Building the swarm
Mozilla has taken corporate SJW activism to new depths:
Firefox maker Mozilla is trying to shame YouTube into “fixing” its recommendation algorithm, soliciting horror stories from users sent down radicalizing “rabbit holes.” Trouble is, most users don’t want more censorship.What business is it of Mozilla's, one might wonder. Perhaps if Mozilla's executives worried more about their browser's long-vanished market share, which is now on the verge of being surpassed by the Samsung Internet app, and less about YouTube's recommendations, they might still be relevant. I've used Firefox since it was called Firebird, but I've now uinstalled it entirely in favor of Brave.
“Once, at 2 a.m., you searched YouTube for ‘Did aliens build Stonehenge?’ Ever since, your YouTube recommendations have been a mess: Roswell, wormholes, Illuminati,” Mozilla laments in its call for submissions, asking users for their “YouTube regret” so that they might “put pressure on YouTube to do better.”
“YouTube’s recommendation engine can lead users down bizarre rabbit holes — and they’re not always harmless,” the company warns.
Labels: SJW, technology
51 Comments:
Isn't this how companies and celebs try to regain or stake out popularity and make themselves relevant again?
I am reminded here of Pearce Brosnan's recent public call for women to play Bond and his outcry of support for Gretta Thunberg.
It's a common way they try to grab for attention.
It's sick and twisted and sad, but the inevitable result of selling out.
I view this as Mozilla trying to do one decent thing before the end: convince Youtube to commit suicide and let another, more responsive site emerge.
I am reminded here of Pearce Brosnan's recent public call for women to play Bond and his outcry of support for Gretta Thunberg.
Look up Pierce Brosnan's wife. The man is just a despicable chubby-chaser.
Give me 6 minutes while I change my browser to Brave.
Soon they will be unable to even provide their basic function. No matter, there are many decent browsers out there now, nobody will miss them.
Note they're about to funnel all your DNS requests, the system that converts a domain name like "voxday.blogspot.com" to an Internet address like 172.217.9.1, to also converged Cloudflare, so unless you change the default settings they'll know exactly which sites you're browsing: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/09/08/0318237/firefox-will-soon-encrypt-dns-requests-by-default
Of course Google is also doing this with Chrome, using their own servers: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/09/11/1437235/google-to-run-dns-over-https-doh-experiment-in-chrome
Chrome is an awful browser and it's no surprise Google is scumming more information. There are ways around the DNS issue, but it's easier to avoid their products.
Brave is solid and working better all the time.
I used Brave for 2 years, then gave a 6 month try to Firefox. Using Brave for the last 30 minutes has been extremely smooth. Always loved it on mobile.
Brave is excellent even on mobile. Hopefully they don't appoint a CEO who feels its his obligation to tell YouTube to "do better".
i like the youtube rabbit holes. it’s entertaining!
@Garuna, Nah, I looked her up. She was pretty skinny when they meet and even through the birth of their 2 kids. They are both just getting older and fatter like the rest of America.
She was a Bond girl. Blume is right.
They're lying anyway. One unusual search won't cause your recommendations to be swamped with related stuff, unless it's the only search you've ever done. My Youtube recommendations are typically 90% stuff I've already seen--apparently most Youtube users just watch the same things over and over--and 9% stuff that's currently popular. Maybe 1% is actually "hey here's something else you might like" stuff.
Didn't she get him on the rebound after his wife died?
Regardless, to the original post, I tried Brave when it first came out and didn't like it. With all the Firefox nonsense lately it might be time to try it again.
“YouTube’s recommendation engine can lead users down bizarre rabbit holes — and they’re not always harmless,” the company warns.
This is so true. YT recommended a couple weird kid videos after watching a Darkstream a while ago. I checked them out and now I am divorced, out of a job, and homeless. All I have left in my life is a truckload of toys for 3 year olds.
Get a steel guitar behind that, and you could be a retro-country star!
I've been using Opera for quite a while (5 years, maybe?). I stopped using FireFox after they fired someone for supporting the anti-same-sex "marriage" referendum.
I use Brave ever since I learned about it here. I also use it on my phone.
Ironically, Linux Mint installs Firefox natively. I had to goof off a little to get Brave installed, but it was worth it. Yesterday evening I watched 'Barcelona Life' using Brave, on a linux machine while sipping bourbon. All the companies and people who hate those like be were left out in the cold.
I've been using Brave since it was mentioned here. It occurs to me now that it's entirely better than it was then. I used to have to rely on other browsers nearly daily then. I'm sure I could uninstall Chrome now.
I blame the survivalist movement on things like this. Consider it. Long lost track of how many engineers and high level techs I met "out in the sticks" mainly during the Ron Paul days who "left the rat race" or something because they got convinced that civilization was going to collapse - or something.
Yeah that's nice.
But it leaves the boardroom open for only a certain kind of person to enter it. So there is no longer any kind of based/conservative - for want of a better term/libertarian - for want of an even better term/nationalist - there that's better in the room. Now it's full of brainless NPCs parroting what they were told on the TV.
Firefox is just an example.
So all across the playing field, from the breakroom to the boardroom, there's nobody with a brain in the room to say "Hey, that's a bad idea".
Because the person who would have been there to say it got convinced that all was lost - or something - and went to go live in the woods.
Only to have it burned down later in all those big fires that mysteriously started to happen during the Bush and Obama years - oh look, the laws say you can't rebuild! Sorrrrreeeeeee! Oh you got new land to hide from the rest of the world in? Oh look, the people in the cities voted for laws that say you can't drill a well. Sorrrreeee!
Would have been better to stay and fight. I dropped a redpill bomb on the HR department a few months ago. Best part is they cannot find out who did it but the one person who would have been a wellspring of SJW bullshit is now too afraid to look stupid. Much more effective than trying to uselessly live in a cabin. This boomeristic mindset of just running away, as if there was somewhere to run, got us to this day when it seems like every corporation is pozzed to death. They ran away. And for what? To take up space somewhere so they can concentrate on feeling good, being comfortable, and getting fat while watching TV.
Hats off to those who didn't run away and are remaining in the fight and building new platforms. Every day I see these people and wonder how I can be more effective.
@22. You have to know when to tactically withdraw. Staying behind and fighting at the cost of your future when you know it won't do anything is not only idiotic, but a major setback for the movement. In the case of Brave, Brendan Eich understood that Mozilla was done for and tactically withdrew. He made a new browser which is better. Let Mozilla self destruct and don't get caught in the explosion.
@22 Doktor Jeep:
Much simpler explanations are found in Robert Conquest's 2nd Law of Politics and Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, and note that Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript (in ten days, thus lots of its warts) didn't retire from the field, but was purged from Mozilla by NPCs, and in the long term replied with Brave:
"2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing."
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization."
> Perhaps if Mozilla's executives worried more about their browser's long-vanished market share
They're riding the sjw gravy train. Market share? Who cares about old fashioned stuff like that?
> Soon they will be unable to even provide their basic function.
It's arguable they already can't.
> Regardless, to the original post, I tried Brave when it first came out and didn't like it.
It's gotten better. Since I now have a 64 bit version of Linux, I can use it at home. But anyone who liked the old Opera should take a look at Otter.
I have Brave installed on two of my computers. I don't use it much because I found it to be slower than Mozilla. Perhaps I don't have Brave configured properly.
"I've used Firefox since it was called Firebird, but I've now uinstalled it entirely in favor of Brave."
I used Firefox starting from Firebird beta 0.73. When Mozilla forced out Brendan Eich, I dropped it entirely, and switched to Pale Moon. Then, when Gab brought out Dissenter, I switched to Waterfox, because Pale Moon cannot run the dissenter app.
riffer73 wrote:Regardless, to the original post, I tried Brave when it first came out and didn't like it. With all the Firefox nonsense lately it might be time to try it again.
I ran Brave last year for about 6 months. I do not like how it handles bookmarks (I have lots), but other than that, it is functional.
"Would have been better to stay and fight. I dropped a redpill bomb on the HR department a few months ago. Best part is they cannot find out who did it but the one person who would have been a wellspring of SJW bullshit is now too afraid to look stupid."
Sounds like an interesting story. What are the details?
Just a reminder ...
You can add the "Infogalactic Transporter" extension to Brave to automatically use Infogalactic when you click on a Wikipedia link. From there, you can still use Wikipedia by clicking a button, if you feel the need to.
The Brave extension can be found on the Chrome extension store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/Infogalactic%20Transporter
In earlier versions of Brave, the Infogalactic extension was difficult to add.
Hey Mozilla, there's this feature you may have heard of, it's called the "Not Interested" button, you click it when you don't like YouTube's recommendations and it doesn't show you any more of that stuff.
What's easier: clicking that button a few times, or ranting and raving and stomping your feet about the recommendations you get until YouTube changes their algorithms?
Then again, I can see why Mozilla staff would fail to understand the concept of "not interested".
Really like Brave a lot. It's gone through some growing pains but it's definitely solid enough that I completely replaced Chrome with it. Been using it for over a year now.
Get out of your comfort zones, people, and stop feeding monsters like Google. Switch your search engine to DuckDuckGo while you're at it.
I know nobody listens to a delta, but Opera is the tits if you want a great browser with no SJW BS I can see.
Brave has been very good here. The corporate cancer is a serious problem. Firefox used to to be pretty decent.
I'm installing brave to give it a try. What is a good ad blocker to use with it? I've been using uBlock Origin with Firefox.
Gonna need more disinfectant
Cootcraig wrote:I'm installing brave to give it a try. What is a good ad blocker to use with it? I've been using uBlock Origin with Firefox.
Brave has built in ad blocking and has an "adblock" section within it's settings, so you may not need an extension for that. Without one, my brave installation reports that it has blocked 339,053 ads and trackers.
If you're just looking for ideas as a place to start, aside from "Infogalactic Transporter," I find "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" to be useful.
Unknownsailor wrote:I ran Brave last year for about 6 months. I do not like how it handles bookmarks (I have lots), but other than that, it is functional.
Brave put a release maybe 6 months ago that improved bookmark handling, especially on a laptop. Brave has been great. Haven't seen a Youtube ad on the youtube site since I installed it. The only thing is, if certain sites seem broken on the mobile, you need to click the Brave guy in the upper right and enable Javascript for that page. Occasionally pages on the PC, such as this one due to Blogger, require me to change the setting to allow all cookies in order to comment. I like the easy ability to only do this kind of stuff on a case by case basis.
Try Falkon (was quipzilla). Faster that FF. And evolution now works better than thunderbird... Mozilla's code base in Linux is breaking
Isn't this gamma behavior? Instead of building yourself up you knock someone down?
Noone cares about Mozilla YouTube recommendations.
Things to think about. Brave is based on the Chromium engine. IMHO, this makes Brave just a Chrome clone. Same with Opera (which is run by the PLA of China, don't ya know?) FYI, Microsoft Edge (child of Internet explorer) is going to be based on Chromium with the next major release. More things to think about: Tor runs off of Firefox, what does that say about Tor? Personally, I run 3 browsers: Chrome, for gov't and other "official" sites, Comodo Ice Dragon, for everyday use, and Browzar 2000 for sites I want to make it hard for the NSA/CIA/FBI/DIA/MOUSE to see or track.
IMHO, I see browsers in the USA condensing down to two basic engines: Chromium and Firefox/Mozilla. Both will be arms of the NSA/CIA/FBI/DIA/MOUSE with spyware all over the place. All other browsers will be either: a) a derivation of the parent, or b)an obsolete browser that leaves you wide open to being hacked.
It was nice while it lasted, but the wild west days of the 'Net are over. Yippy Ki Ya Yay, giddy up Silver, time to ride off into the sunset....
https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_web_browsers
@41 Valley Forge Patriot:
"Things to think about. Brave is based on the Chromium engine. IMHO, this makes Brave just a Chrome clone."
That's because you don't know anything about the architecture of web browsers, or what specifically Brave has replaced on top of and inside the Blink browser/rendering engine. Hint: it's not Google's beloved C++, but "web technologies", that is, more JavaScript. Also consider that Brendon Eich knows a thing or two about web browsers.
@11 Exactly! I was watching a video last night, then there's one off to the side about "The Georgia". I guess the Merimac and the Monitor weren't the only two ironclads in CW1. The Union blockade prompted some southern ladies to have a fundraiser. They did, and raised enough money to build an ironclad ship. The problem was that iron was scarce in the Confederacy, so they used RR rails. One layer with the flat base facing down against the wood, the top layer was more rail slid upside down between the base layer, to form an interlocking shield. But it was heavy and immobile, so they parked it in the river. Still, Union forces didn't come into Savannah until Sherman came over land. Never heard of it until the link was there.
Correction, Union SHIPS didn't come into Savannah. . .
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That’s hilarious. Good job man!
My only problem with YouTube recommendations is not that they send me down dangerous rabbit holes, but that they're repetitive and boring. At least rabbit holds open up new worlds, even if they're retarded worlds.
Mozilla is full of book-burners. And not the good kind.
@42 Karhu, right. Every full-featured web browser uses either Chromium's or Firefox's rendering engine or forks of them, because rendering a web page is now so ridiculously complex that you really couldn't create a new one without huge resources. (NetSurf may be an exception, but I haven't used it so can't comment on how complete it is.) The stuff each browser builds around the rendering engine is what matters to users concerned about security and privacy.
I never could use Firefox, as I am unable to think in Russian.
Ken Prescott wrote:I never could use Firefox, as I am unable to think in Russian.
You can go to sleep with the comforting thought that I, a random person on the internet, understood that reference.
@50 and now I can take a guess as to your age.
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