Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down • Hacker News Board

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#151

Post by xg15 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

reidacdc wrote: post #135

I see these stories from time to time, and I can't help but wonder if there's an opportunity for some kind of third-party support for Google. Like, if you were a former Googler or someone who'd been through their customer-support wringer, and you had some contacts, you could set yourself up as a consultant for small-scale Google account holders who run into this. Charge a fee for access to your higher-tier contacts,…

> Charge a fee for access to your higher-tier contacts, maybe even sell "Google insurance"

There are organisations that already work like this in many countries of the world. That's usually what we want to get away from.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#152

Post by hmert » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

Google never invest/pay attention enough on support.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#153

Post by tomohawk » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

Another sad story of how a person's passion is quashed by big-corp monopoly.

When you're on the receiving end, the actions of Google are indistinguishable from those of traditional bureaucracies except that instead of training people to follow scripts, they have bots that take care of things automatically.

Unfortunately for us humans, Google's model of automating the disregard seems sustainable and profitable.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#154

Post by paultopia » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

reidacdc wrote: post #135

I see these stories from time to time, and I can't help but wonder if there's an opportunity for some kind of third-party support for Google. Like, if you were a former Googler or someone who'd been through their customer-support wringer, and you had some contacts, you could set yourself up as a consultant for small-scale Google account holders who run into this. Charge a fee for access to your higher-tier contacts,…

Apparently this exists for Amazon sellers already. See: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#155

Post by whathappenedto » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #72

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.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#156

Post by 29083011397778 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

soneil wrote: post #86

vosper wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/harley-davidson-rep...

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#157

Post by geza » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

I definitely feel for the author - the Chrome Extension team has been growing increasingly developer-hostile recently. My own open-source extension HabitLab ( https://habitlab.stanford.edu/ ) that I've been maintaining for the past 3 years is going to be removed in 2 days (got a 14-day removal notice for permissions even though all permissions it requests are used and needed, and every update I try to submit is rejected by their system after about 3-4 days) and I feel utterly helpless. It's only used by about 12,000 users so unlike PushBullet I probably don't have the visibility to get a human to intervene, so will be going the way of Kozmos most likely.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#158

Post by pricechild » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

errantspark wrote: post #100

Nightshaxx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kinda NSFW.....might be helpful next time if you indicated it as such.

Really?? Feels like I'm living in 17th century New England here.

I can confirm it's NSF(my)W in 21st century Old England.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#159

Post by dannyw » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #145

Awelton wrote: post #38

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 compa…

> 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.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#160

Post by jjoonathan » Sat, May 23, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

crystaln wrote: post #115

jjoonathan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.