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Postmortem and lesson learned: Don't make yourself dependent on BIG_COMPANY when building a product
Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
51–60 of 530 posts
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#52Is 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 be…
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.
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Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#53It is disgusting that no one from media asks Sundar Pichai touch questions like: 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 su…
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…
Gaslighting is the worst.
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.)
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#54Developers evangelized Android and Chrome in their early days - created the monsters. People making Chrome only sites are feeding the monster. Instead of Kozmos shutting down, the best revenge would making a firefox extension and getting their users to switch.
Or even Edge. Their new Chromium based builds are Chrome compatible and have their own store.
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#55Maybe 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 compa…
> they aren't an email, webapp, cloud storage, or online translation provider.
But they are: all of these are paid services Google offers. Presumably if you pay you get a different level/kind of support?
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#56I 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" do…
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
>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.
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#58I 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 abou…
Stop worshiping the ground Google walks on, which seems common on HackerNews.
According to a lot of devs and CTOs I've met, Google and Apple can't do anything wrong while Microsoft can't do anything right.
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Brave is based on Chromium
But it's not chrome, hence not controlled by Google, and not bound by their policies regarding what extensions you may or may not install.
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#60Maybe 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 compa…
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]