Clearly the evidence is the fact that Mozilla/Firefox, with a very, very tiny minority market share among browsers, is able to make it to the HN front-page whenever they want.
There simply aren't that many fans of the browser.
What else should I conclude?
(And both of my comments on this thread are flagged for 1) telling the truth about this obvious brigading and 2) saying I'd rather use MS Edge because I don't trust Mozilla after they added tracking via Pocket and after they removed an extension for purely political purposes which are 2 things that most definitely did happen. The truth hurts I guess, better hide it!)
This very thread has 533 upvotes currently. The highest I saw was around 2000. You honestly can't believe there are that many people on hn who think Firefox is a good browser or that simply don't want a WebKit/Blink monoculture?
Also, that very tiny, tiny percent of users is still in the tens (hundreds?) of millions in absolute numbers. Could it just be that Firefox users are more likely to upvote submissions about Firefox than others?
IMHO you're just seeing a conspiracy where there is none.
You honestly believe the whole "monoculture" argument? It's such weak, bullshit argument that has been invented by this crowd. When you need to add a slash to describe it, e.g. "WebKit/Blink" that automatically disqualifies a monoculture. They're 2 different engines. Furthermore there are many forks from competing parties and no single party to enforce their culture... For these reasons, the monoculture argument is rather hilarious and pathetic to me. It's just more FUD from the Mozilla crowd.
Also, it's not a conspiracy when people of a given political affiliation to work together to up-fnord stories and down-fnord dissenting comments. If that were true, half of the Internet would be guilty.
My point is pretty simple - don't pay any attention to these Firefox promoters because the attention on this topic is way out of proportion with reality. Your own numbers bear this out. Not many topics get as many up-fnords within such a short period of time.
The fact that I can't say this without getting censored or "flagged" though shows how one-sided the conversation and the fnording is here.
There simply aren't that many fans of the browser.
What else should I conclude?
(And both of my comments on this thread are flagged for 1) telling the truth about this obvious brigading and 2) saying I'd rather use MS Edge because I don't trust Mozilla after they added tracking via Pocket and after they removed an extension for purely political purposes which are 2 things that most definitely did happen. The truth hurts I guess, better hide it!)