by mattweinberg on 5/2/23, 4:21 PM with 372 comments
by WhyNotHugo on 5/2/23, 6:19 PM
And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.
I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.
by bcx on 5/2/23, 4:47 PM
The browser wars are basically over, and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet.
With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge.
Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mozilla 3.9% - Safari
by PaulHoule on 5/2/23, 4:28 PM
by senko on 5/2/23, 7:04 PM
Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) ..
... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it?
I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want.
Except Firefox is the golden goose.
(Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't require chrome).
by applecrazy on 5/2/23, 5:40 PM
> Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and services to you and others:
Contact Info
Identifiers
Usage Data
Application Search History (e.g. not your Google/Bing/other search engine history)
Purchases
Diagnostics
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policyby TheRealPomax on 5/2/23, 10:06 PM
by purpleidea on 5/2/23, 4:45 PM
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.
by qzw on 5/2/23, 5:24 PM
by ve55 on 5/2/23, 4:44 PM
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.
by kivlad on 5/2/23, 5:00 PM
by nbar1 on 5/2/23, 4:30 PM
by krono on 5/2/23, 8:31 PM
Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and illegal content by online platforms.
Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla's claim[2] of commitment to human dignity, individual expression, accountability, and most of all: trust.
Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to make it disappear, which I don't think is the plan. Money would have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really.
[1]: A Europe fit for the digital age https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
[2]: Mozilla Manifesto https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
by dahwolf on 5/2/23, 10:22 PM
Firefox market share has been tanking for 13 years(!) straight. Already 6 years ago the CTO of Mozilla concluded that Chrome had won:
https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/
There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine.
The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact?
All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is.
As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they're learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard.
As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they'll never learn.
by frabcus on 5/2/23, 5:45 PM
"This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake...
by candiddevmike on 5/2/23, 4:42 PM
by jmann99999 on 5/2/23, 4:32 PM
Does the HN community still view it as a trusted source to make better buying decisions?
by dudeinhawaii on 5/3/23, 4:55 AM
I think it'd be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what's real or "likely fake" when browsing the web of tomorrow.
by noisy_boy on 5/3/23, 2:04 AM
Instead of identifying fake content, I'm more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.
by tivert on 5/2/23, 4:33 PM
by tannhaeuser on 5/2/23, 6:50 PM
But what's really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?
by rank0 on 5/2/23, 5:40 PM
FF is like the only remaining browser without this feature.
by zx8080 on 5/2/23, 11:24 PM
A cookie consent on fakespot page states mainly Fakespot and Google cookies in a surprising manner. They give two options, but none to refuse any cookies:
- ok
- do not sell or share my personal information
How are they different? From reading details, I assume no difference.
There's no way to turn off any non-necessary cookies group (shared with Meta/Facebook (!) and Google).
It will be sad to stop using FF because of this integration.
by amai on 5/3/23, 11:31 AM
by asdfman123 on 5/2/23, 9:14 PM
If everyone starts using Fakespot, vendors will just optimize to fool Fakespot.
by nfriedly on 5/2/23, 9:05 PM
It'd be funny if it wasn't so frustrating.
by princevegeta89 on 5/2/23, 6:46 PM
by notacoward on 5/2/23, 4:53 PM
by progmetaldev on 5/2/23, 8:07 PM
by zx8080 on 5/2/23, 11:03 PM
by navi0 on 5/3/23, 4:51 AM
by Zamicol on 5/2/23, 5:23 PM
by kgbcia on 5/2/23, 8:51 PM
by berkle4455 on 5/2/23, 5:03 PM
by dipakgr on 5/3/23, 6:41 AM
by nothingneko on 5/2/23, 7:56 PM
by moneywoes on 5/3/23, 12:16 AM
by InCityDreams on 5/2/23, 7:13 PM
by didip on 5/2/23, 4:57 PM
by natch on 5/2/23, 8:41 PM
I’ve asked ChatGPT for product recommendations and it’s a breath of fresh air to get suggestions that are not filtered for affiliate commission potential. Let’s hope this lasts but in the meantime I doubt I’m the only one noticing that this AI content is not steering you based on the potential for profit.
So, fakespot kind of had it backwards, in a way. What we need is Humanspot to warn us away from content, AI generated or not, that has been corrupted by a human profit motive.