It's interesting to me how you can call out this post and recent others as a "marketing initiative from Mozilla" without any apparent backlash (as of yet), but when I called it "brigading by Mozilla supporters and fans" on multiple other threads I was completely removed from the conversation. Is there really a difference?
Is this the sort of story that casual users or even avid fans of the browser would organically promote? That's the logic that I was handed in some of the responses to me. Am I that out of place to assume that the following is how it goes down? 1.) The marketing/evangelical folks at Mozilla create a story and post it here and elsewhere. 2.) They put out a call to all their supporters in various channels to come and help promote the story (and keep other commenters in line apparently)...
I think the problem is that comment forums always optimize towards showing me what the currently active mob/majority thinks about a topic rather than sorting things towards my own personal tastes. I'd much rather see a rating system that weights posts/topics and comments based on my history. For instance: if I've promoted a certain topic in the past, put it higher. If I typically promote a given user, put their comment higher. If I typically promote a certain user who promoted another comment, put that comment higher. And so on. Basically censor the stuff I usually disagree with instead of allowing mob rule. [1]
I don't see the point of trying to make everybody see the same truth because that's not how real life works. Mostly, people tend to live in tribes. Wouldn't it be nice if the Internet wasn't always in your face telling you how wrong you are? IMO, such systems would put a chill on the global culture war.
[1] - This might be the perfect problem for a graph database. If anyone wants to work on something like this, let me know how to contact you and I'll give you all of my ideas!