I’m sorry that you had that experience. Maybe enough up votes will get Google’s attention.
Maybe with enough exposure it will get people to move away from digital sharecropping where anyone even can accidentally take away your livelihood.
Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
21–30 of 530 posts
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#22It seems like trying to build a business on any Google property is simply a bad idea. Or, if you do, have an alternative ready for when Google shuts down the product or cancels your account.
My "RL" business, that has nothing to do with tech, relies heavily on Google ads, whenever we lessen the spending on them, our income drop proportionally, I am very worried about what will happen when they yank our account due to a mistake, but I am yet to figure out an alternative, other ad providers made no difference...
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#23One thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of automated decision making going on. In [1], the ICO offers guidance around what the GDPR says in regards to this subject. What I don't understand is why the GDPR doesn't enforce the following: 1: Clear and concise information about the action being taken, and clear identification this was done using automation and did not involve any human oversight. 2: A process the…
Literally the first sentence of the GDPR:
This Regulation lays down rules relating to the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and rules relating to the free movement of personal data.
No snark, this situation sucks, but after dealing with GDPR for a while it's not well understood in tech societies
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#24Do you remember when browser extensions could be installed from a developer's own website and didn't require any kind of dysfunctional 'gatekeeping'?
I know there are benefits to having someone vet browser extensions, but it seems a shame that they remove the self-distribution option completely when their moderation is so ineffectual.
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#25Keeps me wondering, can we still install extensions outside their store? Or did they plug the last escape hatch and fucked it all up?
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#26Developers 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.
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#27Is 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…
> Is 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?
Undoubtedly, for the Chrome Store as well as all of their other properties.
Ultimately, Google's business model is about earning fractions of a cent per view/download and making it up in volume. Their profit margin depends on relentless cost optimization, and humans are inevitably the most expensive part of their support/maintenance systems.
Google undoubtedly doesn't want to put extension writers out of business, but if they adjust their procedures to give cases like this real human attention then they will undoubtedly allow a few dozen spammers/scammers to also receive human attention.
(Note: I present the above without judgement. If I were to add my judgement, I'd say that I don't think that this state of affairs is a good thing, and in the long run we may need to reconsider whether algorithmic promotion of content without human oversight is viable.)
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#28Keeps me wondering, can we still install extensions outside their store? Or did they plug the last escape hatch and fucked it all up?
I would be extremely surprised if they remove that feature all together because extension development would not work at all.
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#29I 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" doesn't have this feature yet apparently) got it through after resubmitting it.
It feels like they've set themselves as gatekeepers of Chrome extensions (Windows users can only install from the "store") but they aren't actually interested in doing the job even though you pay an admin fee for the privilege of developing a free extension for their browser.
Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
#30> Imagine having the same conversation, and starting it over and over from scratch every a few weeks
Seems like after doing this 2 or 3 times, I'd be making plans for a pivot or change to my business model.