I'm not sure it makes sense to disable this -- I can only imagine people forgetting they disabled it, then not understanding why they're not getting a family member's folder of photos. And you can already remove something shared with you by going in Drive to "Shared With Me" and clicking "Remove" in the context menu for the file/folder. Otherwise, sharing something with a Google account is no different from sending a…
> But, like Gmail, what Drive should have is the ability to block specific sharers. It should have the ability to only accept document shares from people in your google contacts / in your organization.
I don't think that would be super-helpful. Even if you work in a corporation, you occasionally need to receive a shared file from a customer, outsourced team, etc., even if you don't plan on it. Then, debugging why you're not receiving shared files will be frustrating.
The problem here isn't people sharing things with you, the problem is abusive spam. So anti-spam tech (like blocking which is the most basic) is the right approach here, I think.
LOL, you're assuming anyone gets promoted by fixing issues at Google. Wrong. You build some new shit and switch teams. Someone pitches a new project and builds from scratch. Rinse and repeat. This particular issue happens (at least that's my recollection a few years ago) frequently enough at Google that there were memes about it internally. Not sure giving additional feedback would help.
This is so glaringly apparent as a user. I think Google makes some fantastic products, but the number of "This has to be so exceedingly easy to fix, but Google just doesn't give a damn" issues I've hit is crazy. Here's one simple one: the number of volume steps in Android is only 16: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37035441 . This means that the difference between off and the lowest level volume can be pretty…
I don't think it is as simple as a singular person or a single room saying "I don't give a shit". It's a matter of prioritization. (In this particular case, even from a UX perspective alone, you could argue that increasing friction in sharing could net-net hurt the average user.)
I don't think Google (if we can anthropomorphize it at all) is blind to this general phenomenon though--it's a trade-off you have to make about what company you want to be. Is it better for you to invest resources into incremental improvements to polish the final 2% or try again and maybe make a breakthrough. You have to look it from multiple angles too: are you going to attract the most talented people giving them such gruntwork or will they quit? Is there any meaningful incremental business you could get from polishing Android (remember, polished Android is more expensive and has to compete head-on with a company whose focus is to polish and is best set up to do so). It's complicated. There's a place for multiple models.
The mods on the support forums who make it sound like basic functionality missing from their product is your own fault for not submitting some kind of ticket deserve the gaslighting prize of the year for each of the last 5 years. They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage. https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en
Google support forums are terrible. Every time there is a missing feature (I usually find it in Google Spreadsheet) or a bug, the corresponding entry in the support forum would be answered with some pretext of why said feature will never be supported.
Google products are more likely to be suddenly deprecated with no offboarding plan than to care what features an overwhelming majority of customers want.
Most Google products exist solely for the benefit of the Google engineers who use them for resume padding & career growth. They lose money for Google the company and they infuriate loyal customers up until they are capriciously surprise decommissioned.
Answer: find the email address of the person the product manager of Google Drive reports to, and start sharing stuff with them. (/s: not condoning doxxing here)
LOL, you're assuming anyone gets promoted by fixing issues at Google. Wrong. You build some new shit and switch teams. Someone pitches a new project and builds from scratch. Rinse and repeat. This particular issue happens (at least that's my recollection a few years ago) frequently enough at Google that there were memes about it internally. Not sure giving additional feedback would help.
Many organizations work like this. People get credit for orphaned projects they no longer work on.
Then, more responsible developers have to waste their lives maintaining code that was designed to be orphaned from the start.
How so? someone has to share the files first and there is a quota on the amount of times a shared file can be accessed.
open a dummy account, upload and share it with your main account
Until google's automated process ban all those accounts. That method is used by many pirate video sites and they'll have to constantly play cat and mouse with google. Do not try it if your account contains anything important as once you got banned there is no way to restore your account due to absolute lack of human tech supports on google side.
Google support forums are terrible. Every time there is a missing feature (I usually find it in Google Spreadsheet) or a bug, the corresponding entry in the support forum would be answered with some pretext of why said feature will never be supported.
Are the people that answering questions on that support forum actually google employees? I got this impression that google employees never post on that forum and the people that answer are just unpaid forum members which somehow take it upon themselves to post answers.
I bet you're right.
Reminds me a little of the scenario where people bizarrely ask a forum if they can bring their dog to a hotel, some random person says "yes" and then you wonder if the hotel declined to accept the dog if the owner would say "well Bob off the internet said it would be fine"
My adventures last week: Question: We have a G Suite Enterprise account. We used to share documents with a contractor. They no longer contract with us. How do we remove that contractor from every shared document. Answer 1: Run this report to get a list of every document shared with them. Manually visit each document and un-share it. Answer 2: Our API docs are at... FFS, Google. I really don't think this is that unusu…
Generally, you would disable an account to revoke sharing. Are you sharing these outside your domain? That could be part of the problem. I agree there should be an easier way to remove sharing for everything for a particular user (and there may be). Have you checked out GAM?
The mods on the support forums who make it sound like basic functionality missing from their product is your own fault for not submitting some kind of ticket deserve the gaslighting prize of the year for each of the last 5 years. They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage. https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en
Apple forums are also like this. There are a bunch of Apple apologists full of zeal, trivializing problems and giving people false workarounds.
Google support forums are terrible. Every time there is a missing feature (I usually find it in Google Spreadsheet) or a bug, the corresponding entry in the support forum would be answered with some pretext of why said feature will never be supported.
This is off topic but it reminds me, every time I look for some Windows 10 problem, it mostly leads to some Microsoft forum (answers.microsoft.com). In there however, the questions systematically get answered by a billion "MSFT specialist consultants #not working for MSFT", and it always weirds me out. Are these people there for self promotion, for the thrill of it or is it MSFT that has some reward system for third…
In the '90's I had a mission that I carried out by offering answers to questions on CompuServe fora pertaining to Windows. In 1996 Microsoft decided to embrace and extend this by offering perks to the people who were most active. That program has been revised and renamed over the years. I wouldn't say that I succeeded in my mission, but I would say I don't feel I need to do such things personally. The people you are pointing out seem to need to offer you a solution, however off-point, and need you to accept it formally if you indeed find it to be a solution, and I speculate, seem to be paid and possibly try to make a living doing it now. A possible explanation is that Microsoft doesn't want to be obligated to provide online support any more than Google does. But they want to indeed offer online support for the time being, as casually as possible, and they are regulating some people by measuring some aspects of the support activities of some people.