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End of Japanese community

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Re: End of Japanese community

#491

Post by solatic »

nozilla wrote: post #252

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

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

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

Re: End of Japanese community

#492

Post by latexr »

crote wrote: post #465
latexr wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And personally offering a call is like a sidestep "lets move this problem out of the public discourse" 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…

> Maybe. But that’s also assuming the worst from the get go, and that’s no way to settle a dispute. 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?

> if the rest of the reply hadn't been a borderline-insulting cookie-cutter corporate non-apology.

“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?

Re: End of Japanese community

#493

Post by Ekaros »

braiamp wrote: post #486
Ekaros wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't there already a perfectly fine and seemingly fully functional communication channel in place? The one they answered in. I see absolutely zero reason not communicate in it. On other hand, it seems that early reply had zero effort or attempt to communicate. That is to identify what had happened and gather information and example themselves. But the absolute tiniest bit of effort in I would expect.

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

You could always take actual action on what information you have. First roll back changes. Second announce termination of responsible people.

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"

Re: End of Japanese community

#494

Post by Y_Y »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #421
apexalpha wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this. It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.

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

Having a call is fine, but it's not like the original complaint didn't lay out in plenty of detail what the problem was.

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.)

Re: End of Japanese community

#495

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jacquesm wrote: post #85
jwpapi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m not even sure it’s easy to decide which side is in the right here and it’s not as simple as people think it is. Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators. What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads. Unfortunately these things are really gray, but you really can’t expect a c…

> I’m not even sure it’s easy to decide which side is in the right here and it’s not as simple as people think it is. - No prior communications. - No discussion about what uses the contributed information was being put to. - No discussion about the release and the parameters around the operation of the bot. - No discussion about whether or not this was a desirable in the first place (with the community, not just inte…

> if it is a volunteer group then it is more than enough to throw in the towel

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#496

Post by xg15 »

Aerolfos wrote: post #341
Stranger43 wrote: post #169

I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air. The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too. Firefox is a good browser but is prevented from capitalizing on…

>The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too. But of course, they need "competitive" salaries so they can hire "great talent" from the tech sector so that the company doesn't fall behind or something.

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

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

Re: End of Japanese community

#497

Post by flkiwi »

styanax wrote: post #432
emayljames wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from the UK, and I also think this is true. Hop on a call and the wording sounds like they do not want to fix the issue It comes across very condecending. Maybe it is a US problem

Reading other comments, US folks seem divided; I am with you and the others on this side of the fence, I've seen this exact situation play out in corporate life many times. They are attempting to quiet a public discussion of dissent and dissatisfaction.

I’m an American. The response is coded as “do nothing”. The proper response here would be to say “we’re going to roll back the changes until we understand and fix things that are going wrong.” The individual may not have INTENDED the dismissive due to the way American corporate language has internalize “do nothing, take no position, take no risk, admit no fault” but it’s definitely the tone. Essentially this is a human problem: how do you deal with someone motivated by project passion rather than revenue goals or personal income? It happens ALL THE TIME with nonprofits interacting poorly with volunteers because the motivations and associated daily language are so divergent.

Re: End of Japanese community

#498

Post by greatgib »

avhception wrote: post #295
vintermann wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows? Everyone whose native language is not English knows. Seriously, people with this attitude should be forced to run their browser and mail client with a plugin to run everything through a couple of machine translation roundtrips. Give it two months, and I guarantee you'll understand.

My first language is German, but I've got most of my devices set to English. Because of that, Youtube started machine-translating German video titles and audio into English at random. The audio quality is just bad, everything sounds muffled. And the translations are often complete garbage. I absolutely detest this "feature".

It happened to me in French also, one day I was looking at a video that was trendy, podcast like, and the voices were more than shitty, like a badly translated movie. I looked at comments and everyone was praising this video, so it did not make any sense to me. Until I discovered that Youtube somehow decided to auto enable this feature that I never asked for.

Re: End of Japanese community

#499

Post by Timon3 »

henearkr wrote: post #332
ares623 wrote: post #3

This is rich > We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. The post literally starts with a list of grievances. Maybe ask the AI for an executive summary and the key points.

In the replying posts, there is mention of a discovered bug that could have resulted in most of the reported problems. It is normal to want to discuss in order to check if that was the bug, in which case fixing the bug would have solved the issues.

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

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

Re: End of Japanese community

#500

Post by realaaa »

apexalpha wrote: post #345
nozilla wrote: post #252

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

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this. It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.

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

you don't reply like this to just open forum

lazy ass business world reply

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

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