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Ask HN: Why do many people hate Pocket?

11 points by rg111 ↗ HN
I see a lot comments on HN that signal a serious dislike for Pocket. It's like many here absolutely abhor it. Whenever a thread has relations with Firefox or Mozilla, many comments pop up about Pocket, and all of them are negative.

Why?

Is it simply because it is enabled by default by Firefox, or are there other reasons that I am missing?

13 comments

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slater
1) Questions about privacy

2) Could just be a nice lil installable add-on, but that would mess with their precious metrics/KPI

rg111
> Questions about privacy

What questions, exactly?

Does it get flagged by tracker control apps a lot, or did any privacy expert wrote bad reports on it?

> but that would mess with their precious metrics

So, do you think that or is it common knowledge that Mozilla profiles their users?

moltke
I was (very) mildly interested in it until it got spammed into Firefox. Now it exists in the same category as Norton Antivirus in my mind. I stopped paying attention to what they were doing around then.

It probably actually has some decent features (probably some I want) but every time I see/hear about it I have a pretty negative reflexive reaction.

rg111
> but every time I see/hear about it I have a pretty negative reflexive reaction.

That's what I am trying to figure out. Why is every reaction that I get on HN is negative?

Everybody says it's bad, but nobody clarifies.

The forum being HN irks me more.

lostdog
Spammy marketing means the leadership of the company has bad product sense. No point in wasting time on that sort of product.
rg111
> Spammy marketing means the leadership of the company has bad product sense.

I understand this point-of-view.

But this cannot be the sole reason. Are there any other reasons that are concrete, provable?

And this is also not a universal statement. I have seen good products, not limited to software industry, that were excellent, but the marketing was spammy.

TheGrumpyBrit
Dislike of a particular aspect of a product doesn't need to be concrete/provable - a vague feeling of "I don't like this so I won't use it" is all it takes.

With Pocket in particular, the bundling with Firefox moved my impression of it from "this is a potentially useful tool" to "this company feels like they need to force their product down my throat by bundling it with a browser - I don't know why they're doing that but it makes me not want to keep any data with them"

mikecoles
It's my sole reason. I thought the product could have been useful and toyed with it until it started coming bundled.
jack335
I am still using it but I also get annoyed about it

> App is slow

> App sometimes doesn't have everything offline (isn't that the main point)

> I don't find the button of adding an article from the pocket app :D

muzani
I used to use it a lot. But it feels like a victim of feature bloat, like Evernote.

I just want a bookmarking app. It feels like a dodgy browser. It tedious to find articles I want to read, tedious to actually read them or even open them in a browser.

I think there's a subconscious hate for feature bloat because of the work many of us do.

u2077
Because I use raindrop.io. Also, the fact that pocket was integrated into Firefox (with recommendations on the homepage) makes it feel like bloat. If I wanted a browser with garbage pre-installed, I would have used Edge. That being said, I have never given pocket a try and Raindrop works perfectly for me.
kosasbest
> Is it simply because it is enabled by default by Firefox

Largely, yes. Many people didn't signup for the Pocket integration. Mozilla should've ran a poll/survey to gauge interest, but instead it was pushed on users. You can disable it in Firefox if you don't like it. Or just use Librewolf which strips out a bunch of Mozilla stuff.

maverick74
WT... ?!

I didn't know Pocket before the Firefox integration, either, but I'm really loving it.

Unlike many other sites, it does bring you news and articles you can trust (many by professional journalists).

Regarding the privacy concerns, according to what I've read at the time, it does create a kind of profile about the user, to target you with articles you seem to prefer, but that profile, unlike the competition, is not stored on the cloud... It is stored locally and never leaves your PC.

So... I'm liking it a lot!!!