Instead of coming on here and addressing the issue, he tweeted this instead:
Thanks for the tag. Looks like the author's core issue is (understandably) with the construction of the system itself. I'm not sure what I can do here other than listen and reiterate that we are trying to work to address these issues.
But the situation only appears to be getting worse and no one at Google appears to care enough to do anything about it.
I have an extension that is once again in rejection form mail purgatory and it makes me want to take my extensions off of the Google Chrome Web Store as well.
There are only a handful of extensions that are deal breakers (the lack of which would send users to other browsers). uBlock Origin, for example. All the others can fuck right off.
Google have already given notice that they are killing uBlock Origin. Manifest v3 will eliminate the ability to have your own adblocker. In its place will be the ability for an extensions to provide an interface to a built in functionality that is deliberately gimped.
Adblock addons will be drastically limited in functionality, must bundle the block list with the addon, can't update the list outside of updating the addon, are limited to a fraction of the size of existing block lists.
This will end the arms race in favor of ads vs blockers by ensuring that ad blockers can't win while pretending its not ending adblocking.
I finally stopped using chrome and thanks to Brave, I can use almost all the extensions that I still am used to, since all of them are compatible with Brave.
I think the parents comment's argument is that since it's based on chromium it also can eventually be forced to acquiesce, so any chromium-based browser is just a stop gap solution.
Chromium is Open Source, Google can
t force Brave or MS or anyone else to do anything they don't want to. Google can make their life difficult, leading to a fork, but they can't force anything beyond that.
With all that said- I still prefer Firefox and think it is the best choice right now for the Web.
The difference in scale of effort and money/time of being downstream vs a fork makes it at least possible that they would do no such thing. I personally think it would be extremely unlikely they would fork it.
In theory. In practice, Manifest v3 (the changes to adblockers) will be implemented at the C++ level, meaning you'd need to fork Chromium in order to avoid it. I would be surprised if Brave even had the engineering power to do that. Microsoft perhaps, but I doubt they actually will.
Using AI to suggest a reply or to use human approval seems like a low risk approach.
Would you feel dead inside if your tool helped developers keep their projects online? Sounds rewarding to fight the big guy and keep cool projects online.
Somehow I expect that using a bot against their bot violates user TOS part #63836370 section YQ, and they will immediately lock your accounts, associated business accounts, delete the data and offer zero recourse.
It’s pretty apparent that they think people who don’t work for google are vastly inferior human beings. It honestly runs counter to their “social justice” facade.
I really think this is unreasonable. Even at google there are different subcultures, including many with an anti-corporate streak. Furthermore I’m not going to blame an employee for not sticking out their neck for client businesses who also don’t give a shit about them. This isn’t a problem of individual providence.
Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.
> Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.
The problem is not mainly with how Google treats their employees (though there's definitely something wrong there), but with how they treat their customers.
I was referring to the use of a union to give employees say about the products they make. They provide collective leverage far more broadly than in the negotiation of work conditions and compensation and can negotiate directly with the board, who would normally go to great lengths to avoid speaking to their own employees (in my experience).
Hell, I’ve met more investors footing my salary than board members per se, and they definitely have zero interest in employee negotiations—that’s what management is for.
An anecdote: I was running my bootstraped company with 5 employees when in 2013 I suddenly started getting Google recruiting emails about once every 4 days. They wanted me for a "role" of a SRE, probably because I asked stack overflow sysadmin questions. I never responded.
> Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.
I'm pretty pro-union in general but I don't follow your reasoning. Cops are unionized, and when they murder innocent civilians in broad daylight, the unions are right behind to pay for their legal defense. Unions don't bring reason to a workforce; they merely represent that workforce.
I’m not arguing either. But dude, google? Google!? Its business is selling ads for corporations. A google software engineer can get a job at countless places including nonprofits sometimes making close to google money, but even if they made half that income they would be living more comfortably than 3/4s of the US.
Anti corporate soapbox or google job, please just pick one.
I just created a Google Voice account for the first time. A few hours later I asked 3 different friends to send me a text message to see if it worked. I didn't get any of them or any warning that it takes time for the number to activate.
I tried again the next day, same results. That was 4-5 days ago, and still nothing. I'm abandoning Google Voice because I assume Google has abandoned it. It's not like there's anyone I can ask.
This is just an inconvenience to me. I can't imagine what it's like to have a service I actually rely on and then lose it.
Google is a proverbial a jack of all trades, master of none.
If you need to depend of them for a specific service, don't. Go with an actual business that cares and have the focus on what's important, and more importantly a customer service that listens.
I went with a dedicated VoIP provider, and the service has been excellent
Can you suggest an alternative to Voice? I need SMS and voice, and prefer data being optional (Voice can forward to a dumbphone, or even a landline). Happy to pay, just haven't found an obvious direct competitor.
I like the Unlisted app https://www.unlistedapp.com I got it a few years ago and haven't had any problems. I think it might be iOS only. There are plenty of other burner phone number apps which work on both Android and iOS.
Thanks for using and recommending Unlisted! We added an Android version last year and both apps are under active development. I'm happy to answer any questions (or receive feedback about what we could do better) - erik@unlistedapp.com
Perhaps I'm missing your actual requirements (based on what's been suggested below), but I've been using voip.ms for years now. They support voice and SMS, and even my bank's SMS "2FA" works with them now. They don't support MMS, however (though you may have meant that when you said SMS).
SMS is available as a FLOSS app (I use the F-Droid voip.ms app), or through another portal - able to be sent/received through email, another number, or a web interface.
I honestly have only good things to say about them (despite being a consumer of their seemingly B2B product). As a disclaimer, I don't work for them, have no affiliation with them, and made a point of not using any kind of referral link.
It's getting more common, too. Just the other day I found out that posting links in a youtube comment makes the comment invisible to everyone else. In hindsight, disallowing links is almost certainly a good policy and it's easy to understand and appreciate why it was put in place, but why the gaslighting? Just pop up a box explaining that links aren't allowed. The gaslighting isn't going to fool spammers for long enough to be a meaningful deterrent, but it is going to trip up legitimate users enough to meaningfully degrade their experience.
Time to visit my bitwarden and port another account off gmail (my late new-years resolution is to port an account off gmail every time I get myself worked up about something google did -- funnel the useless frustration into something worthwhile.)
gaslighting also doesn't mean lying, or cheating, or fraud. it involves some of these things, but that doesn't mean that all hiding and lying is gaslighting. to quote wiktionary:
To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance. The verb sense derives from the 1938 stage play Gas Light, in which a husband attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment.
in what way does hiding one's post cause them to "question their own memory, perception and sanity"?
>To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance.
I suspect a lot of people caught up in "shadow bans" already have a tenuous grip on reality in the first place. What a disgusting, mean spirited and wholly pointless thing for them to be engaged in. Why couldn't they just tell said individuals they've been auto moderated or banned? It's not like it will result in additional support being required - Google already make a point of ignoring their users.
while this is arguably true, it has nothing to do with the misappropriation of the original word. something can be terrible and yet not justify using words commonly agreed to mean different things. it reminds me of the recent trend to use "assault" when referring to all types of harassment, regardless of whether physical violence was carried out or even implied. you can argue that shadow banning is bad, but if you go say that it's "literally raping their identity" or something like that then you just sound like an idiot.
They invented the term shadow banning because "gas lighting" has very negative connotations.
Shadow banning is 100% a form of gas lighting, and IMO should be considered just as unethical. If you are going to ban someone, words, or actions be upfront and clear about the rules and bans
Shadow banning is a form of gaslighting because users expect their comments to be seen and responded to, however they are invisible. This is confusing and an abusive practice.
I have had hn accounts shadowbanned without explanation or opportunity for appeal (I did try and was ignored) and largely stopped participating here because of that.
It's completely fair to stop participating as a result.
That said, I'm sympathetic to the idea that in small communities admin time is at a premium and gaslighting, even if it's occasionally abused, is a force-multiplier that can make the difference between a community having enough moderation to survive vs spinning off into toxicity and turning into a ghost town.
What I object to is that it seems to increasingly be used as a "best practice," to be applied universally without weighing pros and cons, rather than as a shitty reality to be applied minimally. For instance, in the case of youtube, we can place a very low upper bound on the value they're getting out of this tool, because it's being used to enforce an automated blanket policy that everyone already knows about (certainly everyone intent on link spamming, in any case). HN's shadowbanning is going to be good or evil on a per-instance basis, which makes it difficult for me to judge, while youtube's shadowbanning (as it relates to enforcing obvious automated blanket policies) cannot be good and is therefore much easier to judge.
Voice was a really frustrating product for me because it was so clearly years ahead of its time and also ignored by Google for so long that everyone else caught up and passed them.
In 2010 I was able to have one number ring multiple phones, automatic transcription of voicemail, text people from a web browser (!), switch between network providers without having to deal with number porting, it was great.
What killed it for me was that MMS was silently dropped, no images, but worse group SMS was handled by MMS so if people added you to group chats you just wouldn't get any of the messages and they would have no indication that you weren't getting them.
This went unsolved for years.
Eventually iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook - basically everyone else took this market. Then Google started some anemic work on it again, along the way making and killing a bunch of other chat products that all sucked in different ways.
Along with google plus and cloud, this is probably one of their biggest strategic failures.
The odd thing is that they can't even make a cost argument for this. If they charged a cost recovery fee for human redress of these sorts of issues, it would not cost them anything, and that's assuming they don't lose money from improper automated enforcement, which they almost certainly do.
What would your brilliant regulation entail? Forcing companies to publish software for free when their automated systems think it's malware?
Could you even summarize a piece of legislation that doesn't amount to "describe Google, then make everything that annoys us about Google illegal for companies fitting that description"?
Apply anti-trust law as is currently written for starters. Standard Oil and Ma Bell were split for less egregious offenses than we've seen from Alphabet/Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
In Standard Oil's case, vertical integration across markets was enough, and pretty much everyone in Big Tech is guilty of this.
So it's easy to think with a human customer service agent, all will be well. But then I think about all the customer service calls I've made or emails I've sent, and I almost wish that they did not exist so I don't get my hopes up and waste my time. Most customer service is worse than a computerized flowchart.
And even if they do understand your situation, and have authenticated you, and aren't just reading a script, then most of the time they can't offer you anything else besides what's possible on the website anyways. Sometimes we just like having someone to complain to.
Sure thing, but I still prefer to talking to the worst human, than the best KI avaible.
Also, I bet no one think all will be well, without KI, but it will be better dealing with incompetent, overworked and underpaid call workers, than dealing with a "smart" KI, with you cannot talk at all. In the first case there is at least the hope, that someone escalates the problem to someone with more knowledge who can finally solve your problem.
That's not my experience of call centres. While they are generally reading from a script and often they have no more information than you do, they crucially have the ability to recognise when things aren't working right and escalate your issue.
With Google's bot approach that can never happen. The only way to escalate issues is to be famous and write a blog post or tweet about it.
Not surprising, given the amount of so called "engineers" they hire, some of whom don't really have a background in CS, just studied for the interviews, or came from a coding school. It's astonishing how many fresh code bootcamp grads that companies like Google pick up and pay 6 figures for.
Most societies actually have something to solve such disputes: courts of law.
The real tragedy is that we decided to let corporations grow so big that they can say "fuck you" to courts and people alike with no repercussions. Twitter is famous for this, ever tried to appeal a ban?
I fear this is overstatement...people don't have a recognised right to an appeal if their app is shutdown. Only if the agreements were written in such a way as to define such a right, would a court of law even be involved.
This isn't about companies being too big, it's about an absence of rule making. If there were some rules defining the rights, then the courts could, indeed, be involved; but courts can't be brought into something just because it is "wrong". People agree to the ToS when they submit an app to the store; and the ToS more or less say, it's Gapplsoft's platform and they may do what they like.
> people don't have a recognised right to an appeal if their app is shutdown.
In Germany, people and political parties have obtained court judgements to unlock their Twitter and FB accounts. Generally the principle behind these decisions was that Twitter and FB are a public venue for discourse and therefore it goes against free speech to ban accounts for acceptable speech.
It is unlikely that any common law jurisdiction would apply freedom of speech so broadly but it is uncertain. It could be that even Germany only applies it in cases where it is clearly a matter of political speech. How broadly do you think this precedent applies?
As someone who's Google ad account was mysteriously suspended for no given reason (even before a single ad was run) and am now up to 4 days waiting with no reply nor phone number I can call, I hear you..
I don't understand how we've normalized Googles behavior to the point where this doesn't even shock me anymore. When I used Google Play Music a couple years ago there was a feature that was broken for YEARS according to the bug reports I could find, and in a classic Google move they shut the service down before ever fixing it.
That might sound like a non sequitur but it's ridiculous to me how little Google cares about anyone (users or the people who make content for their platforms) yet we still use their products. These days I try to avoid them wherever possible, not only for a small satisfaction of boycotting the company, but also because if I grow to like one of their products it will just shut down eventually.
Actually, I regularly have to go through any APIs we use from Google and yell at the developers who use them.
I can't risk having a corporate rollout/demo/pilot fail because some developer made the Googlebot pissy and got everything they're associated with banned.
I trust Microsoft way more than Google at this point. That says something.
Google is clearly guilty of neglect because they like to do everything in an automated way ...even if it can’t possibly be done well at this point.
But that is way different than Embrace, Extend, Extinguish from MS. I would not trade, say, Chrome for the world of IE. the tension between Google and Apple is far healthier for developers and consumers.
> Stop worshiping the ground Google walks on, which seems common on HackerNews.
I've had the exact opposite observation here. There are few places on the Internet I see Google get more consistently browbeaten and held to account for its mistakes and abuses than on HN. This has been the case for at least the past six or eight years or more. Threads on Google here are very rarely laudatory; they typically make the front page because of bad things.
HN comments tilt toward overwhelmingly disliking Goliath and favoring David. You see this in most Intel v AMD threads from the past decade. You'd think Intel killed HN's favorite puppy or merged with Oracle. Intel having an inferior product now doesn't explain the visceral response, it's something deeper psychologically, it's a revulsion of big tech broadly. It's mostly just a matter of rooting for the underdog and against big tech. The same thing is common re Amazon and Facebook here (increasingly Apple as well, which has lost a lot of its favor on HN). Microsoft is slightly in favor by contrast, they took a very long big tech lashing previously and people like a comeback story (their open source olive branches help a lot).
Pretty typical, forever repeating psychology. Underdogs, comebacks, goliaths v davids. They won't like you again until after you fall.
> You'd think Intel killed HN's favorite puppy or merged with Oracle.
To be fair, Intel engaged in some really evil practices to prevent AMD from gaining market share for a very long time. And, unlike Microsoft's slap on the wrist, Intel never really got punished at all for it.
Yeah, Intel isn't as bad as Oracle simply because they don't have Larry Ellison. However, Darth Vader isn't magically good simply because he's not The Emperor.
> Underdogs, comebacks, goliaths v davids. They won't like you again until after you fall.
Yeah, the fact that once "the davids" of the past became today's goliaths changed their behavior from (at least pretending to) caring about being social net-positive forces to being purely business machines has nothing to do with it.
For instance, Google's code of lost this paragraph two years ago [1]:
> “Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.
It may not matter to you but it does for some others. I'm one of them.
> These days I try to avoid them wherever possible, not only for a small satisfaction of boycotting the company, but also because if I grow to like one of their products it will just shut down eventually.
> What can we do about this?
I think you've already got it; don't use Google products. Ideally, pay for alternatives.
There is a much harsher solution that I'm not even sure I advocate yet: stigmatize employment there.
At-will employment somewhere when we can easily go elsewhere means that, while we don't necessarily condone all that our company does, we in general support/accept the company and its approach. Therefore, absent hardships, we must assume Google employees generally support Google actions as a whole (even if not this one). If others disapprove of Google's actions as a whole, they are allowed to disapprove of those that work there.
In my opinion, the best you can do is disapprove of working there (including passing opinionated judgment, albeit politely, on those that do work there). Maybe you take such character judgments in your personal or hiring decisions. Having said that, I don't agree with it as I generally support Google's actions/presence as a whole, but the further their average lowers, the more myself and others won't.
The truth is that it is become an enormous company and somebody working e.g. on the internals of Compose code has no power over how Chrome handles extensions.
I despise Google more and more as a company but that's not going to affect them.
In the areas where Google has some real alternatives, switch to these.
I saw this in my top-5 school. Internships at google were laughed at pretty hard. All the best guys wanted SpaceX or Tesla. Apple was also considered good but not great for your resume and you couldn't talk about what you worked on much.
> When I used Google Play Music a couple years ago there was a feature that was broken for YEARS
Not sure if this is yours, but mine was that it would often swap out my tracks for radio edits, even though I uploaded the original. I'm an adult, I bought this music, I don't need the kids' version. There's a built in feature you can use, "fix incorrect match," that would fix this only about half the time.
Oh right, it also capped the max size of playlists to 1000 songs for some reason.
Now it sounds like YouTube Music won't even let me listen while switching to another app, like a workout app, and won't let you turn off the screen without the music going out. Hard to believe.
Looking around, I'll be moving to musicolet I guess. Sounds like AIMP and BlackPlayer get good reviews too, but I really love the idea of an app that actually tries to limit the permissions it requests from you.
I had that issue as well, but in this comment I was talking about editing a track's album art. It would upload the picture but not do anything with it. Very weird to have such a basic function be broken like that for so long.
As for YouTube Music, it supports background play only if you subscribe, like regular YouTube.
It seems like trying to build a business on any Google property is simply a bad idea. Or, if you do, have an alternative ready for when Google shuts down the product or cancels your account.
My "RL" business, that has nothing to do with tech, relies heavily on Google ads, whenever we lessen the spending on them, our income drop proportionally, I am very worried about what will happen when they yank our account due to a mistake, but I am yet to figure out an alternative, other ad providers made no difference...
I made such a mistake - hosted a static page on AWS S3 with a redirect.
Google didn't like that. AdWords account blocked, no one to talk to but the bots!
One thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of automated decision making going on. In [1], the ICO offers guidance around what the GDPR says in regards to this subject.
What I don't understand is why the GDPR doesn't enforce the following:
1: Clear and concise information about the action being taken, and clear identification this was done using automation and did not involve any human oversight.
2: A process the user can invoke to request human intervention, and a confirmation email that a human will review the decision that was made within 30 days
3: Public statistics and transparency - any decision that was made that did not involve a human must be published, with stats on % of decisions made, number of cases flagged to human reviewers, and the success/failure rates (for example, number of cases resulting in an overturned AI decision by a human).
This could also be beneficial in other sectors too, like automated credit decisions and insurance policies, to publish statistics and data to afford transparency and identify possible biases. It should also be a requirement in law to preserve any code or algorithms should they need to be audited, including an AI system to be preserved "in time", so that the 2017 version can be audited in 2020 if an investigation is launched for example.
Right now, it's a complete free for all, too many edge cases and ways to game the system if you can figure its loopholes, and no requirement in law to provide a fair basis for users to appeal to a human without causing a PR shitstorm.
This early adoption of AI is quite bad, and I suspect we'll see such developments in the long term future as it matures.
This Regulation lays down rules relating to the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and rules relating to the free movement of personal data.
No snark, this situation sucks, but after dealing with GDPR for a while it's not well understood in tech societies
We had similar issues with the Google Play store for the ArtStation App (https://magazine.artstation.com/2018/12/happened-artstation-...), it simply got taken down and appealing continually got rejected. It was only after the issue got picked up as the top story on Hacker News and other sites that exposed the dysfunctional nature of their moderation that finally Google subtly changed their policy so that if the content is primarily “artistic” it’s allowed, but the catch is that only they deem what is appropriate and not...
We recently updated our Chrome extension also and it just seems to me that not a whole lot of effort is going into the Chrome Web Store, at least on the developer side where you update the extensions.
As a web developer, i am tired of JavaScript and whole web ecosystem and want try desktop or mobile apps. But then I read stuff like this and just cannot imagine building a business where AI or one single outsourced moderator can upend my business.
I hate regulations but I am of opnion that if you are a platform that other people use to make living then you should be regulated. Don't be platform of you cannot provide processes to handle appeals or able to pay massive damages in case of false positives.
Yet for some reason does not flag the Reddit, Instagram, and Twitch app with similar or worse content. I wonder if their algorithm has special exceptions built in to ignore apps specifically by name or by "downloads > X".
Is it possible that Google writes code to automate the moderation (for lack of better word) of the extensions in the Chrome Store because they are trying to avoid paying hundreds of people to do it manually? I know it's easy to say "Google doesn't care about you," and generally it as a company may not care, but they also are not in the business of putting us out of business.
It feels like to me that they have just become a sprawling mass of interconnected yet disjointed divisions but without any real customer service department that can handle the amount of requests or situations like in OP. I am not on their side in any way, but Occam's razor and all, it just seems the most likely explanation to me is that they are just too cheap to pay people to handle the volume of customer issues they have? Or would it not be economically feasible? What do y'all think?
[Edited to divide into two paragraphs for slightly easier reading]
> Is it possible that Google writes code to automate the moderation (for lack of better word) of the extensions in the Chrome Store because they are trying to avoid paying hundreds of people to do it manually?
Undoubtedly, for the Chrome Store as well as all of their other properties.
Ultimately, Google's business model is about earning fractions of a cent per view/download and making it up in volume. Their profit margin depends on relentless cost optimization, and humans are inevitably the most expensive part of their support/maintenance systems.
Google undoubtedly doesn't want to put extension writers out of business, but if they adjust their procedures to give cases like this real human attention then they will undoubtedly allow a few dozen spammers/scammers to also receive human attention.
(Note: I present the above without judgement. If I were to add my judgement, I'd say that I don't think that this state of affairs is a good thing, and in the long run we may need to reconsider whether algorithmic promotion of content without human oversight is viable.)
I'm still a bit surprised they're not offering a paid support tier. That'd still suck for non-commercial extensions, but at least help with the "extension filtering is killing our business!" cases.
I'm afraid is more complicated than that. If they were to add non-mandatory paid support, any time someone were at risk of losing its extension would feel/believe it's an extortion scheme to force him to pay for support (whether that's true or not).
I can’t see how a healthy browser extension ecosystem would help
Google. Without Google getting any real value out of it, it makes total sense they do a poor job managing it.
I somewhat agree, yet wouldn't a healthy extension ecosystem (excellent term, btw) attract more users to Chrome and in turn keep users more entwined in the larger Google ecosystem? I guess there is a cost/benefit analysis done. They put just enough effort into it to get the return or results they want. The little guys like OP (who arguably make the best content because it's open source and not full of trackers or other junk) just get stepped on along the way.
I don’t know at all, but if I had to guess extension usage is pretty low. I’m not sure the average user really sees browser extensions as something they need. They aren’t as obvious as say mobile apps.
On the flip side, extensions like Honey seem to suggest at least enough people use them to be of some worth.
Some of the more popular extensions have thirty+ million users, and this is for trivial fluff functionality. When you hit up the extensions dealing with adblocking or say, interacting with Instagram, they can hit 100+ million easily.
> they also are not in the business of putting us out of business
Actually, the way they've expanded their range of products I'd wager they've put quite a few people out of business.
It's especially bad if your business happens to not be one of the ones they acquihire, but one of their competitors, as evidenced by a handful of antitrust lawsuits.
It's clear that Google don't want to hire humans and run customer support centers. According to reports, this has bit them in GCP adoption as well.
That's fine but at least have a human review before taking disastrous actions like taking down extensions, lockdown Gmail accounts. If you can't afford even that at least have an appeal process where human would review the case. If you can't make the economics work even for that maybe just don't run the app store.
It does? Haven't used it yet and have no near future plans to change that. As long as there's a single account, the support of each part of Google matters, because it could cause your account to be closed.
The problem many people have is that they're (rightfully given the horror stories on HN) afraid that anything they'll run afoul of GCP guidelines (i.e. some AI flagging "fraud" or "spam") may also close down their personal and all other Google accounts with no way of reaching a human.
If GCP wants more adoption then you have to fix this shit. Seriously.
Hi, I currently use Azure which has strict lines between organisation tenancies/domains/accounts and personal ones. This means I know that my liability is limited to my business.
Can you assure me that if I move to GCP, have a VM get infected and you ban my GCP account, my personal account will never get banned too? Or that of my next employer? Because I keep reading about that happening...
Well, in general - would you use your personal email account for work?
So for example - say I have a personal Gmail account (e.g. cute-boy-88@gmail.com)
But if I was working for a company that had spun up GCP infrastructure - my work would likely provide me with a work email address (e.g. trevor.jacobs@bankofengland.co.uk) - which I would use, rather than cute-boy-88@gmail.com.
This also covers the use-case that for example, you leave the company (in which case the company still controls those accounts), or an employee goes rogue and tries to takeover their work account.
In general, you would try to keep your work/personal accounts separate - you're not going to put your personal account as the recovery email for your work account for example. Your system administrator (or IT team at work) is going to be the one who resets your password, or recovers your account - and they're not going to send private work passwords to a personal email account (or they shouldn't).
No, of course I wouldn't, but my understanding is that Google (unlike any other company I know) will "pierce the corporate veil" and ban people not accounts. It's not hard to correlate accounts, my chrome is logged into both my personal and work accounts. My computer has a unique ip address. My phone has both accounts logged in as users.
Is that enough for the ban to follow through and hit both?
If you sign into multiple google accounts in the same browser window, then those accounts are linked behind the scenes. You do not have to explicitly link them together. There are plenty of stories on reddit of devs whose company accounts got into trouble because their personal account was in trouble.
You'd need to hire more than "hundreds", especially since people get mad about false positives and false negatives. How long do you think it takes a reverse engineer to completely and thoroughly vet a browser extension or mobile app? A day maybe if you are doing it quickly and longer if you are doing it thoroughly.
Now do that for every app and extension. And repeat it for every single version that is ever uploaded.
Do you remember when browser extensions could be installed from a developer's own website and didn't require any kind of dysfunctional 'gatekeeping'?
I know there are benefits to having someone vet browser extensions, but it seems a shame that they remove the self-distribution option completely when their moderation is so ineffectual.
There's this quote about how the dictator are benevolent in the beginning in their appeals to people's safety needs.
Slowly but surely, the people handover their rights and are shocked by the power the dictator "suddenly has."
When the chrome team was tightening their grips on chrome, people here hailed the move because some windows programs like anti-viruses, download managers and adware sideloaded extensions.
We do keep giving power to some system because they "protect us" (Google and Apple in 2010) but there's always a chance that they'll stop caring once they don't need your support anymore.
Microsoft is also trying to buy our support by being benevolent, I wonder how long and if that will last.
Then extensions started being a spyware / malware delivery mechanism, with popular ones being bought and turned overnight. Coupled with browser plugins shoved down on the user's throat by various Windows software, this made Firefox unusable, at least on Windows.
It's why back in 2010 I started recommending Chrome to family, because Chrome installations kept being clean. It's why we can't have nice things.
From malwarebytes:
"Spyware. Although it sounds like a James Bond gadget, it’s actually a type of malware that infects your PC or mobile device and gathers information about you, including the sites you visit, the things you download, your usernames and passwords, payment information, and the emails you send and receive."
Yep, Google is certainly protecting us from companies that do that.
Chrome can load unpacked extensions by enabling Developer mode in about://extensions. Google will definitely get up in your business if you try to distribute an extension on your website this way though.
Can you go more into what they do if you try to bypass their distribution mechanism? Is there any existing posts sharing experience? I'm curious as this has always been my backup plan if Google takes this action against my extensions.
It's fine on MacOS (albeit a bit clunky), and sideloaded upgrades end up creating two copies of the extension so you'll have to ship your own autoupdater. On Windows, it's a no-go as Chrome will display a scary warning every time you start the browser: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23055651/disable-develop...
The great thing here is that it is literally 100% compatible with Chrome extensions.
I have been working on an extension that uses Chrome's Debugger API, lots of tab / network related APIs, and DevTools. I spun it up on Edge the other day and...it just worked. Everything worked.
I can't say the same for firefox. They do a good job bringing over some extension APIs, but I find it severely lacking for my use case.
I generally try to avoid bitching about Firefox design decisions in Chrome threads, but possibly because of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409675 - the original WebExtensions breaking change removed the ability for newtab-style extensions to do a lot of things their XPI counterparts could, in particular focusing on the address bar after opening a new tab. That bug went WONTFIX with no suggestions for an alternative interface, basically telling extension devs to come up with their own proposal for how to implement it if they want that bit of the API back. I'm not familiar enough with the extension in question to say whether any of those specific issues would have affected it (and from the article it sounds like time was a bigger pressure) but developing newtab-style extensions for Firefox is definitely harder than it should be.
While I generally agree with the reasons behind moving away from XPI extensions, it's been really disappointing to see Firefox not be as focused as I'd hoped they'd be on restoring lost extension functionality. That's especially important in the context of Google fuckery like the OP.
This wouldn't be a problem if browsers weren't walled gardens that are controlled by corporations instead of the users running them. Yes there are security issues with ignorant users doing things. But sometimes the fix causes a problem worse than the original.
Firefox and Chrome both don't let users install any add-on without their permission. Switching to Firefox ecosystem just means the leash is longer (and the protection is fake because of their automated signing portal).
I have a side-project that is partially a browser extension. I use a single codebase for both Firefox and Chrome.
Even with my trivial side-project and a grand total of two releases so far, Google ar itrarily rejected one release for being "spammy" when there was literally a 5 line diff between it and the previous release. Thankfully just finding the depreciated dashboard and uploading an icon (the "new dashboard" doesn't have this feature yet apparently) got it through after resubmitting it.
It feels like they've set themselves as gatekeepers of Chrome extensions (Windows users can only install from the "store") but they aren't actually interested in doing the job even though you pay an admin fee for the privilege of developing a free extension for their browser.
Your best course of action is to drop chrome support, and make your extension as good as possible and make a point of marketing that it's firefox only. Most won't do it due to worrying about market share, but alas IMO it's the best option available
I use Firefox personally and originally made the thing for myself. I added Chrome support because Chrome is much more popular (not far from ten times more popular these days :() and people I would like to use this, eg friends and family, mostly use Chrome.
I couldn't ask them to switch browsers for my little side project. I have to co-operate with Google's bureaucracy. For what it's worth, so far it seems like Mozilla is not exactly streets ahead, but at least they didn't charge me and they seem to be fairer and more helpful to extension developers (they have a "self-distribution" mode with relaxed oversight I used while in private alpha, and their tools and docs are better).
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to promote Firefox to your friends and family as "simply the better choice" irrespective of your own interests.
When Chrome was better, I suggested friends and family use Chrome. Now I think most people would benefit from using Firefox as their primary driver.
Are you including the change cost here, which will be many times higher for most of the population vs. HN? Even if I thought that Firefox was a better choice, I'd recommend to my friends and family to keep using whatever they are using unless they have to switch for some reason.
Lazy web devs that only test in Chrome and maybe safari that constantly break things in other browsers. I don't mind sending the angry support email and using chrome for a single task here and there but others might.
Bank of America didn't work for the better part of last year. Chase Rewards are currently broken since last week. Its easy to drop small sites that don't test but my experience has been they actually bother testing and it's the major sites that actually have problems.
I've had Firefox fail to work properly on the sites of Slashdot, Amazon, Newegg, Chase, BoA, GE, Walmart, the IRS, PennDOT, Mozilla's own org site, WaPo, NPR, Fox, Disney, and a whole host of others.
I think this is because programmers have very specific and personalized workflows for all the tools they use so they assume other people are the same way when in reality a browser for most people is just a tool to get what they want.
>make a point of marketing that it's firefox only.
This is a great but only a temporary solution. Firefox is taking jabs at extensions not on its recommended list with slightly scary warnings.
Firefox as a privacy focused browser should give users the ability to limit permission or sites extension can run on - including click to run option.
Without this, they'll soon go the way of chrome.
Heck Chrome started locking down extensions when they started catering courting enterprises. And they included the ability to make extensions uninstallable.
Bad actors took advantage of it, forcing chrome to tighten things further until extensions could only be installed from the store.
Man, I haven't updated my extension for years because it's already feature complete (at least for my use case) and at this point I'm afraid when I push an update, Google would outright ban it because the extension requires full access to all sites and tabs (it's an automatic tab suspension extension).
Maybe someday everyone will realize that google isn't a company that provides services to users, it's a data theft company. They don't really care about bugs or frustrations because they aren't in the business of providing things to you. You are not their customer.
The vast majority of people have forgotten that they aren't an email, webapp, cloud storage, or online translation provider. They are an advertising company. They use their products to steal your information. They aren't meant to help the user, because the user is not their customer. I'm sure you will get a real human employee if you are interested in buying ads from them.
Contrary to popular belief there are many companies that provide software besides google. Use them if you want a provider that might care about your problems. "It's not exactly the same as google ____" is not a valid excuse for not giving it an honest try.
The last numbers I saw (2016-ish) put Advertising at 86% of Google's revenue (Or perhaps Alphabet's revenue? I'll admit that all that stuck in my head was this 86.)
If those numbers are still anywhere near close, Google is an advertising company with some interesting side hustles. Just because Harley Davidson sell t-shirts, doesn't mean you'd describe them as anything other than a motorcycle company.
A hilariously apt comparison - after looking up Harley's breakdown, it looks like merch was ~10.5% of the revenue brought in by motorcycles (not parts/maintenance) in 2015.
Granted, I'm not well-versed in looking at corporate financials, but the basic breakdown shown here [1] isn't terribly complex
I didn't realise it was actually that much - it's just the only HD product that anyone I personally know has ever bought, which was why it came to mind.
If I'm reading the first table correctly, the number for "google advertising" is the sum of all the lines above it, so that's the number I'll take. If we compare that against the bottom line, we get 82.3% for Q4, or 83.2% for FY19.
So either it's improving (from the viewpoint of someone with a distaste of the ad industry, at least), or I mis-remembered 2016's 86% - either way I can update or correct my claim.
Lol. You get different support yes, but it’s equally as shitty if not more so.
I’ve been an enterprise customer of Googles services. When you have a problem simply finding the link, to the obscure dashboard login, to post an issue may take hours. I’m not even joking. Like Google is built to prevent you from using it discover useful support pages with contact information. “Account Executives” otherwise known as sales people, provide zero support after the contract is signed and I mean zero.
Once you write in, you wait, and hope. It’s kind of like filing a radar with Apple but a bit shittier because you have still idiotic, naive, hope you’ll get a reply or help.
If you ever do get a reply it’s likely a bot. If you ever have to disagree chances are it won’t be seen or acknowledged. Google is by far the worst service provider on the planet if you ever have an issue.
The point of that statement was not to say that they don't provide those services at all, the point was that providing those services aren't their "thing". There is not a paid tier of any google product that will stop them from spying on you. Any payment you make is just to subsidize their spying so they get your data at little or no cost to themselves. If you are paying for google services you are not only giving them your data, you are paying for the privilege.
Developers who publish Chrome Extensions also pay for them. I paid $5 initial fee twice for publishing Kozmos extension. In return, I can't even see a contact information to reach out about a bad review made.
Thing is, the value proposition proposed by "the cloud", whomever that may be (MS/Google/Apple et al), is quite the temptation.
Seriously, I am slowly and surely de-googling, such as storing all data locally (if I need offsite, I use encrypted backups). My calendar now uses caldav on a raspberry pi, my home network uses ethernet for fast data flow to a portable drive and I am using a web browser for many applications such as email; I use noscript and nextdns to selectively control my browsing experience. SSH is powering everything, including being able to access the device from any client connected to the network and if I wanted, from the internet as well (which can be quite useful, needs to be done sensibly however).
It's possible, but it does require effort, staying power (when installing a python package doesn't quite work because python 2/3 still...sigh) and is, quite simply, not something the average home user cares about.
Do they care an enforcement agent can access your documents via a warrant? or your metadata? or access your 'social circle' or profile you? Honestly, not really. But my threat model is that Google can and will use their AI army against you, and if you are unfortunate enough to get caught by them, there's little regards to you as an individual.
I can't risk my data being in a service with such little regard to humans, it's not acceptable and frankly, hosting everything myself is safer, more rewarding from a learning experience (such as how linux works and certain design decisions that are both good/bad and can be frustrating).
go de-google, it's a worthwhile venture.
[P.S: in a previous life I was vastly pro google. I used location history for years, google pay, play store, play games, stored youtube history and the whole works. Thanks to Snowden and forums like reddit/hackernews, I learnt that this was foolish. Giving up my data, for free, in return for little value back (why give them my financial information, for what? Google Pay is no different to my contactless card and that goes to bank directly). Cutting all these data flows was refreshing, and is part of the plan to delete or make my account dormant altogether. I am vastly more pro-privacy and take strict measures to reduce my digital footprint, which is entirely possible but requires additional effort, where the temptation of letting the "nice guy" handle all the work is always there. Paying in cash is still a thing and leaves less of a trace to 'you' as a person than digital]
The only main Google service I still used was Gmail (and occasionally search when DDG doesn't return something immediately useful). I'd seen comments about Fastmail over the years, but moving seemed like it would be a hassle.
With more at home pandemic time I decided to just do it and have been super impressed. The Fastmail docs are really good, setting up DNS to use my custom domain had explicit steps and pictures for my specific provider (gandi.net) along with a ton of others.
They have super easy to setup import from Gmail to get things over initially and to keep things coming as you convert accounts.
They have really good instructions for all IMAP clients and it's been painless to set those up.
I did have to spend a day going through every account in 1Password and changing emails, but the super simple aliases you can setup in Fastmail make this great. I have a bunch of different ones for different types of sites (some very specific, some general catch-alls) on my domain which I can now blacklist in the future if I need to.
The main issue is that you realize a lot of sites are just terrible, many don't let you change your email at all and require contacting support. Some don't even let you change after contacting support (postmates just says to 'create a new account under your new email and abandon the old one').
In general though I'm happy I did it and the Fastmail site has been pretty impressive. I like paying for software I think is high quality and valuable (where the business and customer have aligned incentives).
I went through a similar process during quarantine, but for bluehost.
I found the process of changing emails over meant I also was able to make Pass entries for them (another way I'm taking control of my data), and at the same time delete my account for websites I don't need anymore. It's been very cleansing.
Another thing I should mention is I wanted to try hey.com since it looks like they’re doing some interesting things (alerting users to tracking pixels to push back on clients like superhuman, whitelisting incoming mail, etc.) but they make it hard to get an invite so I gave up trying and paid for fastmail instead.
Not GP, but I’m assuming https://www.passwordstore.org/. Pass is a CLI password manager using Git and GPG to store and manage your passwords. I use it and sync passwords across devices through a git repo on self-hosted Gitea. Works really well if you’re comfortable with the CLI.
Also switched away from Google to Fastmail with my own domain about a year ago. Happy with the move, although Gmail still sees some activity because I never took the effort of migrating historic mails and all non-primary accounts.
Re: Tracking pixels - disable images by default in your email client. I get emails now from people like "we've noticed you haven't been opening our emails..."
Hey, i recently switched to Fastmail too! It's been surprisingly painless, even with importing mail, calendars and what not. Like you mention, the most time consuming part has been going through my accounts to update the email address to the new one.
There's a fairly general way to do mail import that works fine with Fastmail, and might be more flexible if you would like to combine the import with reorganization your mail folders. This assumes both providers support IMAP.
1. Set up both providers on an IMAP client that supports multiple simultaneous accounts.
2. Copy messages from the old provider to the new by simply selecting them in the old provider's folders in your IMAP client and dragging them to wherever you want them in the new provider's folders.
As long as you pick an IMAP client that supports copying between IMAP servers, this should do it. I used either Apple Mail or Outlook for this. I don't remember which.
My wake up call came in May 2018 when I was starting a cannabis dispensary YouTube channel and they decided to terminate all content creators. But this also included the gmail account. Completely. Flipping the switch off just like that made me realize I’m an idiot for using Gmail as my “central” email address (I’ve navigated all my critical emails offline and now use my own email server.)
Not wanting to rely on Google - especially Gmail - as my central identity provider is why I switched to Fastmail. Sure it costs and the migration took a couple of days but it's been worth it.
This reminds me of when sports fans say things like, those odds are meaningless, they’re just set by bookies to get action.
True from a naively pedantic POV, but also ignores that betting odds happen to end up efficient also. Like saying shopkeeps set prices to drum up business and aren’t subject to the principles of supply and demand.
Google is an advertising company, but as part of its strategic goals it develops a high quality email client that beat out competitors on its own. I bet you the Gmail team is full of brilliant people who don’t give a shit about advertising and just want to make an awesome email client and spend night and day thinking about just that.
It doesn't matter what brilliant ground level people want if they don't get to do anything about it because of pressure from management.
I have seen this first-hand. I bet you have too. A brilliant user friendly idea stays at the bottom of the product log, as middle and upper management product asks get piled on top of it, pushing it deeper and deeper.
Sure, I guess you could donate the small amount of free time you get to your employer and do it after work, but I can't think of anything more demotivating than working for free for a company with revenue in the hundreds of millions.
This may be true, but follow the money. The facts of their business plan are a simple matter of public record. Users are the product and their customers are advertisers. As a company, they exist to service advertisers. Everything else is just noise. Sure, they have some incredibly talented engineers trying to create good stuff. None of that matters. The focus of the company remains the same. As potential users, we must choose to support that business model or not.
As long as someone understands the Faustian bargain and enters into it willingly, no problem. The difficulty is that it is unlikely most users really understand the details of the deal they are entering. "Hey, cool, free email." That's about the end of the thought process for most users. Google's approach is brilliant in its simplicity. "Free" stuff.
This is a bit of an exaggeration, but: I bet you the arms industry is full of brilliant people as well, but developing systems that are designed to kill people is still wrong.
I think all of this is moot, because several big companies that have a business model arising from direct transactions with end users ... are also routinely losing sight of their obligation to end users. Did anybody want Windows 8 tablet UI on their desktop? Did anybody say, you know, this Macbook is great, but it'd be even better if it no longer launched my 32-bit software, and please make it phone home for everything I do?
I think this story is better told more simply, that when a company gets big it becomes arrogant, bad at social awareness and serving anybody. I'm sure you can find advertisers or would-be beneficiaries of what you call "data theft" that are fed up with Google breaking their stuff too.
Yup, take a look at their financial statements. I haven't done it in the last few years, but for most of their existence advertising revenue has been >95% of their total revenue.
Everything else is a loss-leader or a rounding error.
> The vast majority of people have forgotten that they aren't an email, webapp, cloud storage, or online translation provider.
This is all well and good, but they cornered the market for email, webapp, cloud storage and online translation products (and most importantly smartphones and web browsers). So until there is a viable alternative that the average person knows about, this will not change.
Generally speaking, the cornered the market through building good products that beat the competition. Do you remember free email providers prior to gmail? ISPs who you maintained a paying customer relationship with offered worse quotas and outdated web mails.
I remember postmaster.co.uk and hotmail.com, they were around way before Gmail, and were less invasive, but I got my own domain and I serve my own emails since 2000 so I got that covered. I like my emails like I like my newspaper: NOT to read them together with someone else. I do know that emails are clear text etc but it's not fun that I get an email about XYZ and then every website I visit shows me ads about XYZ.
Yes, I remember plenty of free providers (as well as quality paid ones, and ISP ones, for example GMX and Ilse), including with IMAP/POP3, TLS/SSL support, anti spam features, anti virus features etc. Gmail was unique in three ways: it had a huge quota (for that time), and it offered a slick web interface. The other way Gmail was unique was the invite. If you gotta get invited to become part of the (secret) club, that makes it more special.
This is why I have slowly de-googled the last year. Finally switched away from Gmail after 15 years. I've removed pretty much all Google from my life except some searching at times.
Google is a provider of all those things. Advertising is the biggest revenue line and supports free access (to products that are still best in class) but they also sell paid versions to both consumers and businesses.
Bureaucracy and customer support problems with large companies is not a new or unique to Google.
We had a problem at work with receipts and support request replies to all our customers on a certain popular free email provider that also had a big ad business (but was not Google or Microsoft...) getting filtered out as spam. We'd contact them, and they'd say they would fix it, and in a few days the mail would start going through--for maybe a month then it would go back to getting blocked as spam.
Word of this got to our guy who handled ad buying. He called our ad rep with them, and asked pointedly "why the fuck am I spending $X thousand dollars a month to buy ads from you to get new customers, and then you are blocking those new customers from getting their receipts and support replies???".
The ad rep put our guy on hold for a minute, then came back and said he had their head of IT on conference. He asked the head of IT that question. The head of IT put us all on hold for a couple minutes, then came back with a couple engineers who worked on their email system on the line, and told them to whitelist us so that nothing of ours could be blocked as spam, and promised it would be done in something like half an hour.
> They use their products to steal your information.
They aren’t stealing from me. I get to watch YouTube videos, store my files in Drive, and use gmail — all things that I like quite a lot. Yes there are alternatives to gmail and Drive, none of which are good enough for the hassle of switching. There is no YouTube alternative.
Sure but people understand the basic transaction (give money -> get milk). If on the other hand they gave you free milk but tracked your milk usage without telling you, I'd argue that's a non-consensual transaction and falls under stealing (roughly).
This story explain perfectly why I will never create anything relying on Google tech or services again... Too many horrors story... And I have 2 projects killed by their dumb AI and without any possibility to talk to a human
Google is Skynet!
This comment is trite. No Android app, no iPhone app, no Google search listing, no Amazon product page, no Stream/Epic store listing, no browser extensions, no cloud servers. Can you rely on an internet provider or should you lay your own fiber? What technology product are you going to make that relies on nothing? HN deserves better comments imo.
Do not relay on one solution, diversify. Have a backup plan. Assume that whatever it is you rely on has possibility to dissappear anytime for any reason.
Every stock market investor knows that you should always diversify your risk. So never make yourself deoendent on the whims of some single or few BIG_COMPANIES.
Specifically:
> no Stream/Epic store listing
There exist lots of stores: Epic, Steam, GOG, Humble Store, itch, ... So diversify the risks of being dependent on the whims of one or few of them.
> no cloud servers
Write your server-side applications in a way that does not depend too much on the specific details of the cloud implementation of a specific cloud provider so that you can rather easily switch to another cloud provider if necessary.
I get it, Google loves to automate stuff to save money. Makes sense, I agree. But I'm seriously wondering if all the people in charge of automating such processes are those delusional ego-programmers who think they can solve anything with machine learning, aka "AI". Really, I cannot understand that there aren't basic safeguards in place like "hey this extension got repeatedly flagged and when a human finally reviewed it we found it was a mistake each time, so maybe set a flag on this extension to double-check next time". Or maybe, have such incidents automatically bubble up to the team responsible for the automatic screening. But why do that if you're a wunderkind programmer who never makes mistakes?
Sorry, this is the only explanation I have for this, I've worked with this kind of person twice. Once they got the first version of something running they are done, no further testing, no sanity checks, no asserts or logger.warn() for "this can never happen" branches.
The other explanation is that they don't really want users to have most browser extensions. The browser extensions either become features that google wants to embed in the browser, or things they don't want, for business reasons. In either case it is better if the extension dies after a year or so.
BTW, this doesn't have to be a conscious choice of anyone at Google, it could just be the way the incentives turn out.
User friendly features are only incentivized in a competitive environment.
Until Firefox or Edge catches up in both performance and implementation compatibility to make Chrome-first sites work, extension support isn't incentivized
Tbh I can’t even think of a place where competition solves user-friendliness—user friendly software is highly uncommon in commercial software, let alone more broadly (i’m eying you, canonical).
There are a large number of user-hostile behaviors that stretch across industries: ad-funded software, app stores pushing microtransactions, wildly inconsistent interfaces and behaviors across DOM-driven software, opt-out behavior for things like arbitrary internet access.... user unfriendliness is the default state of software and even the most user friendly software still neglects the needs of many of their potential users.
This is a fact of software built in bounded time to be resold for passive income and “support” (which means “bug explainer” and possibly “refund-giver” in most corporate cultures).
I'd hazard to say that what you're describing (which I agree with) is true actually because in most spheres, there really ISN'T meaningful competition.
Building software is hard, generally, and takes time, generally. Just because you can throw up a set of microservices in a day doesn't mean you can build a properly competing product that quickly. And as time goes on, the standard of competition gets higher and the barrier to entry gets higher, because user expectations grow over time. So most software isn't competitive.
I think this is unfortunately close to the truth. I think Chrome only entertains extensions on desktop since desktop browsers are somewhat competitive. On Android where their bundling deals ensure Chrome is the default browser, they don't really have to bother. They can just disable extensions and therefore ad-blockers.
A bookmarking service sounded to me like something Google wanted to operate themselves, and I was thinking maybe that was related to why it got taken down.
At the same time, it seemed to not have had that many users yet, so, a bit early for Google to pay attention?
Imagine all the semantics you could extract from lists that people curated. The early web used to be human curated content and then Google came along and extracted all the associations they could out of those curated lists (links) and became the juggernaut it is today.
So your theory about Google wanting to run a bookmarking service I think is correct. Human curated links continue to be the only source of semantically relevant content. Everything else is algorithmic extraction of the relevant associations created by humans.
I was surprised to see that is not the same bookmarks synced in my Chrome Browser. That's the case with
https://passwords.google.com/ . Is their a webview of synced Chrome bookmarks (I couldn't find one) and what use case is google.com/bookmarks?
Oh that is trippy, not only does the link from the GP not include my Chrome sync'd bookmarks, all the recent activity on it is places I've starred in Google Maps (!).
Exactly, they have a competing service. They also took down Podcast Addict while keeping their competing podcast app which violated the same terms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
Chrome supported/promoted its extensibility early on because it was seen as a competitive feature when compared to IE and Firefox at the time. At the time, FF supported a huge library of extensions, and Chrome's job was to eat FF's market share (and IE's). Thus, extensions were an obvious thing for them.
Now, extensions present pretty much nothing but problems for Google:
* Features that compete with Android
* Features that compete with their own offerings, like Pushbullet
* Features that actively harm their offerings, like adblockers
* Features that actively harm their enterprise customers, like anti-paywalls
There's NO upside now for Chrome to support extensions, and ALL downside. They certainly don't need them in order to keep browser share. Too many people use it now.
By the way that description is one aspect of a monopoly (no, I don't want to start that discussion. Just pointing out that that behavior isn't possible in a competitive environment).
Given all the recent postings on HN lately about the DoJ sniffing around google re: anti-trust....
You'd think this would be a really bad time to be doing this...
Isn't one of the 'main' criteria around anti-trust how a company impacts the consumer ? this sort of thing sounds harmful to the consumer (fewer choices, actively taking down products consumers use, etc.)
I agree, maybe the DoJ should ask why it is so hard to make an extension? A little pressure would act against the forces that make them decide when in doubt, shut down extension.
> The browser extensions either become features that google wants to embed in the browser, or things they don't want, for business reasons.
Exactly. This is basically a replay of the way Microsoft treated developers of third-party Windows programs in the 1990s. Only the time scale was different; you typically had at least a few years before MS either integrated your killer feature into Windows, or changed something about the Windows internals that broke your program, either way killing your business.
I think you'll find the people in charge of automation have no programming background at all. They're likely new grad product managers hopped up on Adderall with no incentive to reflect on the unintended consequences of their decisions
The worst outcome of the iPhone is the general move of programmers from people who write software for a platform the user fully controls to people who write software for a platform controlled by a company that the user borrows a device from.
Yeah, everyone's known that platform dependence is risky, and every decade or so we "learn our lesson" but then forget the moment the next cool platform comes along if it has enough users.
It’s almost like the companies with more money than governments and complete control over what content users see might shape the world to keep their profits high.
One way to tell if a conspiracy is crazy is if it doesn’t benefit rich people. This pretty clearly passes that test.
You don't have to believe conspiracy theories to think centralization is bad. Sometimes bullshit "they" don't want you to know about is still bullshit.
Developers go where the money goes. The money goes where the users go. The users don't know the difference between a walled garden and a free ecosystem.
The worst part of the so called modern Google experience for me is that somehow mediocrity seems to be accepted as good enough. Quality human work has been replaced by software that is far from perfect. The worst part: others try to emulate that, "because Google is doing that." But Google is a Behemoth that can afford not caring. Moreover, since they know they can't be search leaders forever, they really can't afford not diversifying and not experimenting with all possible services, trying to see which one sticks and which could be monetized. So I expect it's going to be much worse in the future.
I maintain a paid Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shortkeys-custom-k...) and I've had a very similar experience with the frustrating repeat automated shutdown emails, except that so far my extension hasn't been actually shut down. I'm just waiting for the day that it happens at this point. I'm surprised it has not happened before now, since my extension requires a lot of permissions to do its job.
In my case, I make a nice little side income from that extension so it would be a noticeable income hit. But I'm not sure of anything I can really do to prevent it from being shut down if and when Google's robots decide the time has come.
An interesting extension but I am a bit surprised - it seems the target users are developers, which generally have the wherewithal to download the repo and install themselves - how does this result in a "noticeable income"?
Sorry, not trying to be obtuse, just curious from a side-income perspective.
It surprised me too. I started charging a few months ago after it was free for ~7 years. Now I'm making $600 a month off of it.
Paying users seem to be part productivity nerds who maybe aren't technical enough to grok installing from the repo, and part people who just choose to pay for the automatic upgrades or to support the developer. Also, lots of users are web gamers who use it for in-game automation.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 440 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23198629
Thanks for the tag. Looks like the author's core issue is (understandably) with the construction of the system itself. I'm not sure what I can do here other than listen and reiterate that we are trying to work to address these issues.
- https://twitter.com/DotProto/status/1264331488029376513
A month ago he said:
For context, we're currently planning to create a team that will respond to escalations with more meaningful information about a rejection.
- https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-exte...
But the situation only appears to be getting worse and no one at Google appears to care enough to do anything about it.
I have an extension that is once again in rejection form mail purgatory and it makes me want to take my extensions off of the Google Chrome Web Store as well.
There are only a handful of extensions that are deal breakers (the lack of which would send users to other browsers). uBlock Origin, for example. All the others can fuck right off.
1. When (not "if") Google kills UBO 2. How Chrome's market share doesn't drop
Adblock addons will be drastically limited in functionality, must bundle the block list with the addon, can't update the list outside of updating the addon, are limited to a fraction of the size of existing block lists.
This will end the arms race in favor of ads vs blockers by ensuring that ad blockers can't win while pretending its not ending adblocking.
With all that said- I still prefer Firefox and think it is the best choice right now for the Web.
Me: Hey, this must be a mistake
> Google (Robot): No mistake, review these policies, your extension violates one of them
Me: It does not violate any of them, this is a mistake!
> Google (Finally human): Oh, sorry, a mistake.
Obviously someone just needs to create a robot that automatically replies to the takedown notices and disputes them, thus closing the loop!
Also, someone would have to program that bot and can you even imagine how dead inside you'd feel if that was your life?
Would you feel dead inside if your tool helped developers keep their projects online? Sounds rewarding to fight the big guy and keep cool projects online.
1. Non human (AI) usage for termination google accounts. 2. No repeal process
At least some employee from Google here in hn must do things and understand mentality of other people.
It increasingly looks like - well... we employees live in bubble but if you are unlucky then you are screwed. Do not ask us?
What kind of programmers wrote such code that terminates account without human intervention? Please do not blame it on Project Managers.
You are human - so is some one that was affected by your code.
Amen
One who gets paid half a million a year to not question the policies and their consequences and just does what they are told?
Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.
The problem is not mainly with how Google treats their employees (though there's definitely something wrong there), but with how they treat their customers.
Hell, I’ve met more investors footing my salary than board members per se, and they definitely have zero interest in employee negotiations—that’s what management is for.
I'm pretty pro-union in general but I don't follow your reasoning. Cops are unionized, and when they murder innocent civilians in broad daylight, the unions are right behind to pay for their legal defense. Unions don't bring reason to a workforce; they merely represent that workforce.
So basically the worst form of slacktivist hypocrites.
Anti corporate soapbox or google job, please just pick one.
I tried again the next day, same results. That was 4-5 days ago, and still nothing. I'm abandoning Google Voice because I assume Google has abandoned it. It's not like there's anyone I can ask.
This is just an inconvenience to me. I can't imagine what it's like to have a service I actually rely on and then lose it.
If you need to depend of them for a specific service, don't. Go with an actual business that cares and have the focus on what's important, and more importantly a customer service that listens.
I went with a dedicated VoIP provider, and the service has been excellent
SMS is available as a FLOSS app (I use the F-Droid voip.ms app), or through another portal - able to be sent/received through email, another number, or a web interface.
I honestly have only good things to say about them (despite being a consumer of their seemingly B2B product). As a disclaimer, I don't work for them, have no affiliation with them, and made a point of not using any kind of referral link.
It's getting more common, too. Just the other day I found out that posting links in a youtube comment makes the comment invisible to everyone else. In hindsight, disallowing links is almost certainly a good policy and it's easy to understand and appreciate why it was put in place, but why the gaslighting? Just pop up a box explaining that links aren't allowed. The gaslighting isn't going to fool spammers for long enough to be a meaningful deterrent, but it is going to trip up legitimate users enough to meaningfully degrade their experience.
Time to visit my bitwarden and port another account off gmail (my late new-years resolution is to port an account off gmail every time I get myself worked up about something google did -- funnel the useless frustration into something worthwhile.)
Gaslighting = post is visible to you, and unbeknownst to you, invisible to everyone else
To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance. The verb sense derives from the 1938 stage play Gas Light, in which a husband attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment.
in what way does hiding one's post cause them to "question their own memory, perception and sanity"?
I suspect a lot of people caught up in "shadow bans" already have a tenuous grip on reality in the first place. What a disgusting, mean spirited and wholly pointless thing for them to be engaged in. Why couldn't they just tell said individuals they've been auto moderated or banned? It's not like it will result in additional support being required - Google already make a point of ignoring their users.
Shadow banning is 100% a form of gas lighting, and IMO should be considered just as unethical. If you are going to ban someone, words, or actions be upfront and clear about the rules and bans
I have had hn accounts shadowbanned without explanation or opportunity for appeal (I did try and was ignored) and largely stopped participating here because of that.
That said, I'm sympathetic to the idea that in small communities admin time is at a premium and gaslighting, even if it's occasionally abused, is a force-multiplier that can make the difference between a community having enough moderation to survive vs spinning off into toxicity and turning into a ghost town.
What I object to is that it seems to increasingly be used as a "best practice," to be applied universally without weighing pros and cons, rather than as a shitty reality to be applied minimally. For instance, in the case of youtube, we can place a very low upper bound on the value they're getting out of this tool, because it's being used to enforce an automated blanket policy that everyone already knows about (certainly everyone intent on link spamming, in any case). HN's shadowbanning is going to be good or evil on a per-instance basis, which makes it difficult for me to judge, while youtube's shadowbanning (as it relates to enforcing obvious automated blanket policies) cannot be good and is therefore much easier to judge.
I had a Firefox plugin that would tweet all my bookmarks. Years later I noticed all the tweets were hidden from search
In 2010 I was able to have one number ring multiple phones, automatic transcription of voicemail, text people from a web browser (!), switch between network providers without having to deal with number porting, it was great.
What killed it for me was that MMS was silently dropped, no images, but worse group SMS was handled by MMS so if people added you to group chats you just wouldn't get any of the messages and they would have no indication that you weren't getting them.
This went unsolved for years.
Eventually iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook - basically everyone else took this market. Then Google started some anemic work on it again, along the way making and killing a bunch of other chat products that all sucked in different ways.
Along with google plus and cloud, this is probably one of their biggest strategic failures.
It's pure incompetence.
Could you even summarize a piece of legislation that doesn't amount to "describe Google, then make everything that annoys us about Google illegal for companies fitting that description"?
In Standard Oil's case, vertical integration across markets was enough, and pretty much everyone in Big Tech is guilty of this.
The Human mind has an infinite capacity to justify any manner of things as "just doing my job" or "just following orders"
This has been seen in all industry, in all types of roles and at all times in history
There is nothing more dangerous than a group of people "just doing their jobs"
And even if they do understand your situation, and have authenticated you, and aren't just reading a script, then most of the time they can't offer you anything else besides what's possible on the website anyways. Sometimes we just like having someone to complain to.
Also, I bet no one think all will be well, without KI, but it will be better dealing with incompetent, overworked and underpaid call workers, than dealing with a "smart" KI, with you cannot talk at all. In the first case there is at least the hope, that someone escalates the problem to someone with more knowledge who can finally solve your problem.
With Google's bot approach that can never happen. The only way to escalate issues is to be famous and write a blog post or tweet about it.
So every bad idea eventually gets implemented.
The real tragedy is that we decided to let corporations grow so big that they can say "fuck you" to courts and people alike with no repercussions. Twitter is famous for this, ever tried to appeal a ban?
This isn't about companies being too big, it's about an absence of rule making. If there were some rules defining the rights, then the courts could, indeed, be involved; but courts can't be brought into something just because it is "wrong". People agree to the ToS when they submit an app to the store; and the ToS more or less say, it's Gapplsoft's platform and they may do what they like.
In Germany, people and political parties have obtained court judgements to unlock their Twitter and FB accounts. Generally the principle behind these decisions was that Twitter and FB are a public venue for discourse and therefore it goes against free speech to ban accounts for acceptable speech.
The only downside is that it are mostly hardcore actual Nazis which obtain these rulings, e.g. from the NPD party: https://www.belltower.news/gerichtsstreit-facebook-muss-seit...
It is unlikely that any common law jurisdiction would apply freedom of speech so broadly but it is uncertain. It could be that even Germany only applies it in cases where it is clearly a matter of political speech. How broadly do you think this precedent applies?
That might sound like a non sequitur but it's ridiculous to me how little Google cares about anyone (users or the people who make content for their platforms) yet we still use their products. These days I try to avoid them wherever possible, not only for a small satisfaction of boycotting the company, but also because if I grow to like one of their products it will just shut down eventually.
What can we do about this?
I can't risk having a corporate rollout/demo/pilot fail because some developer made the Googlebot pissy and got everything they're associated with banned.
I trust Microsoft way more than Google at this point. That says something.
But that is way different than Embrace, Extend, Extinguish from MS. I would not trade, say, Chrome for the world of IE. the tension between Google and Apple is far healthier for developers and consumers.
I've had the exact opposite observation here. There are few places on the Internet I see Google get more consistently browbeaten and held to account for its mistakes and abuses than on HN. This has been the case for at least the past six or eight years or more. Threads on Google here are very rarely laudatory; they typically make the front page because of bad things.
HN comments tilt toward overwhelmingly disliking Goliath and favoring David. You see this in most Intel v AMD threads from the past decade. You'd think Intel killed HN's favorite puppy or merged with Oracle. Intel having an inferior product now doesn't explain the visceral response, it's something deeper psychologically, it's a revulsion of big tech broadly. It's mostly just a matter of rooting for the underdog and against big tech. The same thing is common re Amazon and Facebook here (increasingly Apple as well, which has lost a lot of its favor on HN). Microsoft is slightly in favor by contrast, they took a very long big tech lashing previously and people like a comeback story (their open source olive branches help a lot).
Pretty typical, forever repeating psychology. Underdogs, comebacks, goliaths v davids. They won't like you again until after you fall.
To be fair, Intel engaged in some really evil practices to prevent AMD from gaining market share for a very long time. And, unlike Microsoft's slap on the wrist, Intel never really got punished at all for it.
Yeah, Intel isn't as bad as Oracle simply because they don't have Larry Ellison. However, Darth Vader isn't magically good simply because he's not The Emperor.
Yeah, the fact that once "the davids" of the past became today's goliaths changed their behavior from (at least pretending to) caring about being social net-positive forces to being purely business machines has nothing to do with it.
For instance, Google's code of lost this paragraph two years ago [1]:
> “Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.
It may not matter to you but it does for some others. I'm one of them.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
> What can we do about this?
I think you've already got it; don't use Google products. Ideally, pay for alternatives.
I suppose it depends on how you count, but Fastmail seems like a good example.
Purchase software from other providers. With like, cash.
There is a much harsher solution that I'm not even sure I advocate yet: stigmatize employment there.
At-will employment somewhere when we can easily go elsewhere means that, while we don't necessarily condone all that our company does, we in general support/accept the company and its approach. Therefore, absent hardships, we must assume Google employees generally support Google actions as a whole (even if not this one). If others disapprove of Google's actions as a whole, they are allowed to disapprove of those that work there.
In my opinion, the best you can do is disapprove of working there (including passing opinionated judgment, albeit politely, on those that do work there). Maybe you take such character judgments in your personal or hiring decisions. Having said that, I don't agree with it as I generally support Google's actions/presence as a whole, but the further their average lowers, the more myself and others won't.
The truth is that it is become an enormous company and somebody working e.g. on the internals of Compose code has no power over how Chrome handles extensions.
I despise Google more and more as a company but that's not going to affect them.
In the areas where Google has some real alternatives, switch to these.
Not sure if this is yours, but mine was that it would often swap out my tracks for radio edits, even though I uploaded the original. I'm an adult, I bought this music, I don't need the kids' version. There's a built in feature you can use, "fix incorrect match," that would fix this only about half the time.
Oh right, it also capped the max size of playlists to 1000 songs for some reason.
Now it sounds like YouTube Music won't even let me listen while switching to another app, like a workout app, and won't let you turn off the screen without the music going out. Hard to believe.
Looking around, I'll be moving to musicolet I guess. Sounds like AIMP and BlackPlayer get good reviews too, but I really love the idea of an app that actually tries to limit the permissions it requests from you.
https://www.androidauthority.com/best-music-players-android-...
As for YouTube Music, it supports background play only if you subscribe, like regular YouTube.
What I don't understand is why the GDPR doesn't enforce the following:
1: Clear and concise information about the action being taken, and clear identification this was done using automation and did not involve any human oversight.
2: A process the user can invoke to request human intervention, and a confirmation email that a human will review the decision that was made within 30 days
3: Public statistics and transparency - any decision that was made that did not involve a human must be published, with stats on % of decisions made, number of cases flagged to human reviewers, and the success/failure rates (for example, number of cases resulting in an overturned AI decision by a human).
This could also be beneficial in other sectors too, like automated credit decisions and insurance policies, to publish statistics and data to afford transparency and identify possible biases. It should also be a requirement in law to preserve any code or algorithms should they need to be audited, including an AI system to be preserved "in time", so that the 2017 version can be audited in 2020 if an investigation is launched for example.
Right now, it's a complete free for all, too many edge cases and ways to game the system if you can figure its loopholes, and no requirement in law to provide a fair basis for users to appeal to a human without causing a PR shitstorm.
This early adoption of AI is quite bad, and I suspect we'll see such developments in the long term future as it matures.
[1]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
This Regulation lays down rules relating to the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and rules relating to the free movement of personal data.
No snark, this situation sucks, but after dealing with GDPR for a while it's not well understood in tech societies
People look at historic court cases which defines future societal behavior (like acceptance of Gay marriage in some places).
It'll take time but get there eventually, and then we'll see changes based on that.
We had similar issues with the Google Play store for the ArtStation App (https://magazine.artstation.com/2018/12/happened-artstation-...), it simply got taken down and appealing continually got rejected. It was only after the issue got picked up as the top story on Hacker News and other sites that exposed the dysfunctional nature of their moderation that finally Google subtly changed their policy so that if the content is primarily “artistic” it’s allowed, but the catch is that only they deem what is appropriate and not...
We recently updated our Chrome extension also and it just seems to me that not a whole lot of effort is going into the Chrome Web Store, at least on the developer side where you update the extensions.
I hate regulations but I am of opnion that if you are a platform that other people use to make living then you should be regulated. Don't be platform of you cannot provide processes to handle appeals or able to pay massive damages in case of false positives.
For now, I will stick with webdev.
It feels like to me that they have just become a sprawling mass of interconnected yet disjointed divisions but without any real customer service department that can handle the amount of requests or situations like in OP. I am not on their side in any way, but Occam's razor and all, it just seems the most likely explanation to me is that they are just too cheap to pay people to handle the volume of customer issues they have? Or would it not be economically feasible? What do y'all think?
[Edited to divide into two paragraphs for slightly easier reading]
Undoubtedly, for the Chrome Store as well as all of their other properties.
Ultimately, Google's business model is about earning fractions of a cent per view/download and making it up in volume. Their profit margin depends on relentless cost optimization, and humans are inevitably the most expensive part of their support/maintenance systems.
Google undoubtedly doesn't want to put extension writers out of business, but if they adjust their procedures to give cases like this real human attention then they will undoubtedly allow a few dozen spammers/scammers to also receive human attention.
(Note: I present the above without judgement. If I were to add my judgement, I'd say that I don't think that this state of affairs is a good thing, and in the long run we may need to reconsider whether algorithmic promotion of content without human oversight is viable.)
Actually, the way they've expanded their range of products I'd wager they've put quite a few people out of business. It's especially bad if your business happens to not be one of the ones they acquihire, but one of their competitors, as evidenced by a handful of antitrust lawsuits.
That's fine but at least have a human review before taking disastrous actions like taking down extensions, lockdown Gmail accounts. If you can't afford even that at least have an appeal process where human would review the case. If you can't make the economics work even for that maybe just don't run the app store.
https://cloud.google.com/support
There's a variety of different tiers to suit your required level of support, and some products (e.g. G Suite) come with free in-built support.
(I work as part of Google Cloud support organisation).
If GCP wants more adoption then you have to fix this shit. Seriously.
Can you assure me that if I move to GCP, have a VM get infected and you ban my GCP account, my personal account will never get banned too? Or that of my next employer? Because I keep reading about that happening...
So for example - say I have a personal Gmail account (e.g. cute-boy-88@gmail.com)
But if I was working for a company that had spun up GCP infrastructure - my work would likely provide me with a work email address (e.g. trevor.jacobs@bankofengland.co.uk) - which I would use, rather than cute-boy-88@gmail.com.
This also covers the use-case that for example, you leave the company (in which case the company still controls those accounts), or an employee goes rogue and tries to takeover their work account.
In general, you would try to keep your work/personal accounts separate - you're not going to put your personal account as the recovery email for your work account for example. Your system administrator (or IT team at work) is going to be the one who resets your password, or recovers your account - and they're not going to send private work passwords to a personal email account (or they shouldn't).
Hopefully the above helps.
Is that enough for the ban to follow through and hit both?
Now do that for every app and extension. And repeat it for every single version that is ever uploaded.
I know there are benefits to having someone vet browser extensions, but it seems a shame that they remove the self-distribution option completely when their moderation is so ineffectual.
Slowly but surely, the people handover their rights and are shocked by the power the dictator "suddenly has."
When the chrome team was tightening their grips on chrome, people here hailed the move because some windows programs like anti-viruses, download managers and adware sideloaded extensions.
We do keep giving power to some system because they "protect us" (Google and Apple in 2010) but there's always a chance that they'll stop caring once they don't need your support anymore.
Microsoft is also trying to buy our support by being benevolent, I wonder how long and if that will last.
Then extensions started being a spyware / malware delivery mechanism, with popular ones being bought and turned overnight. Coupled with browser plugins shoved down on the user's throat by various Windows software, this made Firefox unusable, at least on Windows.
It's why back in 2010 I started recommending Chrome to family, because Chrome installations kept being clean. It's why we can't have nice things.
Yep, Google is certainly protecting us from companies that do that.
Instead of Kozmos shutting down, the best revenge would making a firefox extension and getting their users to switch.
I have been working on an extension that uses Chrome's Debugger API, lots of tab / network related APIs, and DevTools. I spun it up on Edge the other day and...it just worked. Everything worked.
I can't say the same for firefox. They do a good job bringing over some extension APIs, but I find it severely lacking for my use case.
While I generally agree with the reasons behind moving away from XPI extensions, it's been really disappointing to see Firefox not be as focused as I'd hoped they'd be on restoring lost extension functionality. That's especially important in the context of Google fuckery like the OP.
Firefox and Chrome both don't let users install any add-on without their permission. Switching to Firefox ecosystem just means the leash is longer (and the protection is fake because of their automated signing portal).
Even with my trivial side-project and a grand total of two releases so far, Google ar itrarily rejected one release for being "spammy" when there was literally a 5 line diff between it and the previous release. Thankfully just finding the depreciated dashboard and uploading an icon (the "new dashboard" doesn't have this feature yet apparently) got it through after resubmitting it.
It feels like they've set themselves as gatekeepers of Chrome extensions (Windows users can only install from the "store") but they aren't actually interested in doing the job even though you pay an admin fee for the privilege of developing a free extension for their browser.
I couldn't ask them to switch browsers for my little side project. I have to co-operate with Google's bureaucracy. For what it's worth, so far it seems like Mozilla is not exactly streets ahead, but at least they didn't charge me and they seem to be fairer and more helpful to extension developers (they have a "self-distribution" mode with relaxed oversight I used while in private alpha, and their tools and docs are better).
When Chrome was better, I suggested friends and family use Chrome. Now I think most people would benefit from using Firefox as their primary driver.
I think we as developers overestimate the resistance to switching.
This is a great but only a temporary solution. Firefox is taking jabs at extensions not on its recommended list with slightly scary warnings.
Firefox as a privacy focused browser should give users the ability to limit permission or sites extension can run on - including click to run option.
Without this, they'll soon go the way of chrome.
Heck Chrome started locking down extensions when they started catering courting enterprises. And they included the ability to make extensions uninstallable.
Bad actors took advantage of it, forcing chrome to tighten things further until extensions could only be installed from the store.
Seems like after doing this 2 or 3 times, I'd be making plans for a pivot or change to my business model.
The vast majority of people have forgotten that they aren't an email, webapp, cloud storage, or online translation provider. They are an advertising company. They use their products to steal your information. They aren't meant to help the user, because the user is not their customer. I'm sure you will get a real human employee if you are interested in buying ads from them.
Contrary to popular belief there are many companies that provide software besides google. Use them if you want a provider that might care about your problems. "It's not exactly the same as google ____" is not a valid excuse for not giving it an honest try.
But they are: all of these are paid services Google offers. Presumably if you pay you get a different level/kind of support?
https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-Docs-and-Drive-generate-an...
It's not unlikely that in this case they use the more traditional business model of having the free tier do the marketing for the premium option.
If those numbers are still anywhere near close, Google is an advertising company with some interesting side hustles. Just because Harley Davidson sell t-shirts, doesn't mean you'd describe them as anything other than a motorcycle company.
Granted, I'm not well-versed in looking at corporate financials, but the basic breakdown shown here [1] isn't terribly complex
[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/harley-davidson-rep...
You did inspire me to go look up actual numbers for google though. Looking at FY Q4 - https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings...
If I'm reading the first table correctly, the number for "google advertising" is the sum of all the lines above it, so that's the number I'll take. If we compare that against the bottom line, we get 82.3% for Q4, or 83.2% for FY19.
So either it's improving (from the viewpoint of someone with a distaste of the ad industry, at least), or I mis-remembered 2016's 86% - either way I can update or correct my claim.
I’ve been an enterprise customer of Googles services. When you have a problem simply finding the link, to the obscure dashboard login, to post an issue may take hours. I’m not even joking. Like Google is built to prevent you from using it discover useful support pages with contact information. “Account Executives” otherwise known as sales people, provide zero support after the contract is signed and I mean zero.
Once you write in, you wait, and hope. It’s kind of like filing a radar with Apple but a bit shittier because you have still idiotic, naive, hope you’ll get a reply or help.
If you ever do get a reply it’s likely a bot. If you ever have to disagree chances are it won’t be seen or acknowledged. Google is by far the worst service provider on the planet if you ever have an issue.
Seriously, I am slowly and surely de-googling, such as storing all data locally (if I need offsite, I use encrypted backups). My calendar now uses caldav on a raspberry pi, my home network uses ethernet for fast data flow to a portable drive and I am using a web browser for many applications such as email; I use noscript and nextdns to selectively control my browsing experience. SSH is powering everything, including being able to access the device from any client connected to the network and if I wanted, from the internet as well (which can be quite useful, needs to be done sensibly however).
It's possible, but it does require effort, staying power (when installing a python package doesn't quite work because python 2/3 still...sigh) and is, quite simply, not something the average home user cares about.
Do they care an enforcement agent can access your documents via a warrant? or your metadata? or access your 'social circle' or profile you? Honestly, not really. But my threat model is that Google can and will use their AI army against you, and if you are unfortunate enough to get caught by them, there's little regards to you as an individual.
I can't risk my data being in a service with such little regard to humans, it's not acceptable and frankly, hosting everything myself is safer, more rewarding from a learning experience (such as how linux works and certain design decisions that are both good/bad and can be frustrating).
go de-google, it's a worthwhile venture.
[P.S: in a previous life I was vastly pro google. I used location history for years, google pay, play store, play games, stored youtube history and the whole works. Thanks to Snowden and forums like reddit/hackernews, I learnt that this was foolish. Giving up my data, for free, in return for little value back (why give them my financial information, for what? Google Pay is no different to my contactless card and that goes to bank directly). Cutting all these data flows was refreshing, and is part of the plan to delete or make my account dormant altogether. I am vastly more pro-privacy and take strict measures to reduce my digital footprint, which is entirely possible but requires additional effort, where the temptation of letting the "nice guy" handle all the work is always there. Paying in cash is still a thing and leaves less of a trace to 'you' as a person than digital]
With more at home pandemic time I decided to just do it and have been super impressed. The Fastmail docs are really good, setting up DNS to use my custom domain had explicit steps and pictures for my specific provider (gandi.net) along with a ton of others.
They have super easy to setup import from Gmail to get things over initially and to keep things coming as you convert accounts.
They have really good instructions for all IMAP clients and it's been painless to set those up.
I did have to spend a day going through every account in 1Password and changing emails, but the super simple aliases you can setup in Fastmail make this great. I have a bunch of different ones for different types of sites (some very specific, some general catch-alls) on my domain which I can now blacklist in the future if I need to.
The main issue is that you realize a lot of sites are just terrible, many don't let you change your email at all and require contacting support. Some don't even let you change after contacting support (postmates just says to 'create a new account under your new email and abandon the old one').
In general though I'm happy I did it and the Fastmail site has been pretty impressive. I like paying for software I think is high quality and valuable (where the business and customer have aligned incentives).
I found the process of changing emails over meant I also was able to make Pass entries for them (another way I'm taking control of my data), and at the same time delete my account for websites I don't need anymore. It's been very cleansing.
Another thing I should mention is I wanted to try hey.com since it looks like they’re doing some interesting things (alerting users to tracking pixels to push back on clients like superhuman, whitelisting incoming mail, etc.) but they make it hard to get an invite so I gave up trying and paid for fastmail instead.
Also switched away from Google to Fastmail with my own domain about a year ago. Happy with the move, although Gmail still sees some activity because I never took the effort of migrating historic mails and all non-primary accounts.
It's a kind of shared hosting with full ssh (non-root) access. They offer a pre-installed Roundcube Webmailer, but you can host your own one as well.
I run my own Roundcube with my own Domain and configured a maildrop instance to sort incoming mails.
So far it works as a charm. The hoster is based in Germany and I trust them to be privacy-aware.
https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html
You pay based on traffic rather than per account/domain.
1. Set up both providers on an IMAP client that supports multiple simultaneous accounts.
2. Copy messages from the old provider to the new by simply selecting them in the old provider's folders in your IMAP client and dragging them to wherever you want them in the new provider's folders.
As long as you pick an IMAP client that supports copying between IMAP servers, this should do it. I used either Apple Mail or Outlook for this. I don't remember which.
True from a naively pedantic POV, but also ignores that betting odds happen to end up efficient also. Like saying shopkeeps set prices to drum up business and aren’t subject to the principles of supply and demand.
Google is an advertising company, but as part of its strategic goals it develops a high quality email client that beat out competitors on its own. I bet you the Gmail team is full of brilliant people who don’t give a shit about advertising and just want to make an awesome email client and spend night and day thinking about just that.
I have seen this first-hand. I bet you have too. A brilliant user friendly idea stays at the bottom of the product log, as middle and upper management product asks get piled on top of it, pushing it deeper and deeper.
Sure, I guess you could donate the small amount of free time you get to your employer and do it after work, but I can't think of anything more demotivating than working for free for a company with revenue in the hundreds of millions.
As long as someone understands the Faustian bargain and enters into it willingly, no problem. The difficulty is that it is unlikely most users really understand the details of the deal they are entering. "Hey, cool, free email." That's about the end of the thought process for most users. Google's approach is brilliant in its simplicity. "Free" stuff.
I mean they better give a shit about advertising because it’s what lets them have a job at Google.
I think this story is better told more simply, that when a company gets big it becomes arrogant, bad at social awareness and serving anybody. I'm sure you can find advertisers or would-be beneficiaries of what you call "data theft" that are fed up with Google breaking their stuff too.
They lost their way but keep riding their initial wave.
Everything else is a loss-leader or a rounding error.
This is all well and good, but they cornered the market for email, webapp, cloud storage and online translation products (and most importantly smartphones and web browsers). So until there is a viable alternative that the average person knows about, this will not change.
Bureaucracy and customer support problems with large companies is not a new or unique to Google.
That’s a fact. Speaking from personal experience, Google Ads/Admob seem to be the only services where human support exists.
Word of this got to our guy who handled ad buying. He called our ad rep with them, and asked pointedly "why the fuck am I spending $X thousand dollars a month to buy ads from you to get new customers, and then you are blocking those new customers from getting their receipts and support replies???".
The ad rep put our guy on hold for a minute, then came back and said he had their head of IT on conference. He asked the head of IT that question. The head of IT put us all on hold for a couple minutes, then came back with a couple engineers who worked on their email system on the line, and told them to whitelist us so that nothing of ours could be blocked as spam, and promised it would be done in something like half an hour.
It was, and we never had a problem there again.
They aren’t stealing from me. I get to watch YouTube videos, store my files in Drive, and use gmail — all things that I like quite a lot. Yes there are alternatives to gmail and Drive, none of which are good enough for the hassle of switching. There is no YouTube alternative.
More sinister than actually, "film you taking a shit and then sell it". As perverse as it sounds, but you won't even know it.
I actually got rejected from YC Summer 2019 with this idea. Demo Day would’ve been one to remember.
If you MITM your own browser you can do whatever you want without an extension (that's almost a hostage to browser makers.)
Postmortem and lesson learned: Don't make yourself dependent on BIG_COMPANY when building a product
Specifically:
> no Stream/Epic store listing
There exist lots of stores: Epic, Steam, GOG, Humble Store, itch, ... So diversify the risks of being dependent on the whims of one or few of them.
> no cloud servers
Write your server-side applications in a way that does not depend too much on the specific details of the cloud implementation of a specific cloud provider so that you can rather easily switch to another cloud provider if necessary.
Sorry, this is the only explanation I have for this, I've worked with this kind of person twice. Once they got the first version of something running they are done, no further testing, no sanity checks, no asserts or logger.warn() for "this can never happen" branches.
BTW, this doesn't have to be a conscious choice of anyone at Google, it could just be the way the incentives turn out.
Until Firefox or Edge catches up in both performance and implementation compatibility to make Chrome-first sites work, extension support isn't incentivized
There are a large number of user-hostile behaviors that stretch across industries: ad-funded software, app stores pushing microtransactions, wildly inconsistent interfaces and behaviors across DOM-driven software, opt-out behavior for things like arbitrary internet access.... user unfriendliness is the default state of software and even the most user friendly software still neglects the needs of many of their potential users.
This is a fact of software built in bounded time to be resold for passive income and “support” (which means “bug explainer” and possibly “refund-giver” in most corporate cultures).
Building software is hard, generally, and takes time, generally. Just because you can throw up a set of microservices in a day doesn't mean you can build a properly competing product that quickly. And as time goes on, the standard of competition gets higher and the barrier to entry gets higher, because user expectations grow over time. So most software isn't competitive.
At the same time, it seemed to not have had that many users yet, so, a bit early for Google to pay attention?
So your theory about Google wanting to run a bookmarking service I think is correct. Human curated links continue to be the only source of semantically relevant content. Everything else is algorithmic extraction of the relevant associations created by humans.
I have stuff saved in there dating from 2007 to 2015. Used to use a Firefox extension to load them in the sidebar.
I don’t use Google extensions on Chrome, and increasingly I don’t use Chrome.
That's what finally started bothering me enough, I don't feel comfortable keeping my search history and email in the same basket.
I'm currently in the process of switching to protonmail.com, which has been a positive experience so far.
Chrome supported/promoted its extensibility early on because it was seen as a competitive feature when compared to IE and Firefox at the time. At the time, FF supported a huge library of extensions, and Chrome's job was to eat FF's market share (and IE's). Thus, extensions were an obvious thing for them.
Now, extensions present pretty much nothing but problems for Google:
* Features that compete with Android * Features that compete with their own offerings, like Pushbullet * Features that actively harm their offerings, like adblockers * Features that actively harm their enterprise customers, like anti-paywalls
There's NO upside now for Chrome to support extensions, and ALL downside. They certainly don't need them in order to keep browser share. Too many people use it now.
By the way that description is one aspect of a monopoly (no, I don't want to start that discussion. Just pointing out that that behavior isn't possible in a competitive environment).
Isn't one of the 'main' criteria around anti-trust how a company impacts the consumer ? this sort of thing sounds harmful to the consumer (fewer choices, actively taking down products consumers use, etc.)
Exactly. This is basically a replay of the way Microsoft treated developers of third-party Windows programs in the 1990s. Only the time scale was different; you typically had at least a few years before MS either integrated your killer feature into Windows, or changed something about the Windows internals that broke your program, either way killing your business.
One way to tell if a conspiracy is crazy is if it doesn’t benefit rich people. This pretty clearly passes that test.
In my case, I make a nice little side income from that extension so it would be a noticeable income hit. But I'm not sure of anything I can really do to prevent it from being shut down if and when Google's robots decide the time has come.
Sorry, not trying to be obtuse, just curious from a side-income perspective.
Paying users seem to be part productivity nerds who maybe aren't technical enough to grok installing from the repo, and part people who just choose to pay for the automatic upgrades or to support the developer. Also, lots of users are web gamers who use it for in-game automation.
I wrote a post about it 1 week after monetizing, if you're curious: https://critter.blog/2020/01/14/week-1-of-monetizing-my-chro...