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A comment on How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news feed than Facebook. Parent comment

Re:How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news... by class4behavior on Saturday June 16, 2018 @07:46PM (#17330124)
You've explained where Facebook's likely interest lies, but not why that feature is actually popular.

I don't see any difference with how HN and Reddit attract people. They all seek the added social aspect to reading news; and Facebook is just what people know.

>Apologies for being cynical, but I'm not surprised.

Luckily cynicism doesn't equal realism. FF devs often make data-driven decisions, and none of the devs showed interest fixing all the accumulated bugs. So they left this to matter to add-ons, the big button was eventually stored away and the one in the address bar abandoned for Pocket. No sneaky marketing strategies involved.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news... by Techonomicon on Saturday June 16, 2018 @08:38PM (#17330302)
Reddit and hn are quite different in the sense that HN actively (allegedly) attempts to fight against clickbait / mislabeled titles where resdit (in general) leaves that up to the subreddits to manage which (in general) do nothing.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news... by class4behavior on Sunday June 17, 2018 @07:33AM (#17331929)
Indeed, but it's the same concept, just different target groups.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news... by xg15 on Sunday June 17, 2018 @03:53AM (#17331365)
What was the data-driven decision in that case? You mean they looked at plugin usage stats and realized Pocket had more usage than the built-in RSS feature?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news... by class4behavior on Sunday June 17, 2018 @07:32AM (#17331924)
>What was the data-driven decision in that case?

That based on telemetry data the RSS feature was barely used in general. I haven't seen any commentary that suggests any relation with their support for Pocket.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news... by shock on Sunday June 17, 2018 @08:20AM (#17332064)
Is it surprising people don't use a feature they don't know exists? This is a catch-22 problem.

I would very much like to see a banner at the bottom of the new tab page introducing RSS and how it can be used, similarly to how Mozilla did for Firefox Sync.

[ Parent | on HN ]