Comment on Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery

• piefood@feddit.online ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What about Wikipeida? Internet Archive? All of the products/services that live on kickstarter/patreon/gofundme/etc?

  People are more than willing to pay for the things that they love, but Mozilla knows that people wouldn't be willing to pay enough to continue floating the Executive salaries. That's why they don't transition.

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  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The orgs that are heavily dependent on federal funding as well as major corporate investors? That run the websites that the vast majority of people just think is free?

    Again, we’ve seen how this plays out with Patreon et al. Everyone says it is totally viable because the ridiculously popular people make bank. And as more and more celebrities flock to it, there is less and less money for the “small creators” and so forth.

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    • piefood@feddit.online ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I feel like I'm mis-understanding your argument. Are you saying that Mozilla can't do things that other groups are already successfully doing, because "The popular people make too much money" doing it, and "They are already getting that via the Mozilla Foundation"?

      That doesn't make sense to me.

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      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        The point is that they are already doing what those orgs are doing. They are dealing with a userbase that doesn’t want to give them money by getting large amounts from special interest groups and corporations.

        Which is why the Wikimedia (?) Foundation pushed REAL hard for AI until basically the entire editorbase told them to fuck off.

        But hey? There is obviously infinite money so yeah, I am sure if Mozilla drops all those corporate interests and just switches to an optional patreon they would have even MORE money than they already do and would have no need to placate said special interests.

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• MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  A huge problem with America’s and many other economic systems is that companies are incentivized to undercut the competition, use a monopoly growth model, acquire or push out competitors, and then screw the customer when the competitors are gone.

  Without guardrails, some other “affordable solution” will just show up to replace streaming, and then we’ll start all over again.

  I don’t know what the solution is, but as a consumer, I’m exhausted. I wish there were options to just buy products, sometimes more expensive ones, for piece of mind that the company won’t stab me in the back someday.

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  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    In a perfect world? Yeah, I would love to just spend money and get what I want forever.

    The problem is that most of these products would never exist without external funding. We all remember Microsoft getting slapped hard for bundling internet explorer and the like in the 90s. What people don’t remember is just how GOOD IE was… because it was largely subsidized by the OS et al that everyone bought because it was that damned good.

    Same thing with the idea of “use a monopoly growth model”. What is the alternative? Actively making a product worse because everyone else is? Because that is collusion. Hell, if anything, browsers for the past few years have been exactly what we would theoretically want. Google are the de facto monopoly. They literally pumped insane amounts of cash into Mozilla et al to fund their competition so there would actually BE competition.

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    • MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Same thing with the idea of “use a monopoly growth model”. What is the alternative? Actively making a product worse because everyone else is? Because that is collusion.

      This question really highlights the danger of the growth-at-all-costs model in forcing every company to race to the bottom when one company does. The future of the human race may one day depend on killing progress.

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