
I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action - MindGods
https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/i_love_mdn_or_t.html
======
Timberwolf
One thing which really resonated:

"But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if
what you’re describing is always true, or just most of the time? And will you
repeat that testing once new versions have come out? Will you go through
related pages..."

This. A thousand times this. The problem for me isn't the quantity of
information any more, it's the quality. 10-15 years ago if you hit an even
slightly esoteric problem you'd bottom out a search pretty quickly and be on
your own. Now, you'll find dozens of blog articles, community answers, Reddit
threads... and unless you're very lucky they will all be wrong, from subtle
"works on my machine"-isms up to "just commit a god-rights CI token to your
repository, it'll be fine" \- the telltale sign often being nobody can tell
you _why_ this is the solution, merely that they bashed other random solutions
to related problems together until a particular combination happened to work.

Authoritative sources like MDN are vital in this context, having something you
can refer to that tells you how things _actually_ work so you can verify
whether the suggestion you or a co-worker found on a blog is a sensible
solution or the kind of horrible mess you'd expect to find alongside world-
writable S3 buckets and services that regularly time out due to being OOM
killed.

~~~
piefayth
This is tangential to your point, but it’s funny how sometimes the amount of
information on a topic can ultimately be a detriment due to the dilution of
truth over time.

I’ve been spending my free time working with an experimental library. Google
stops returning relevant results for searches on this topic around the 10th
result. While this is often infuriating and leads to countless hours deep in
indecipherable library code, it is equally likely to stumble upon an in depth
discussion among users about pros and cons of various solutions. This context
is rarely captured for mainstream tools, and when it is, those authors are
lauded for their ability to contextualize the problem.

What is most disappointing to me is how often we document “what” but not “why”
when most of us NEED the context of “why” to make comparisons across different
tools or approaches for our use cases.

------
avolcano
Rather sad the two proposals here are either "giant browser vendors should pay
for it" or "independent web developers should pay for it." It's one thing for
developers to pay for things that will develop their independent careers, but
MDN is a _reference_ as much as it is a learning resource; it's something
developers constantly use at their jobs. Their _employers_ , big or small,
should be the ones paying for it.

Of course, we all know that asking startups to actually fund open source
(whether code, documentation, or learning resources) is like pulling teeth.
I'd say maybe the collapse of some larger open source project(s) could
convince companies to start actually giving a shit about whether or not the
maintainers of the technology their entire businesses rely on have enough
money to continue developing said technology, but it's more likely the
companies would just say "well, let's put 10 engineers on this problem for a
month to replace this dead open source technology with something new and
shiny" and not recognize how much more they've had to spend. Or, y'know,
they'll go with paid support of a Microsoft product or something.

~~~
ROARosen
>MDN is a reference as much as it is a learning resource..

>Their employers, big or small, should be the ones paying for it.

Your argument is counter intuitive, if it is truly a reference, then surely
the developers themselves should pay for it.

A company hires a developer with the expectation that they know their field
(including the standards etc.). It is the developers' own concern if they
(understandably) need a reference to help them execute what they were hired
for.

~~~
dgb23
Also bring your own chair and desk while we're at it. Oh and you definitely
want to buy some toilet paper. Felix always keeps a stock on those but he
never shares.

~~~
munk-a
Don't forget to bring a bucket of water from the well every morning - yea
we've got working plumbing but that costs money and your developer salaries
are unreasonable!

------
gambler
_> Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat?_

Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually
paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate
activism or doomed web startups.

 _> Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get
members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN
or its successor._

Sounds like a decent idea, but a Patreon-style funding with different tiers
will probably yield even better results.

~~~
CarelessExpert
> Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually
> paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary,
> degenerate activism or doomed web startups.

Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving
runs into problems.

A lot of people are willing to give, so long as _they_ get to decide what is
done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no idea what it
actually takes to run a charity; they have no idea what on-the-ground problems
need to be solved day-to-day; they have absolutely zero understanding of the
organizational supports needed to make any organization function. They're
basically in the worst possible position to decide how best to use those
funds.

But they still want to decide how they're used.

This despite the fact that they're ostensibly donating to a charitable
organization specifically because that organization possesses all that
expertise; expertise that costs real money to attract and retain, since
they're ultimately competing against the private sector.

It's one of the reasons why, when I donate to a charity, I _never_ specify how
I want those funds to be used; I recognize that the charity is in a far better
position to make that decision than I am.

I feel like there's a connection to Dunning-Kreuger in here somewhere...

~~~
MattGaiser
It is not a matter of expertise, but a matter of setting priorities and
valuing projects. I value MDN and Firefox. I am fine with every other aspect
of Mozilla dying to save those two.

How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really
aligned with Mozilla as a whole.

~~~
Goronmon
_How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really
aligned with Mozilla as a whole._

Seems like you want control over the project, not to just be donating? At that
point it appears one of your main solution would be to start a project like
MDN that you can have such control over.

~~~
manquer
OP is not saying he wants decide _how_ Firefox and MDN are run per se, He is
saying we want to not be funding projects like pocket. We don't want or know
how to run MDN or firefox, but we are grateful users who would like those to
succeed and willing to contribute those projects specifically.

The concern of about management salary is very important in Mozilla important
than in a for profit entity.

Shareholders / board will react fast enough over market challenges or poor
performance in for profit companies . Many, many companies have cut _base_
salaries for management this year due look at Airbnb for example, All Mozilla
is saying variable pay will be impacted.

Given the ownership and revenue structure of Mozilla _nobody_ is in a position
to keep management of Mozilla Corporation accountable, the donors to Mozilla
Foundation donate miniscule amounts compared to what the Corporation makes in
the single search deal with Google to have any real leverage.

The deal with Google just got _renewed_ well before the lay-off's, despite the
empty words about global pandemic being a reason, there is no major impact on
their revenue ( or Google's for that matter).

~~~
boomboomsubban
>The deal with Google just got renewed well before the lay-off's, despite the
empty words about global pandemic being a reason, there is no major impact on
their revenue ( or Google's for that matter).

I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure that "our revenues stayed the same
between 2018-2023” would be seen as a failure in most companies. Not only do
costs rise every year, employment decisions are made assuming it will lead to
increased revenue.

~~~
manquer
Mozilla is not any company.

For almost any non-profit maintaining their new donations for the same level
for 5 years would be considered good performance.

Even in most aggressive startups maintaining revenues at $400-500 Million
level is likely to cause first _management change_ and rarely lay-offs of
_25%_ of the workforce.

Even if that was the reason, clearly mangement have been unable and unlikely
to that kind of growth. Firing quarter of your highly skilled workforce is not
the right approach.

Had they killed 25% of the projects and retained the best of talent from those
projects and repositioned them in other projects it would have made sense.
While as you say such highly skilled workforce has salary growth expectations,
hiring from the market is _always_ costlier in terms of absolute salary,
training, on-boarding, performance risk and finally attrition before RoI is
achieved .

~~~
boomboomsubban
>For almost any non-profit maintaining their new donations for the same level
for 5 years would be considered good performance

Donations are barely a factor here, it is not a meaningful part of their
revenue.

As you say, one year of steady revenue would cause a significant shakeup in a
company. By year three, things would look fairly dire. Mozilla has already
tried a number of other options, and are in the middle of a management change.
Eventually this becomes the only choice

------
jameslk
Google seems to be paying technical writers to build the free (growing)
alternative to MDN, [https://web.dev](https://web.dev). It's not a generalized
web resource yet like MDN, but just wait. Of course, you'll have to accept
that the documentation here will likely have a Chrome-centric view of web
development, further establishing the Chrome-only version of the web.

The loss of MDN will just result in Firefox becoming less relevant. MDN was
not just a free resource, it anchored Firefox's relevancy in the web
development world. I believe the layoffs of the MDN team is a fairly
significant strategic mistake for Mozilla.

~~~
paulirish
(I'm a googler who works closely with the web.dev team).

Google also pays technical writers to contribute to MDN which we consider to
be THE destination for reference documentation. Both Google and Microsoft have
employed multiple fulltime techwriters to contribute to MDN for the last ~7
years, I believe.

We don't consider web.dev to be an alternative to MDN. web.dev doesn't do
reference documentation, but rather guides, tutorials, and news. web.dev is
developed by the Web DevRel team and you can be sure that everyone working on
Web DevRel and Chrome knows the fundamental importance of a diverse browser
ecosystem. If there's anything we can do to make web.dev more inclusive, we'd
love to hear it.

~~~
jameslk
I have my doubts that MDN will be able to keep receiving the same level of
updates with these layoffs. I'd hope they would, but that doesn't seem logical
unless either contributions increase from outisde somehow (e.g. Google and
Microsoft decides to add more writers for MDN), or GPT-3 starts generating
those docs.

Now if MDN starts becoming outdated, someone else will fill that void.
W3Schools maybe (nobody wants this), but it seems like a better opportunity
for Google to swoop in and lead, to further solidify their domination in the
browser space. Cynical sounding to you I'm sure, but that seems logical to me
from a homo economicus business stance. I'd be happy to hear I'm missing
something or wrong in some way so this doesn't happen, since after all,
competition is great.

------
bccdee
> I Love MDN hinges on the expectation on the part of web developers that this
> sort of information ought to come for free — the expectation we’re entitled
> to this sort of free ride.

I think people _should_ be entitled to a free ride.

Important infrastructure can, paradoxically, be both free and expensive. We've
committed, for instance, to spending a whole lot of money on maintaining all
of our roads, but access to the street is still free for everyday pedestrians.

Not everyone can afford to pay to use the road. If you want to get a job,
often you'll need to drive to and from work for a good while before you'll
have enough cash built up to meaningfully contribute to the road through your
taxes. Of course, wealthy people wind up paying more, but often times they
wouldn't have ever become wealthy if roads hadn't originally been available to
them for free. Important infrastructure can be free for individuals when our
society makes a commitment to collectively paying for it.

MDN is an extremely important resource to beginner devs -- the exact people
who would have trouble paying to support it. But supporting beginner devs is
good for both the industry and the economy. Important public or open-source
infrastructure such as MDN and Wikipedia should receive public grant money. We
already do this with research grants for science, because there's a strong
understanding that making research available for free makes society better.
Informational infrastructure deserves the same consideration.

~~~
PenguinCoder
>street is still free for everyday pedestrians

No it's not. Taxes pay for this. Business taxes, property taxes, local taxes,
gas tax, etc. It is decisively not free for pedestrians or commuters.

~~~
acdha
The three words you stripped out before that part of the quote address this:
“access to the street”. With those, you are just echoing the poster's point
that we use taxes to pay for common goods.

------
mekoka
I think I understand the sentiment behind this post. But a few things give me
pause:

> Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat?

I've seen some open-source authors/contributors successfully raise enough
money, after they'd pledged to work on their project full-time. So the problem
might not necessarily be to raise. But money has this uncanny ability to shift
a project's focus. What happens when you raise more money than you actually
need for the next 3 years (considering the scope of the project)? Will the
project just mention that it doesn't need to raise more and just proceed to do
what it's supposed to do? All the while spending and raising sensibly? Or will
it find novel and creative ways to spend all this extra cash?

> The problem with expecting volunteers to do this sort of work is that they
> burn out.

Should we assume that once someone gets a salary they're somehow more
resilient to burnout? I'd think that the burnout would be due to a volunteer
biting much more than they should. So couldn't this also be an issue of work
management and allocation?

> The passionate community has nothing to do with anything, unless they’re
> willing to pay. A profoundly unscientific poll indicates that only about
> two-thirds of my responding followers are willing to do so.

Is paying the only way to have helpful resources? I mean, we have the
Wikipedia and StackExchange models that seem to provide decent value, even if
not on par with MDN's standard. Would it be possible to have a model for MDN
that meets somewhere in the middle, such as community contributed contents,
moderated, reviewed, and edited by both community and full-time,
knowledgeable, and paid staff? Unless I'm mistaken, I think the Linux kernel
also follows something similar.

------
divbzero
Should roads be free to drive on? Clean water, primary education, or
firefighting be free for public use?

I don’t think there are black or white answers to these questions. There are
toll roads and freeways, for-profit but regulated water utilities, “free”
education and firefighting funded through taxes. But all of these, like MDN,
are public goods [1] where some pooling of resources makes sense. It’s not so
much wanting them to be free as it is wanting shared low cost options.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_\(economics\))

------
yarrel
"The co-signers unthinkingly assume they are entitled to free content."

Oh sweetie, no.

I feel entitled to Mozilla's management being competent and not killing the
company.

Appealing to developers is a precondition for that.

MDN does that.

But there are free alternatives. So charging for it would be counter-
productive.

If Mozilla had shown even trace amounts of competence at business development,
rather than acting like a freshly-minted MBA parachuted into a university's
administration, I might be more sympathetic.

As it is I've formed a partnership with a violin manufacturer. Mozilla won't
see any money from it but we're going to play them a very profitable-sounding
sad tune as soon as we recover our initial investment.

------
627467
In my head the question is: can a wikipedia-style MDN exist? If the answer is
yes than I think op opinion is only on one type of model of organizing and
funding a documentation site.

Will a wikipedia-style MDN be successful if there are (in addition of
volunteers) paid writers who cover the majority of the work need? Maybe not.
Maybe that's what the existing MDN proves.

~~~
seabrookmx
It already is a wiki. You can contribute right now if you wanted..

~~~
627467
Wikipedia model goes beyond being a wiki. Wikipedia does not pay for content
on itself. So they have no direct vested interest in the content.

That is not the model of MDN, it seems.

------
phantom_oracle
> It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous
> health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs.

> If not, this is all about making you feel better,...

These 2 statements here reflect this weird behavior I have seen in certain
countries like the UK where everyone will say things like "we <3 the NHS" or
"protect the NHS" during the pandemic, but on the other end either the
government or the proletariat or both will be unhappy to expand funding of the
NHS.

At times this behavior feels a bit cult-like and I also think that the
dopamine-effects are meant more for those giving the applause.

------
oliwarner
I don't think shitting on others' praise for MDN makes anything about this
better.

Yes, it's an initiative that needs money. Maybe this will enthuse somebody up
high to reconsider, or somebody else to take the torch and run with it.

But even if it doesn't, a bit of recognition is _nice_. These are humans and
even though it doesn't pay the bills, it might help somebody not feel they're
as worthless as Mozilla imply.

Stop dumping on these projects because you're all sourpuss about "free".
You're only adding to the hurt.

------
jermier
> Cult of the free

This is poorly chosen language as it doesn't distinguish between freedom
versus monetization.

I think most users of free software know it's 'free as in freedom' and they
are not being duped.

I think most users of free services are duped into thinking it is actually
free and are unaware their data is being sold and monetized and are paying for
the service with their data. Lately more people are waking up to that fact
though. I don't mean services like MDN, just things like Facebook, Google etc

~~~
benmller313
I don't think the value in MDN is developers data so much as it's about
controlling the defacto standards of Web Development.

~~~
jermier
I was referring to the phrase 'cult of the free' which is poorly chosen
language as it doesn't distinguish between freedom versus monetization.

------
yencabulator
1\. The idea that these standards need third-party write-ups for basic
reference (not tutorial) use boggles my mind. Why is the main standard so
unusable that we can't rely on _it_ to explain what a form element is. The web
"standards" have a history of this. It's a self-caused problem -- fix the
problem, don't paper over it.

2\. A lot of this complaint seems to be about needing to repeat manual browser
testing regularly. Why is it manual?

3\. The web is a bloated, overcomplex, platform with hundreds of talented
people full time employed to make it more complex every day. Since it seems
HTML+CSS+Javascript cannot be contained inside any line drawn, can we figure
out something like a WASM + son-of-DOM simpler reboot that throws out as much
of this complexity as possible? As in, stop using the existing HTML tags and
default CSS, let the app define new ones along the lines of WebComponents, and
make the DOM be just a rendering engine to get things like universal text
selection and copy-paste (as opposed to everything just blitting to a canvas
and reimplementing that). Of course I'm oversimplifying -- but I really think
the world needs an old school "hourglass figure architecture" here to limit
this feature creep.

------
wdb
Says the man that forced its students to buy his book, if you didn't he would
fail your class while not using the book at all in class

~~~
hyperrail
Strong claim. Do you have a source for it?

------
marcinzm
>But will we be well served by that in the long run?

Mozilla brought in $3.25 BILLION in revenue over the last 10 years. If they'd
saved/invested a majority of it then they could go for decades without any
further revenue. The business model was sound if they didn't decide to waste
money.

~~~
munk-a
Wasn't their business model mostly "We hope that Google keeps subsidizing us
for no apparent reason?"

~~~
pwdisswordfish0
The payouts are neither "subsidizing" nor "for no apparent reason". Do you
think the Mozilla–Yahoo deal was also an act of charity? It's baffling that
people think that the arrangement between Mozilla and Google is unique. Google
is paying royalties to Mozilla for driving attention to Google properties,
just like they do with their other partners who aren't named "Mozilla".

------
zelly
ArchWiki[1] is a counterexample to the notion that the community cannot write
good technical documentation. It is actually much better written and more
thorough than MDN, but it's also concerning a topic that attracts many
hobbyists. To be fair, web dev is not something many people do without being
paid, as opposed to tinkering with Linux, so the talent pool may be smaller.

Also, the W3C and ECMA standards documents are all free and are more
authoritative references than any wiki. It would be interesting to see if a
language model e.g. GPT-3 could translate the standardese into something more
readable to laymen.

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/](https://wiki.archlinux.org/)

~~~
potatoz2
ArchWiki is a good counterexample (so is Wikipedia I guess), but the W3C and
ECMA specs are not: they document what ought to happen and are geared towards
implementation, not what actually happens in practice or how to build a mental
model about what happens.

------
egsec
I think a good parallel is OWASP for web app security. The content is free and
open for the internet. OWASP doesn't directly focus on curating the content
and it is left up to the community. The content grows old and stale, errors do
not get corrected, and the writing is often what I would call draft quality
even when its published.

There are always a lot more consumers than creators of content on any
platform. Most people going to use a resource are not the same who can write
about it, not everyone on YouTube has something to share or make a video. And
why give it away for free when you can make a paid course, give a talk, charge
consulting fees, sell a solution to a problem?

You need to align incentives. Again, why contribute to something and possibly
deal with the pain of moderation for free (costs instead of gain). Should we
blindly trust the wisdom of the crowds? The other cost of free, is that the
community may not be capable or not interested in sufficient moderation - this
leads to low quality content which chases people away, even if there is good
content right next to it.

OWASP's incentives and objectives have never been 100% clear to me. There are
some big security players involved, but it seems more interested in research,
community, grants, etc versus content. When you look at MDN, Mozilla has a
clear incentive to document these things so developers build more "standard"
vs "Chrome-focused" web apps, which helps keep users on FireFox since all of
their favorite sites are less likely to break without FireFox simply copying
decision made by Chrome. By documenting expected action and quirks, it forces
Google et al. to try to move back towards agreed upon standards.

In security, I am generally more reliant upon vendor write ups and content
from people with a reputation. Security has a much smaller population than web
dev. Also, for web dev a lot of people pick it up and feel comfortable writing
publicly even when they are just starting out (See Dev.To). I am not sure if
companies pump millions of dollars into commercial web tools beyond graphics
and CMS type stuff, so I wonder if a more decentralized collection of guidance
is practical for the web, not to mention that there is a lot of nuance between
browsers and even recent versions.

------
lapcatsoftware
I think the fundamental problem is that the web has no clear organizational
structure. Although the internet itself is decentralized, it has a fairly
clear organization structure, where each part of the internet has ownership,
and there are explicit relationships, and expectations, and modes of
cooperation between the various parties.

In the past, the W3C was at least nominally "in charge" of the web. They were
the natural providers of documentation. But then 2 big things happened: (1)
vehement disagreement between the W3C and the browser vendors over the
successor to HTML4, and (2) the "mobile revolution", which changed the
landscape of the whole tech industry.

To a significant extent, W3C has been sidelined by WHATWG. So now, WHATWG
would be the natural providers of documentation for the web. However, WHATWG
is dominated by Google/Apple/Microsoft, and nobody really trusts those BigCos
to run the web, even if they do actually run the web by virtue of their market
share dominance. And each of those BigCos has their own agenda which is not
necessarily beneficial for the open web.

Thus, we're left with a leadership vacuum. We can try to "crowdsource"
documentation, but that ultimately seems doomed to failure IMO, as most
crowdsourcing efforts are. (The well known "tragedy of the commons".) I don't
have a solution to these problems myself, to be sure. Sorry! I do agree that
the solution needs to be permanent organizational funding of professional
writers, but I don't know who that organization should be.

~~~
gowld
> think the fundamental problem is that the web has no clear organizational
> structure.

think the fundamental problem is that the _Universe_ has no clear
organizational structure.

We have to make it up as we go a long. Even a national government was simply
made up by some people and enforced by the use of force, the only law of
nature.

~~~
lapcatsoftware
Sure, but that only works if a critical mass of people rally behind specific
leadership. Millions of individuals acting independently is just chaos. So the
question is, which web organization should we rally behind? WHATWG? Well, ok,
but... ugh.

------
dmix
> I find I Love MDN demeaning to technical writers. It reminds me of breaking
> into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of
> funding them properly so they can do their jobs.

Not surprising this is prevalent. This sort of ‘artificial positive feedback
and positive thinking helps solves problems’ was rampant in schools.

Not to mention social media significantly selects for performative behaviour
over tangible and measurable support.

------
Communitivity
I'd pay $50/year to keep MDN afloat and current, though would prefer $24 ($2
per month). I think Patreon is an excellent idea.

Perhaps a combination: Patreon for continuous funding and development;
kickstarter for specific big features/releases (e.g., resurrecting Places and
implementing it in Servo).

Also, has anyone archived MDN, in case they pull the plug on it unexpectedly
now the team is gone?

------
gregors
I'd suggest that successful monetization strategy has already been
accomplished at w3schools. Is it pretty? No. How about Stackoverflow? Prettier
and that seems to work ok too.

Looks like MDN was on mediawiki at some point. It worked fine then too.

Who pays for Wikipedia? Who pays for NPR? People do use fundraisers from time
to time.

Where are all the Universities in this? Should they have a roll in any of
this? Seems like all the Ivy League places could donate? Maybe they already
do.

I suggest that if the management team at Mozilla were actually good at their
jobs maybe MDN would already me profitable. I'd also suggest that it's in
browser manufacturer's interest to provide documentation. If MDN disappears
something will fill that void. Maybe it's time for a change.

If all else fails, just slap everything into a man page.

------
renewiltord
Interesting. So the browser-compatibility section is not crowd-sourceable. I
never read it, though. It does appear that there is no incentive for a browser
engine to report that they are incompatible with something, only that they are
compatible with something, but perhaps doing the latter implicitly implies
through omission those for whom they are incompatible so that degenerates to
"browser vendors will not report compatibility".

So be it. I think the rest is standards translation plus examples.

For this sort of thing, content isn't king, content is pawn. Back to w3schools
or whatever, I suppose. Not the end of the world.

I think if it came to it, this could be BountySourced (or whatever the
acceptable solution is now) and just suck up the fact that we won't have
compatibility. With Evergreen browsers that's a moving target anyway.

------
agentultra
I feel like this also speaks to the wider trend in OSS. Businesses in many
(the majority of?) and their programmers have come to expect free compilers,
developer tools, libraries, security patches... and documentation and all that
entails.

"Open source," projects that are well funded appear "free," which seems to
distort perceptions and opinions.

Maintaining good documentation, like maintaining libraries, and good compilers
takes a lot of on going effort. This creates value and deserves compensation.

If not corporate sponsors, if not a patreon style model, what else can we do?
Does everyone on the web contribute a little bit through volume collective
licensing when you buy a domain or host a server or from profits of commercial
entities on the web platform?

~~~
eulenteufel
The EU could probably spare a dime on Firefox and MDN, the US and other big
nations too. I find public infrastructure of the internet is something I
wouldn't mind my taxes being spent on.

Of course this opens another bag of problems of how to decide on which
projects to finance how much or unwanted govermental influence on the
projects. But I would still say it is a realistic alternative to corporate
sponsors and patreon style funding.

------
Santosh83
The wider community taking over maintaining MDN _ought_ to be at least more
feasible compared to say forking Firefox and keeping up with Chrome, which is
a non-starter.

I don't think we can rely on Google or Microsoft caring for MDN in the future.
They may do so for a while, but will inevitably let it languish or turn it
into something that heavily promotes their own visions.

At the very least given the high traffic it ought to be getting, the current
maintainers can try monetising it with non-invasive and contextual ads.

------
jermier
It would be cool if MDN had a Stack Overflow question-and-answer style format
alongside the main offering. Then Mozilla could take advantage of the
gamification model where users earn badges and awards for their efforts.

Jeff Atwood said it once: `If you put a number next to someone's name, then
that person will try everything to increase that number`. Also: it would look
good on CVs and would be a good heuristic to determine if a person's really
fit for a position.

~~~
superficialnerd
> If you put a number next to someone's name, then that person will try
> everything to increase that number

Damn true!

------
commandlinefan
> If you deny these skills exist by pretending anyone can do it, you’re
> demeaning the people who have actually taken the time and trouble to build
> up those skills.

See also: programming.

------
simonebrunozzi
MDN = Mozilla Developer Network. Most people wouldn't know what this is about.
Tell them at the beginning of every web page.

------
manquer
I find the premise technical writing is under appreciated or is only a
professional skill little odd.

Wikipedia and StackOverflow have proved that technical writing can be done by
community and crowd sourced effectively with active _moderation_.

This model has and can work, even independent sites like caniuse.com have been
able to good quality content and are used widely.

~~~
muricula
The community can do an okay job but not a great one. The writing on Wikipedia
is shoddy and inconsistent, and there are many many missing sources even if
the article is accurate. I'm a huge fan though!

Similarly, many stack overflow questions are out of date, and good luck
getting them updated to reflect current best practices. And if you do ask the
same question again trying to resurface a newer, better way to do something it
will almost certainly be closed as a duplicate. Huge fan of the resource
though.

Ultimately, experienced professionals who are paid full time to be both
writers and technologists can do a better job, especially over a long period
of time.

~~~
manquer
I am not sure dedicated full time employees can do better job as _whole_ , on
a single person level a professional developer, encyclopedist or writer will
outperform even the best amateurs sure, but as a community many open source
projects ( documentation or applications) have outperformed professional ones
many times.

PostgreSQL is a good example, it fantastic documentation and runs on mostly
volunteer work the documentation is on par (IMHO better) to say Oracle/ MSSQL/
DB2 documentation which have paid professional writers behind it for example

Quality is more a function of editorial oversight rather than nature of
contributions itself.

SO and wikipedia has both been effective partly because of stricter review
process ( reason their brands are trusted) and also have been criticized for
it, getting the balance right is not easy.

Sub-reddits are good way to study this, there are ones which emphasize on
participation over quality and vice versa, i.e. optimize for the reader or the
writer.

There are no perfect solution, and communities must keep changing, early on
contributions are more important i.e. quantity, as the site and brand grows
large quality is more important (SO and wiki both went through this
lifecycle).

MDN has very different starting point - strong brand and content quality but
no contributing community. They will have to come with something that fits
their unique needs.

------
nojvek
I would pay for MDN. Their docs are really well done. I've used css-type
package, which is autogenerated from the mdn json docs. It makes the
development wonderful, no AI can match that. How do I put my money into the
MDN fund, so it doesn't go to that a-hole CEO who gets million dollars of
salary?

------
rammy1234
Developers and Employers who are not ready to pay for these sites like MDN are
part of the problem. No Argument here.

~~~
elric
Would you care to argument your case anyway? Your statement seems very black &
white. Not every developer has cash to spare, especially those just starting
out who might need resources like this the most. Same goes for companies that
are just getting started.

------
elric
This is probably somewhat outside of the scope of the Core Infrastructure
Initiative [1], but maybe that just means we need an organization of a similar
nature for projects like this?

[1] [https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/](https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/)

------
garrison
It sounds like MDN could benefit from being the work of a 501(c)(6) business
league, which is how the Linux Foundation's work is funded. Money could
initially come from the big existing browser vendors. It is in everyone's
interest to see it continue.

------
rammy1234
What you mean by donation or contributing to the projects you are using. This
site says that well.

[https://sigil-ebook.com/donate/](https://sigil-ebook.com/donate/)

------
adreamingsoul
I'd happily pay a yearly fee to continue employing technical writers,
engineers, and anyone else needed to keep MDN the reliable, source-of-truth,
ad-free resource that it is today.

------
bosswipe
Could you slap some ads on MDN and fund it that way?

------
vertbhrtn
What's exactly difficult in running the MDN? It's just a bunch of makrdown
files contributed to by folks on payroll from Google and co. The content can
be hosted on github and served via github pages. This looks like a $25/year
operation to me (total, not from each MDN user). The real value comes from
those folks on payroll who update MDN, but the big tech is already willing to
pay for that.

------
fefe23
Whatever are you talking about? Cult of the free? Are you kidding me?

I did pay for MDN. Google monetized my personal data and gave some of that
money to Mozilla.

I paid for MDN. Not with money, but same difference. Mozilla got money.

Now if you want to complain about Mozilla not spending that money on MDN but
relying on crowdsourcing, then be my guest. I don't have enough insight into
who go paid what at Mozilla to comment on that.

But please stop the "cult of the free" b/s. Just because there is no paywall
in front of it does not mean it wasn't paid for.

------
jonas21
Defunding MDN seems like an enormous strategic blunder on Mozilla's part. Its
existence and popularity help ensure that developers are writing to the
standard, and not just Chrome's implementation of the standard.

This is good for everybody, but _in particular_ for Mozilla because it reduces
the chance that people will write things that work on Chrome but not Firefox
and then just call it a day.

------
skybrian
I think there may be interesting alternatives. If you want everyone to pay
their share then you're basically proposing a paywalled site. But is it
necessary? A much smaller community with some combination of volunteers and
funding could make a site for everyone. (One person is too small, obviously,
since they'll burn out.)

But I do think this article hits on something important, which is the
difference between activism devoted towards demanding things of others, versus
activism devoted to creating an organization to actually do some work.

It seems like it would be quite possible (though there is a lot of work
involved) for someone to create an independent organization that just works on
MDN? You don't anyone else's permission. There are various volunteer groups
that decide to fix various things on Wikipedia, without having any intention
of running Wikipedia.

But someone needs to lead. Who will bell the cat? [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat)

------
aazaa
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention W3Schools, because that's another
model that has existed in parallel with, and may actually predate MDN.

It has incredible Google juice, seems to be as resilient as an army of
cockroaches, and is about as pretty.

Still, it's another path this could take.

~~~
jermier
[https://www.w3fools.com/](https://www.w3fools.com/)

------
soapdog
I wonder how many web developers in this thread, many who are quite certain
how things should be run, have ever actually contributed articles to MDN...

Everyone is an armchair director, very few actually contribute to such
projects.

~~~
manquer
I would bet that most people on this thread have answered few stack overflow
questions freely. Plenty of people contribute to Wikipedia , If I see simple
mistakes in a project wiki or readme people submit the pull request because
github makes it easy to do.

It is matter of UX and openness towards contribution. MDN never felt like it
needed my contribution, not once I thought that a) I could actually add value
b) my contributions were welcome. Until a couple of days back I and many
others did not know even that MDN took wiki style contributions.

------
dimitrios1
> You’re part of the problem, not the solution.

I hate this faulty line of reasoning. It's a false dichotomy. You cannot
simultaneously be either part of all the world's problems and/or solutions.

------
punnerud
MDM = Mozilla Developer Network

------
mola
There's a third option, which is Taboo in the US.

~~~
mjw1007
You're not being terribly clear. Do you mean to fund things like this from
taxes, like (say) CERN or NASA?

