Technology

@XLE@piefed.social @Feyd@programming.dev @technology@lemmy.world

The most menacing thing in that picture is the bold red text, assuming it isn’t Photoshopped that way

I'm interacting from Sharkey, on a Lemmy thread, and you're interacting from PieFed. I'm not sure if PieFed fetches the alt-text from images. If you access my original Sharkey note, you'll see the following alt-text:

Screenshot of confirmation dialog "Block AI enhancements?" with "or pop-ups about them" highlighted.

I disclosed the fact that "or pop-ups about them" was highlighted. Also, a quick reverse image search would point to the original picture where said excerpt isn't highlighted.

It would be photoshopping/photo manipulation if I removed, added or changed text from the picture, which I didn't.

I’ve seen Firefox implement other dark patterns, including hiding the ability to disable ads from within the homepage

Exactly, and even this one is a matter of conundrum when it's brought to the table. Because Mozilla, and corporations in general, know the exact, dosimetric approach of pushing dark patterns, not too hard so all the user base would readily notice and complain, not too soft so all the shareholders wouldn't see the "graph line go up". Just the right amount to make things dance to their song.

Even today, stating how the opting-out of "Sponsored shortcuts" isn't trivial for the average user (not to mention how said user will see the sponsored shortcuts at least once as they head to turn them off), is met with people blindly advocating for Mozilla (which, let us remember, they're a corporation with corporate interests, not a lifelong friend or a fellow trustworthy acquaintance, and corporations are driven by profit, not by friendship or psychological well-being).

But this isn’t really one of them

The opt-out implies a feature that was pushed without consent.

Again, I bring my heavy hypothetical example: if a harasser offers the harassed a way out of the harassment after having initiated the harassment, would this make the harasser less of a harasser? Hell no, of course no! It's still harassment! It turns out opt-out features are exactly that: something that gives you the "right" to leave, only after it was pushed onto you.

And The fact that "opting-out" requires double confirmation only makes it worse, as if the hypothetical harassed were to be ask by the hypothetical harasser "are you sure you don't want this?" before being "allowed" to be freed from the hypothetical harassment.

Users have been begging Mozilla for StartPage integration, but Mozilla gave them a Perplexity integration instead.

Exactly, another dark pattern, and another proof of how Mozilla is not a friend, but a corporation.

the ones that give them money

Yeah. And this is often the justification people often use to advocate for that: "oh, but Mozilla needs to mane money" (at what cost?), as if donation-based economy weren't a thing.