Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

Everytime people talked about Mozilla or Firefox the main complaint was Pocket. Everytime. Yet most people here are sad to see it go. What gives?

There are lots of people with different opinions on the same subject, and not all of them speak up in the same conversations.

Some people hated pocket, and would complain about it. Different people liked pocket and are commenting here.

The community has people with different viewpoints, and you are seeing different people's comments on different stories (either because different people are commenting or because different comments are getting voted to be visible).

I think it's consistent to be annoyed that they went and bought something and shoved it into everyone's browser, but also that they're taking away a service that people have come to depend on.

The complainers were FF users forced to deal with bloat they didn't use, those who are sad here are pocket users. They're just different people. Though, even those who didn't like the bundling of the extension probably didn't actively want the service to fail.

Some call this phenomenon the Goomba fallacy.

Different groups of people.

If you don't use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because they spent a bunch of money buying an unrelated company to add a feature you don't want. If you do use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because you don't want to be relying on a weird side project of a company because they'll do a terrible job of maintaining it and it'll inevitably get shut down.

Nicely articulated. I think their comment encapsulates the disbelief people have about public opinions that differ from their own political viewpoints (and the aspects that had been amplified within their own media/algorithmic bubble).

This is what confused me coming into this thread too! I was wondering what it'd be like consider how widely unpopular pocket is around here. Enough that anytime Firefox is brought up people point to pocket. No one defending it at those times so at just hear negatives. I'm sure there are plenty of different users but it's interesting to see what opinions dominate a thread at a given time.

I think people just like complaining about Firefox and Mozilla. Or maybe it's just that HN likes to complain in general

Either way, good news for Google I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Right. I would be one of the people who saw pocket as an unnecessary distraction, but even I tested it and my opinion is partly based on pocket just not working in my Firefox at the time. I also just did not like that it was given space in the toolbar while a way more important rss button was denied that space. And despite that, I still think the shutdown now is bad - this should be spun out or be moved to a Foss project, and certainly not be killed for more ai nonsense.

BTW, fakespot (the service they also shut down) is or could be an applied ai project where that technology could be helpful, and they also shut it down. That also feels wrong, especially the combination.

There are some from the Pocket disliking group that have made comments here. I bet most don't care that much.

The vast majority of people using Firefox don't care at all.

And then the people are significantly affected, the Pocket users, are going to be the loudest in this thread.

Maybe they were different people?

After about 5 minutes of reading, I'm proclaiming that its proper name shall be the "hivemind fallacy".

like grape jelly and tomato soup, two great tastes that don't belong together.

This is exactly correct. And everything happened exactly as written!

People who are happy about something have no reason to post.

You're talking about two entirely different groups of people even though they're all on HN.

Pocket was pushed pretty heavily and basically shoved down the throat of Firefox users. Many obviously complained about this behaviour, either because they had no use for Pocket or already had a different solution. Mozilla was basically mimicking Microsoft behaviour of just forcing products/features onto it's users.

Shortly after the Pocket launch Mozilla stopped pushing Pocket and it became less visible in the Firefox UI. Now it's just a tiny grey button most don't click. So you're either use Pocket and like it, or you don't even think about it.

The main complaint, as I remember it, was mostly how Mozilla positioned Pocket. Some people picked up Pocket over the years, many liked it. These are not necessarily the same people who objected to have Pocket thrown in their face.

That's not true, I sing the praises of things that bring me value all the time. I am, arguably, getting pretty close to "shill" category for some of them. However, I think that behavior should get a pass if the things being shilled are actually FOSS and not just "change from one company to the other"

I think statistically I'm still right. Complaints are always more frequent than positive comments -- and more unsolicited. I always factor that in when reading, for example, product reviews. While there are always people willing to sing the praises of products they like, the average content person is likely to just move on with their lives, and a wronged person cannot wait to tell everyone.

This is also related to Cunningham's Law.

Look at this thread, I've never heard so much positive talk about Pocket in my life. Up until it's imminent demise nobody had any strong inclination to talk positively about it.

I recognize these are different groups and HN isn't a homogeneous entity.

My explicit point was about perception bias.

My point was about how this bias is often undermining ourselves. In this case, helping Google chrome.

It just seems worth pointing out. That the comment sections in Internet forums seem to preference comments that compilation.

I'm quite happy about it. I might even print out a tombstone to piss on.

I'd have had no problem with pocket if it'd been an optional plugin. Or, if it'd been optional at all. If I wanted to go around disabling a bunch of browser bloat, I wouldn't be using Firefox.

You're right. Everywhere I've gone to school or worked, any big online forum was mostly complaints, even though I went to great schools and had cushy jobs. You'd think every course curves to a D- and every employee gets a 10% yearly pay cut. It's simply because one unhappy person can be as active online as 100 happy people.

And on some sites like Yelp where complainers aren't disproportionately active, complaints can have disproportionate power. Like a 4.5-star restaurant's average is affected way more by a 1-star review than a 5-star review.

> they spent a bunch of money buying an unrelated company to add a feature you don't want

While fiddling (and paying their execs $$$) as the only useful thing they do -- firefox -- crashed and burned into irrelevance. Leaving the company useful only as an ersatz chrome hypothetical competitor to keep the feds / EU at bay. Great for the overpaid people running it; less good for anyone in our industry.

Exec pay: up and to the right.

Marketshare: way down and to the right.

Don't worry guys -- now they're playing VC and AI, at which they're sure to be as good as they were at running Firefox. Though I guess since you could say their only successful product was anti-trust insurance sold to Google, that's at least in the finance space, so in some way related to being a vc...

I'm just glad it has a funny name instead of something arrogant-sounding like "Dunning-Kruger effect." That was ok in a research setting but got turned into an insult.

I hated pocket being enabled by default, that's all. I also think a lot of people saw it as adware/spyware even if it technically didn't work that way, which tbh I'm unsure of.

That doesn't mean I wanted it dead. I was happy for the feature to exist and for others to use it. Maybe some people were angry that they even wasted a few KB downloading the extra code for a feature they won't use, but I'd be ok with it.

Pocket became annoying because Mozilla started shoving it down your throat, whether or not you wanted it. To most FF users, Pocket is (at very best) a source of occasional popups and other UI annoyances. People who had a use for it really liked it, though.

I used Pocket for about 3 years, before and after the acquisition. When Firefox started syncing bookmarks across devices, and they added the reader mode, Pocket became obsolete in my mind. I stopped using it because I didn't need it anymore.

People tend to be more vocal about negative things in their life than positive things. I think it really boils down to that.

In my experience people are more likely to complain about things that annoy them than those things which make their lives easier. However, nowhere in that statement will you find "everyone" is more likely to complain, just that the probabilities are much higher for complaining about a thing rather than advocating for a different thing.

People really don’t like your comment it seems but you’re right, even if it’s a little on the nose.

I think most people wish it wasn’t true, myself included, but how many times does Mozilla have to show us their priorities are anything but improving and maintaining Firefox itself before we accept the truth?

I wish there was a "Beg HN:" because I'd love to see a little graveyard with 3d printed tombstones of all the failed and canceled products of all the big tech companies.