I know that everyone has already given their opinions about what kinds of people are involved and their motivations, but this is really about two fallible humans, one listing grievances and another asking to open a communication channel.
That's it.
Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotional communication over).
Regardless of how nice or not-nice the text may sound to the various cultures that have weighed in so far, the right thing to do is talk voice/video and hash out what the problems are, and work together to come up with a solution that will satisfy everyone.
That's what communication is about.
I worked on adding TLS 1.1 and 1.2 support to firefox back in the day, and the whole process left me so disappointed I asked to be removed from the list of contributors. I wish mozilla all the best, but it's not an especially well run organization and this post gives another example of why.
Ladybird and other browser alternatives cannot come fast enough. Every other week we've got a thread here about some stupid move Mozilla have made, I can't remember the last time I heard positive news about Mozilla.
I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air.
The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.
Firefox is a good browser but is prevented from capitalizing on the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.
10+ years in Japan. The message here is much deeper from my perspective. “Let’s jump on the call” is not the solution. The guy was stripped off of his face. I love Japan for being human. Small business bar or restaurant with 3 tables. Not everything should be streamlined for a quick call solution… the process was pushed on his head. Google nemawashi decision making process
This is rich
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
The post literally starts with a list of grievances. Maybe ask the AI for an executive summary and the key points.
> Hi Marsf,
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
> My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound!
What a horribly condescending and patronising response. If I'd received this it would just further vindicate my decision to quit.
I'm not really able to understand the finer details but I think I picked up enough to get the broad strokes.
Really though, all I needed to see was the phrase "jump on a quick call" to form an irrationally strong opinion. That phrase instantly warms my entire body with rage.
I'm sorry for how you feel about us kicking you in the balls.
Would you like to hop on a quick call to chat about this further?
Just a quick lil call.
Quick lil ol' callerino.
Hoppity hip hop.
This almost deserves to be nominated for the AI darwin awards. "Volunteer community destroyed and leadership self-exiled because someone at corporate thought thier machine translation was better than native speakers, of one of the world's most notoriously difficult languages."
I would bet money that Japan has thier own yearly "business fail awards" and this is gonna wind up there. "Just hop on a quick call, never mind the time zone!"
> They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.
Could this have been a mistake rather than a malicious act?
What is the logic behind adding machine translation for content that already had a seemingly robust, enthusiastic, and motivated (volunteer?) community maintaining the translations? The "saves money" rationale to deploy LLM/MT automation doesn't make sense when its volunteers are contributing because they want to. This is kind of community and participation destruction wrought by the introduction of LLMs/MT has a serious impact because it undermines the people who are actually willing to do the work. It was presumably costing nothing (or very little) to have the community maintain this content, but the change has cost a significant amount of goodwill. If the Japanese SUMO community wanted to use MT, it should be their sole decision, baring any issues with their stewardship in general. This is someone else saying "look, with this great new automation, you don't need to spend time anymore doing «thing you want to do»". Huh? How does that make any sense to force on anyone?
It’s sad to see a community built with love for 20 years end like this. AI should help people, not replace the heart behind their work.
Isn't it fascinating that despite `while true; do claude --yolo` over a weekend being all it takes to port some project across platforms, LLMs completely fall apart when it comes to speaking grammatical and natural Japanese?
Free tier Gemini CLI literally writes Android app for me by just endlessly wondering in English. AGI's here. And it struggles with Japanese. How!?
I'm not sure why I clicked on this beyond just knowing it was going to be another Mozilla trainwreck and not being able to look away. But what was truly stunning to me was this comment thread. There are people here actually defending the following response:
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?
This is horrifically patronizing after someone's volunteer work was effectively destroyed (as laid out in the list of grievances), but there are people here asking "how is it patronizing? seems perfectly reasonable to me".
It's one of those "they live among us" moments, where you realize that you're surrounded by psychopaths. It's not even malice, they're not intentionally being assholes, they just have no empathy.
As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years.
Sure we had machine translation before, but it was still a little off. Now the latest language models get us 99.9% there, so they are judged good enough to deploy at scale. What results is a weird twilight zone where everything is in your language, except it feels kind of wrong and doesn’t really communicate in ways specific to the culture from which the language is.
You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French.
Or your mom sends you a screenshot of a Facebook thread in her native language that has her worked up - and reading it, you realize it’s an LLM translation of something that should have no bearing on her.
Same with various support pages on websites - it all reads mostly fine until you hit a weird sentence where the LLM messed up and then you’re transported back to the reality that what you’re reading was not authored by anyone who can actually operate in that language/culture.
There’s a lot of nuance in language beyond the words - how you express disagreement in English is not how you express disagreement in Japanese, how you address the reader in French is not the same as in Korean, etc. Machine translation flattens all modes of expression into a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained).
I have no illusions that this trend will reverse - high quality translation work is skill and time consuming, and thanks to LLMs anyone on Earth can now localize anything they want in any language they want for ~free in ~0 time.
The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English.
The classic linguist response to this, which I subscribe to, is “no language is fixed, language is ever evolving in response to various external cultural pressures“. Which is true. But it doesn’t make our post-LLM language landscape any less weird.
Some people do these type of contribution or charity work not just to do some good but also to feel some autonomy and mastery in a world were much of the regular top down driven drudgery work does not provide much of that feeling. These people are canaries in the coal mine. I expect more people feel a loss of purpose and rise of anxiety and depression in the world.
Can anybody provide some context for this?
I can’t parse what’s going on from the post or the comments here, and there’s no navigation on that page to anywhere but “support “
It sounds like something is happening. What is it?
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
Talk about being tone deaf. This was so incredibly rude. No consult, no request whether they wanted this or not. Mozilla keeps finding new ways to shoot itself in the foot, these are probably some of the most loyal people that you could wish for, that's a precious resource if there ever was one. And to add insult to injury they want to them 'hop on a call' and to 'trully[sic] understand what you're struggling with' even though they just spelled it out as clear as day.
Doing this in production directly without even trying it on staging feels very wrong.
Imagine having human volunteers do the work for you, than paying an AI to overwrite their work without communicating this with them (no validation of any sort it seems). And once they quit you corporate-speak to them "let's hop on a call to understand your frustrations!" in response to a post where they outline precisely their frustrations.
Disgusting behavior.
I call this the AI theater. If a company can (still) look good AND decrease dealing with pesky flesh and bone humans, that's not collateral, that's a win. On the surface you act caring, concerned, rendering investors and HR both happy while you decrease "human complexity" - then you are winning the AI game. Mozilla always wanted to join the big boys, but while yearning for their soft power status the yearn bore the fruits of a rotten soul they will also have to embrace. There is no light without shadows and AI's shadows are drawn long and deep.
I understand the matter in theory, but I don't understand the matter in practice. Clicking through on the user, I couldn't identify any machine-translated overwrites of his work. What is an example of this? And if the community that manages the site objects, why not apply a batch temporary revert, and then re-run once/if everything is solved.
This is a trivial operation for me to do on MediaWiki with a bot, so it must be straightforward to do here too. I think "Ask forgiveness, not permission" is fine in order to move things forward, but you do have "ask forgiveness".
I've been studying Japanese for 15+ years and have really come to loathe machine translations from English. While generally the meaning gets across, they're very unnatural and often use words in contexts that sound weird or are just flat out wrong.
KB = Knowledge Base
MT = Machine Translation
In this context.
Reading the comments and replies here makes me wonder if I might have unintentionally stepped on some toes at work, especially across different cultures and people with different "takes" on English.
I've also been on the receiving end (written communication) but given that we get along pretty well in-person, I chalked that up to our different writing "style".
It’s a shame because “improve an off the shelf llm ti translate in line with this large dataset we prepared” is precisely the kind of project people love to work on. It could have been a chance to immortalize the hard work they did up until now.
Note, and this is very important: marsf posted this at 2am pacific time. Kiki responded at 6am (I don't know it's timezone, but presuming anywhere in the US, it is literally the earliest it could have responded). Then afterwards, marsf have posted a response publicly. So, we don't know what happened since then. There have been 1 day and a half-ish and coordinating between timezones is interesting, to say the least.
If i was this guy, i would take all the translations and move them to his own independent site with proper promotion so that Japanese speaker can find it easily
Can someone please remind what the community coordinators were called long back? I remember they were part of releases, had power and responsibility.
There was an exodus of them around 2015/16 times.
Does anyone remember anyone's post?
Floorp is a fork by Japanese developer, though his English is not perfect. It removes all backwards compatibility to speed things up, competing vs. Thorium to be best performing browser, if anyone's interested.
So, they had people working for free for years and didn't think to involve them in a process where they could have been stil "useful"?
But I think they already clarified how much they care about people doing translations since they defaulted to the robo-translation. Which to me is complete nonsense considering how superior the human translations must be. As a human with a brain, I would have just translated automatically the missing pages leaving to them the option of replacing/fixing them. Also they should have been thanked many times for all their hard work.
Mozilla is more and more disappointing. Always talking about making an internet for everyone, community, bla bla. But then they don't even talk to their own community contributors before changing their workflow. And when someone speaks up, they get the most corporate reply possible.
This should be a wake-up call for any org trying to "AI-ify" community-driven work
File under “nominative determinism”
Google “sumobot;” ai summary says:
A sumobot is a robot designed to push an opponent out of a circular arena, similar to human sumo wrestling.The same feeling non-native English speakers have battling native English speaker bias
The level of arrogance it took to do this is quite simply stunning.
Saying "I'm sorry for how you feel..." is the most condescending way to begin. Then a "let's jump on a con call"... oh... why would I do that when I just told you? smh.
Enshittification will continue until market share improves.
Shocking that Mozilla would roll out a bot - in production - without coordinating with the team that's been doing the work for years so far. Very bad look.
Context in another thread on that site gives a lot of background and a lot of community pushback that was clearly ignored: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...
I'm sure they'll be as open and communicative with the community as they were when their baked-in CA TLS certs for the add-ons expired and everyone not using $latest's add-ons got disabled. Which is to say they'll explicitly shut down the comment threads where people are discussing it over and over and then set up a non-commentable blog post where they ignore everything. And leave the problem in place to repeat in the future.
I am browsing the website on Firefox and Reader Mode does not work. Peak irony.
It looks like companies are doubling down on shitty AI bots to cut their costs even though it is backfiring terribly, like in Facebook case where they spent billions on their AI and all it did - just banned millions of their core userbase (and still banning). Looks like we will see more companies imploding because they relay to much on subpar AI.
A similar thing is going on at Amazon. Their AI is rewriting perfectly good product descriptions provided by manufacturers and I noticed that I stopped buying there, because I cannot find out what it is that I am buying or how much of it I am buying. I started shopping at sites that sell same products, but do not change manufacturers' descriptions. I have a feeling that post AI bubble we'll be doing a lot of manual cleanup of information "improved" by AI.
mozilla never had a sound business model to sustain its operation anyways, everything they do is just a stunt to make a living out of people's belief and naivety on how it operates.
it's a grift of an organization and it reflects in the simplest ways like this.
When you've seen this over and over again, you notice the pattern.
Marsf’s declaration will stand as a warning, yet not a turning point. The Japanese community will fade into quiet dignity, its pages archived and replaced by machine-rendered text that sounds correct but says nothing alive. A few veterans like Michele will remain, mending sentences by candlelight, until exhaustion or disillusion drives them away too.
Within Mozilla, the story will become legend told in conference calls - “remember when the Japanese translators quit over the bot?” Some manager will sigh, another will nod, and the project will move on. In a year, SumoBot will be improved, made less intrusive, and marketed as community-enhanced translation.
What will endure is not the bot or the bureaucracy, but that farewell note - an act of witness that proved people still care enough to walk away.
If Shakespeare wrote the final scene, it would close not on victory or defeat, but on silence: a hall of empty chairs, lit by the blue glow of screens that still translate into nothingness.
He sounded pathetic, especially "therefore I declare" that's just ridiculous.
Boss, I declare that you must remove all my code from all our products effective today, because of that coop that easily replaced my 20 years experience and I'm upset about.
Another delightfully awful Mozilla problem
> End of Japanese community
Hurray ! Finally AI is eliminating the need for junior (and, it seems from the post, also senior) developers. /s
> I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.
> I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.
It's Mozilla's data...
> explicit violation to the Mozilla mission
I'm not sure what this is referring to. I don't see any explicit violation of Mozilla.org's mission. If anything it seems consistent with that mission to provide universal translation with quick turnaround.
What actually happened? What's his complaint?
Am I taking crazy pills or is this entire thread full of some insane reaches
Going by title, I thought this is about low birth rate and accumulation of old people in Japan. Is that silly me or click-bait title.
Small meta observation: Gemini Flash 2.5 summarises this discussion as a problem with how ML was used and it's flaws, whereas Gemini Pro 2.5 emphasizes that it mainly a cultural communication problem. Both topics are here, but "fast Vs slow thought" sees different things.
It's funny how Japanese contributors often go nuclear whenever things don't go their way instead of communicating etc. Bugs happen. this is tech. open communication is always the way to go before escalation. we see the same phenomenon in git, ruby etc etc etc.
Ironically, Japanese work culture encourages over-communication. It seems that open-source is considered a counter-culture that they want to escape japanese work culture from.
When the machine automation quality became okay enough, this conflict of interest happens.
His demand of not using his existing work for AI training is nonsense. Because the entire article is stated:
> Portions of this content are ©1998–2025 by individual mozilla.org contributors. Content available under a Creative Commons license.
Didn't he agree on that?
So, this contributor revealed he doesn't understand the license his work is published under. As such, Mozilla must refuse his contribution because he don't understand the idea behind Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.
> Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
That has the same vibes as a customer support helpline that has no intention to actually help.