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Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

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Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#21

Post by wslh »

ve55 wrote: post #13

How do they expect to lead in identifying fake content when the problem is intractable if adversaries are even somewhat competent? You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.

You can even follow the Amazon Mechanical Turk [1] + ChatGPT + editors type of workflow which will be indistinguishable from a real content? I am eager to see what arises from this acquisition. I remember using Disqus in Wordpress to expect more competitive spam detection. The result? It didn't even detect obvious network bots. Fakespot raised $ 5.3m [2]. Is there a disclosure of the number for this acquisition? [3].

[1] https://www.mturk.com/worker

[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot

[3] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:C2WWi4...

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#22

Post by qzw »

Barrin92 wrote: post #17
purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

If your first step as PM of a browser that desperately needs to win back market share is to work on gnome-keyring, a feature only relevant on an operating system that less than 1% of people use your tenure is going to be very short-lived. This is engineering virtue-signaling, for lack of a better phrase.

But the first line of his resume will be “Achieved 100% market share among gnome-keyring users.” That’s gonna bring all the recruiters to the yard.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#23

Post by boringuser2 »

purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

You'd have to invest in quality engineering on the browser itself with no guarantee that this would actually improve anything or drive revenue.

The idea would be a gambit that you could improve the software sufficiently that it accidentally became actually competitive with chrome.

Right now, it feels like some weird hobby project that falls short of the engineering chops that went into Chrome, and I suspect people can feel this too.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#24

Post by notatoad »

jdwithit wrote: post #20
purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.

the general state of firefox suggests that they are not large enough to do more than one thing.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#26

Post by hammyhavoc »

purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

Mediocre web browsers aren't making them money though. The search partnership royalties are. If it is still making them money, why try harder?

Is Firefox-centric Mozilla still relevant in 2023? No, not really.

People also assume that x is a distraction to the goal of y, but why would it be? If it hasn't happened yet, it probably isn't going to.

At this point, they arguably lost the browser war, even if they made a great browser, it is going to struggle to win meaningful marketshare, and even then, how many people are going to subscribe to Pocket or a VPN? Nowhere near as much as what their search royalties make them, which likely isn't going to last forever in this climate.

What about if Google pulls the plug on their search partnership due to declining Firefox numbers? They're largely dependent on Google. They probably can't pay their CEO $3m salary if that goes South.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#27

Post by wslh »

jdwithit wrote: post #20
purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.

Yes, they can work on many things simultaneously but it is worrisome when the execution of their core product fails [1] it shows a big management failure.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+market+share&oq=fire...

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#28

Post by function_seven »

878654Tom wrote: post #16
purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

Why do you expect this from Mozilla but not Microsoft, Google, Apple,...?

Because I expect Microsoft and Google to build more features for advertisers to target me, and Apple to build more features that lock me into their ecosystem.

I expect better from Mozilla.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#29

Post by Aeolun »

notatoad wrote: post #24
jdwithit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.

the general state of firefox suggests that they are not large enough to do more than one thing.

What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#30

Post by gnicholas »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #26
purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

Mediocre web browsers aren't making them money though. The search partnership royalties are. If it is still making them money, why try harder? Is Firefox-centric Mozilla still relevant in 2023? No, not really. People also assume that x is a distraction to the goal of y, but why would it be? If it hasn't happened yet, it probably isn't going to. At this point, they arguably lost the browser war, even if they made a gr…

> Mediocre web browsers aren't making them money though. The search partnership royalties are. If it is still making them money, why try harder?

Wouldn't they get more royalties if they could attract more users to their web browser?

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