On 12/02/2014 07:42, Jim Porter wrote:
On 02/11/2014 07:26 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
regarding
https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/
:
Directory Tiles will instead suggest pre-packaged content for
first-time users. Some of these tile placements will be from the
Mozilla ecosystem, some will be popular websites in a given
geographic location, and some will be sponsored content from
hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla’s pursuit of our
mission. The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such,
while still leading to content we think users will enjoy.
Thanks for bringing this up; I probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
To be perfectly honest, this is the kind of announcement that makes me
seriously wonder how this idea managed to survive long enough to get
published as an announcement. While it's perfectly legitimate to say
that the new tab page sucks for a new Firefox profile, was there really
no one who said "hey wait a minute, maybe we should be really careful
before we start talking about putting ads into the actual browser"
before this post was published?
I obviously wasn't involved in any internal discussion with "Directory
Tiles", but I'm hoping that this is something that was already fairly
well-known amongst Firefox Desktop devs.
It was presented and discussed at the Firefox desktop work week in
Paris, early January. There were many other ideas that were shot down
well before they were even shown to the Fx desktop team.
If not, there is a Problem.
There have been occasions at Mozilla where I had a vague suspicion that
someone who wanted a controversial feature simply chose not to mention
the feature to relevant parties who might object on privacy/ethical/etc
grounds; I sincerely hope this was only my paranoia speaking, and not
the truth of the matter. The same applies to this situation as well.
If indeed this happened without relevant people being in the loop, we
need to come up with ways to prevent that. For my part, I've always
tried to run my crazier ideas past a few people before posting it
somewhere more public to help prevent embarrassment (both for myself and
Mozilla as a whole).
This sort of thing has the potential to erode the trust of not only our
users, but our contributors (and employees!).
- Jim
As Bryan Clark put it on Twitter,
> The "Mozilla ads" inside Firefox is actually taking us from
> http://cl.ly/image/033X3C3R1m3f to http://cl.ly/image/3I172o2f202k
> for first run
https://twitter.com/clarkbw/status/433333066514198528
To the best of my knowledge, there are no plans on using any kind of
user data for deciding what ends up on the empty tiles. As the blogpost
noted,
> "Some of these tile placements will be from the Mozilla ecosystem,
> some will be popular websites in a given geographic location, and
> some will be sponsored content from hand-picked partners to help
> support Mozilla’s pursuit of our mission"
which I would assume to be based on the Firefox locale, just like the
existing facilities for search providers in the search box.
I would also hope that we trust the other people in Mozilla to have the
user's interests at heart. That includes the people who decide what kind
of image/text is shown in the tile, and what tiles we would consider
shipping and what tiles we would not.
If you do not trust the people making these decisions, I would argue
that is a separate problem (to be taken up in .governance) to having the
ability to prepopulate these tiles.
We already prepopulate:
- bookmarks
- search providers
- links to Firefox/Mozilla support/help/information sites
We monetize some of what is in the search provider list (but not
everything).
I don't understand why implementing the ability to prepopulate the
tiles, and monetizing some (but not all) of them, has some people
commenting here so much more worried than the current state of affairs,
and why this would get us onto a slippery slope that we were not on before.
Note also that you can remove sites from your tiles, just like you can
remove (sponsored or otherwise) search providers. I would expect us to
continue providing that possibility.
~ Gijs
_______________________________________________
governance mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
