstream (or future-proof for that matter).
Devault is not a good actor. Everything he says comes out of jealousy and spite.
Look, Wikimedia is an evil, biased, insane organization that grifts for money and gives to absolutely insane causes, but if they gave me a few thousand for an open source project, would I turn them down? No. I'd never give them money, but it's not going to prevent me from using their services either (using LibRedirect + a Wikiless instance to avoid tracking and their ads of course).
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".
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.
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.
There was an exodus of them around 2015/16 times.
Does anyone remember anyone's post?
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.
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.
it's a grift of an organization and it reflects in the simplest ways like this.
Hurray ! Finally AI is eliminating the need for junior (and, it seems from the post, also senior) developers. /s
> 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.
> 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.
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.
How exactly did you manage to place the blame for no communication on Japanese contributors here given the actual complaint in question?
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.
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.
You can make updated version of your work to non-CC, but the version you published under CC is CC.
My problem with this type of gate keeping is that machine learning does open up translations that are accurate to the masses. It is quaint having a real human do your translations though. Kind of like having a real human drive your car or do your housework. Not everyone can afford that luxury. But, on the other hand, having a singular organization own the training data and the model and not publishing the model itself is where the gatekeeping continues.
But I'm not a lawyer so I don't know and in real business, they casually use the word "license" in Japan. But in my opinion, everything is contract under Japanese law.
Or to put another way, a license (a contract) is a tuple (terms, jurisdiction), and the juridical evaluation process will take both into account.
I am not sure how it is under Japanese law, but in some countries a creator cannot be stripped of his rights by agreeing to a license. Even without that there is often a way to rescind any gift given in good faith if the receipients behavior warrants it.
It includes right to be not published(like a personal letter intended to be secret), attribution, right to be identical preservation(modifying in a way author don't intended, like adding extra arm to 3-arms monster)
You see, these rights are covered in Creative Commons, by agreeing and publishing his work under Creative Commons, the author explicitly promised he won't use these exclusive rights against the users.
If he didn't agree on the spirit of Creative Commons, why did he contributed Mozilla in CC license for 20 years? Did he intended to taint free software by incompatible non-free work?
This is exactly what happens if you ignore the free software definition explained by RMS.
CC licenses (and some other foss licenses, e.g. Apache 2.0) are explicitly irrevocable... which is probably enough for US law though I still wonder to some degree if there isn't some country that would take issue with that term... especially a country which recognizes "Moral rights".
Some other FOSS licenses (GPL for instance) contain explicit terms allowing revocation under certain circumstances (but otherwise claim to be irrevocable).
In particular, the primary purpose of AI as we know it is to strip off attribution, which is explicitly forbidden by basically every license in existence.
To nitpick "explicitly forbidden" isn't quite right. Licenses basically only grant more permissions, they can't remove them. It's explicitly excluded from the rights granted by the license, but it's not explicitly forbidden because it is the law that might or might not forbid the activity, not the license.
And the fact 20+ years Mozilla contributor didn't understand it too. You can't restrict the usage to things you don't like it under CC.