Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

palant.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 187 posts

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#51

Post by tamrix »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #20

In another thread[1] on HN today there was discussion over developers selling out their web extensions to marketing corporations which end up filling them with tracking scripts and malware. Someone suggested that google should be much more aggressive at filtering out said extensions, and one of the responses was a sarcastic comment over a future article about Google attacking extension developers and the free web. An…

All conveniently in time before chrome bans third party extensions unless they are approved in the store.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#52

Post by grigjd3 »

CryoLogic wrote: post #7

They somehow have the man power to ban your extension in 2 hours and 30 minutes without an explanation as to why, but than when I get a fake copyright claim on my most popular YouTube video somehow it takes three months, 12 emails and I still don't get the ~$900 lost revenue back.

I would guess this was automated somehow.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#53

Post by fwdpropaganda »

gnicholas wrote: post #23

Same thing happened to me [1], with a slightly different rationale for pulling the extension. This happened despite tens of thousands of users, years of good reviews, and an extension so useful that Google's own accessibility team demos it at conferences. I was only able to get the situation sorted because I know people who work at Google on the Chrome team. Even with all this, it took weeks to get the previous versi…

Stop contributing to google's ecosystem.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#54

Post by gnicholas »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #35
gnicholas wrote: post #23

Same thing happened to me [1], with a slightly different rationale for pulling the extension. This happened despite tens of thousands of users, years of good reviews, and an extension so useful that Google's own accessibility team demos it at conferences. I was only able to get the situation sorted because I know people who work at Google on the Chrome team. Even with all this, it took weeks to get the previous versi…

Another good option is posting your story on HN: if it gets to the front page, you have good chances of solving your problem.

I did post at the time. Didn’t get much attention.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#55

Post by gnicholas »

e40 wrote: post #48
gnicholas wrote: post #23

Same thing happened to me [1], with a slightly different rationale for pulling the extension. This happened despite tens of thousands of users, years of good reviews, and an extension so useful that Google's own accessibility team demos it at conferences. I was only able to get the situation sorted because I know people who work at Google on the Chrome team. Even with all this, it took weeks to get the previous versi…

Did you ever find out why this all happened?

I did not, and hearing this guy’s story means that the problem hasn’t been completely solved.

For us, this was triggered by a question about our privacy policy (which we have, and always have had). I assumed that it was just a glitch in their review and follows-up software — specifically, that it didn’t give the full 7 day grace period. But it sounds like it’s a bigger problem than this.

One of the big frustrations for me was that their system was run from an anonymous mailbox, and seemed to have different folks responding different times. Also, if they sent you a message and you replied immediately, you might not hear back for days. At times, it seemed like I was either corresponding with a bot or someone with very bad English.

Maybe a tech journalist can write a story about what’s going on, and actually get some answers from them?

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#57

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

CryoLogic wrote: post #7

They somehow have the man power to ban your extension in 2 hours and 30 minutes without an explanation as to why, but than when I get a fake copyright claim on my most popular YouTube video somehow it takes three months, 12 emails and I still don't get the ~$900 lost revenue back.

Mirror your videos to other services. If you want to make sure your content is preserved you can upload it to archive.org.

There's also a huge difference in scale. There's not that many browser extensions to consider, but they have millions of videos on YouTube. It's not really comparable.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#58

Post by gnicholas »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #53
gnicholas wrote: post #23

Same thing happened to me [1], with a slightly different rationale for pulling the extension. This happened despite tens of thousands of users, years of good reviews, and an extension so useful that Google's own accessibility team demos it at conferences. I was only able to get the situation sorted because I know people who work at Google on the Chrome team. Even with all this, it took weeks to get the previous versi…

Stop contributing to google's ecosystem.

I have told them that this issue has pushed us to look more at other platforms. We are also on Firefox (much easier now that their extension platform is similar to Chrome’s), but we still have the vast majority of our users on Chrome (60k versus I even submitted our extension to Opera. Months went by with no response. Dev forums show that this is a common experience.

We’re also on iOS, but since extensions don’t really exist on mobile, this isn’t a great substitute.

I’d welcome suggestions for another platform that we should be on!

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#59

Post by bdcravens »

Animats wrote: post #32
bdcravens wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably far more difficult than #DeleteFacebook

Not really. I don't use a Google account.

That's the thing that makes Google a more challenging beast than Facebook: you don't have to have an account to be an asset for Google, and you likely feed them more data all the time.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#60

Post by megous »

gnicholas wrote: post #23

Same thing happened to me [1], with a slightly different rationale for pulling the extension. This happened despite tens of thousands of users, years of good reviews, and an extension so useful that Google's own accessibility team demos it at conferences. I was only able to get the situation sorted because I know people who work at Google on the Chrome team. Even with all this, it took weeks to get the previous versi…

Sounds like they don't really have automation that well set up for fixing up removal mistakes. Not a great sign.
Post reply on HN