alt Hacker NewsMy issue with this post isn’t so much the post itself but with what it demonstrates about culture today.
20 years ago one would have written the same post on Blogger but the odds are it would have been framed as “here’s how you can clean up the Firefox menu”.
It’s not like vitriolic content didn’t exist. But the vitriolic content was usually limited to holy war posts, when a Mac user was disparaging PCs or vice versa, or if it was a vim vs emacs conversation. And even then there was an understanding that no one was being entirely serious.
But in today’s social media/political environment, every post is turned up to 11.
I'm sure part of this is hindsight bias, but software was less intentionally user hostile in the before times.
Firefox used to release features that improved privacy. Today they add features that reduce privacy. Enabled by default, with no easy way to disable or remove the spyware link.
The tone should shift, in step with how much disrespect companies decide to inflict on their users.