I am fascinated by the nuanced opinions people have about word choice. What phrase would you use to ask someone to discuss a matter, but which you feel would be more appropriate for this kind of situation?

My guess would be the anger comes from implication that is a possible solution at all. This type of “hop on a call” request is not usually actually designed to “truly understand what you're struggling with.” (words from the post)

Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.

This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.

'I'm sorry for how you feel' is in the same class as 'I'm sorry if my words hurt you'. They are both classes of non-apologies.

'I'm sorry that our actions caused such distress' come a bit closer to being a true apology.

Importantly, 'if' was changed to 'that'.

'We're sorry you feel this way' implies that this is the fault of the person that feels that way, not of the party that made them feel that way. Given the very clear message this was entirely uncalled for. This is not the kind of feeling that goes away by being talked down to like that, it might go away after a reversal of a very bad policy decision and a very sincere apology about a mistake that was made and even then the damage is severe enough that I would not be surprised if the person that was slighted decided to stick to their decision.

It’s really not a word choice thing (though it’s definitely the favorite word choice of orgs who are committed to not doing anything about it).

It’s that the complaint is descriptive on 5 or so actual problems and a couple of impacts that stem from them and the response doesn’t address any of them, it just looks like an attempt to take this issue out of the public space.

"I'm sorry for how you feel about it" isn't exactly an empathetic opening stance

The right thing to do is undo what you did and then ask to talk about it. There is nothing the person can say to make up for the destructive effects they took.

> What phrase would you use to ask someone to discuss a matter, but which you feel would be more appropriate for this kind of situation?

The only thing to ask for here are some clarifications and expanded explanations so that the original text does not get misunderstood. If the Mozilla representative does see such potential points he can perfectly ask for them publicly.

Asking someone to "hop on a call" is phrasing you use with someone you are close with, not someone whose work you've just destroyed and is no longer interested in a relationship with you.

The fact that the preceding apology was absolutely awful does not help. "I'm sorry for how you feel" is wrong, since nobody asked them to react to "feelings" but the clearly delineated problems with the automation that Mozilla rolled out.

Asking to discuss something like this over synchronous voice comms is basically asking to go off the record and handle things privately. Sometimes that's appropriate, but if that's what the correspondant wanted they would have asked for it.

These three things combine to tell anyone who is paying attention that this is damage control, not meaningful engagement, and it's offensive to act this way toward someone who has put this much time into your project.

I mean, almost anything would be better. But here's my swing:

  > I'm so sorry about this. We definitely screwed up here and want to
  > fix things. We want to chat to you in a call if you're able?
  > We will stop changing things, issue a moratorium on AI while we
  > figure things out. You and communities like yours are central to
  > our entire existence and purpose at Mozilla.

There is nothing you can do, because you already traded away the community for your AI project and money. The same corpo goons who don't see anything past their slop projects are the one who use the "jump on a quick call" lingo

After you fuck up and before you ask to discuss the matter, you APOLOGIZE!