Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

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

kodfabrik.com

1,178 points_fwu1513 comments

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.

I'm really sorry to hear that--it looks like a useful extension and I'm sure you've put a lot of hard work into it.

Naive question to you and to other extension developers here ... how does Firefox do when it comes to this issue? Is it just that the market share is so much lower that it's not worth developing for FF? I ask this as a happy FF user on mac, linux, ios.

I tried porting the extension over to Firefox when Firefox switched to WebExtensions, and at the time there were tons of incompatibilities, mostly with Firefox's Shadow DOM implementation (HabitLab is a huge and complicated codebase, porting it is non-trivial - I had an issue tracking it at https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab/issues/137 ). I'm sure it's a valid option for smaller extensions however. At the moment I'm trying to get it accepted on the Edge store, as Edge is much more compatible with Chrome extensions than Firefox.

I wonder if others are thinking the same re: Edge and whether this will eventually lead to chrome losing users to Edge as useful extensions find a home there.

Have you tried again with Firefox recently? I'm the developer of an extension that makes extensive use of the Shadow DOM for UI components in content scripts. I recently ported our Chrome-only extension over to Firefox and had a few minor issues but none with the UI. I'm even using React for Shadow DOM UI components and it's been working well in both browsers.

I work for Microsoft on a moderately complex chromium extension. We've investigated porting it to Firefox (we've had a small but nonzero minority of users ask about it, and several of our engineers have a personal interest in it), but it's really hard to estimate ahead of time how much effort it's going to be. Most of the issues are not so bad to fix individually, it's just an unknown-length onion peeling exercise. It's especially challenging when a library/framework you use is impacted by a difference and its maintainers aren't motivated to improve compatibility; some examples of this we've run into include "Firefox's RegExp implementation doesn't support named capture groups" (but the library author doesn't want to make the code less readable by not using them) and "Firefox's auto-size behavior for extension popup UI (what you see when you click am extensions toolbar icon) sometimes sends spurious window resize events when the DOM is modified" (the UI control library we use has behavior to dismiss context menus on window resize, which this breaks).

The most painful incompatibility I've read about was in the Bitwarden extension, which basically doesn't support most operations in Firefox private windows because Firefox intentionally doesn't support getBackgroundPage() from there, and Bitwarden architected their extension to use that for all IPC between their frontend and backend layers. You can avoid that incompatibility by using runtime.sendMessage for that purpose, but they didn't know that at the time they wrote it (there's a warning about it in the MDN docs for getBackgroundPage now, but that warning wasn't there at the time). We happened to have gotten lucky in our extension in that we use sendMessage for the same purpose, but we certainly didn't know about that incompatibility at the time we were making the architectural decision.

Beyond just making it work, our team would also want to be able to automate regression tests against Firefox if we were to officially support it. For a long time, selenium was the most realistic option for that, but we switched away from selenium to puppeteer a year ago due to reliability issues with the former. Now that Firefox support in puppeteer is very recently starting to stabilize, we're hopeful we'd be able to use that, but we haven't tried it yet and it's new enough that we wouldn't expect it to be fully compatible/stable yet.

Is there a workaround for users? Old builds of Chromium?

It works fine with the current versions of Chrome (and Chromium-based browsers like Edge), you'll just need to sideload it once it gets removed from the Chrome store. Alternatively, if/when I manage to get it accepted into the Edge store, you could switch to Edge.

I thought Google banned sideloading unapproved extensions on Windows and Mac.

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/external_extensions

Well, you can enable developer mode, extract the extension, add it manually, re-enable developer mode every time Chrome starts, and manually update to each new version...

No need to re-enable it every time Chrome starts.

I meant distribution as a zip file that you can load in developer mode, like the installation instructions for Bypass Paywall ( https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome ). It's not a very user friendly installation process but it still works. But yes, CRX-based sideloading no longer works on Chrome.

I believe CRX-based sideloading is still a Chromium feature. For example, if I turn on developer mode in Vivaldi, I can drag a CRX onto the extensions page and install it without a problem.

That's very sad to hear, I've been an avid user of HabitLab. Thank you so much for developing this tool! I wonder if you've ever considered doing a Chromium fork with the HabitLab interventions integrated deeper into the browser? I think there's a lot of potential and interest for a productivity-oriented browser that helps stay focused and develop good time management skills.

A Chromium fork is going to be a pain to maintain. My contingency plan if it gets removed from the Chrome store is to try to get it accepted into the Edge and Opera stores, and ask users to switch to either Edge or Opera (and provide sideloading instructions for those who want to stick to Chrome).

Why not, might I ask, Firefox?

Edit: no need to reply, I've seen your answer below, thanks.

Good luck getting drm content to work on a chromium fork.

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

I'm not sure how this would work legally with employment contracts, but it would be worth it to get your employees hired at Google so they can professionally execute that role for you. We have joked before about not poaching friends from Google since they are more valuable working there than at your company.

Ah, this might seem like a joke but it's true.

I was part of a student association when I was an university student.

Part of the activities was to host gnu/Linux courses record them and upload them to YouTube.

One day, out of the blue, the channel goes dark and nobody knows why.

We all panicked. We had received no warnings and there was no way to appeal.

In the end, we asked some former students that were employed by Google to pull some levers internally, and we managed to get our channel restored.

This is bordering on dystopian monolithic megacorp nightmare.

Ugh. We get the cyberpunk dystopia but we don't get the cool cyber-limbs and neural AR interfaces.

Worst of both worlds. Can I get a refund?

All of the dystopia, none of the cyberpunk. Instead we get a business services dystopia. Spreadsheets are the last refuge of the BS Underground, fighting for their right to maintain their email inbox and browser extensions, while risking all revenue to MonoCop.

Having friends (software engineers, SREs, etc) at Google used to be the way to get a human to look at something but these days it gets you nothing.

You’re better off with a highly rated news.yc post.

It depends how highly placed they are (and how much money you spend/ make them).

The tech giants seem to operate on a law of averages, where automating everything and having essentially zero support system for those using their services is worth it despite the (apparently quite frequent) failures that may break accounts and cost the giant some money as a result.

I've seen similar situations happen with Facebook, where entire businesses with what you might think were significant ad budgets were completely shut out of advertising on FB because its system for advertisers was broken yet again. I guess if you have a very small number of channels that are totally dominant, as Google and FB now are, you can afford to throw away a thousand here or even a million there if it saves you millions in support costs.

Whether organisations that have become so dominant should be legally allowed to do that, given the unfair adverse effect it can have on others operating in the ecosystems they create, is a different question. Just as we have laws about monopolies and limit what they can do in other contexts, maybe it's time for the handful of businesses that dominate online advertising or marketplaces to be regulated for the protection of everyone else.

> Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government.

It's more like dealing with a blind automaton, and that's becoming more common outside of Google, too. Automation support scales well because the fixed costs are high but the marginal cost is low, human attention scales poorly, with a high marginal cost.

To a first approximation authoritarian bureaucracies are blind automatons too.

To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units. A lot of "fat" in bureaucracy comes with dealing with the fact that the computing units are buggy, unreliable, and sometimes actively malicious.

And so the next step would be to actually throw out the written word and replace it with actual code.

I'm serious.

Why let "government code" be subject to all the shortcomings and pitfalls of natural language when you could just use cold hard logic and exact math instead?

Natural language is just programming for humans, anyways.

That would be a very wrong move. I'm serious.

This unreliability that comes from agency of the individual compute nodes has some very important benefits: the system is much more resistant to bugs in code[0], and much more humane. Software, as it is today, doesn't understand morality. That's e.g. you wouldn't want to automate away judges in the justice system - the law is code, but it's buggy, and isn't complete enough to handle all cases in all contexts. You need case-by-case judgements, and that's why it's good to have human bureaucrats who can independently think and override the system as needed. Otherwise, the system would just grind people that fell into it.

[0] - Like, "you have to deliver document X before 14th to get something done, but the document is only available from 23rd". Happened to me during university, where some scolarship depended on a government document that you could procure only well after deadline. Of course, the secretary at the university knew this and let you fill in incomplete application; she'd wait for the whole allowed processing time, then send you a letter asking you to bring in missing documents and giving you 14 extra days. Given that this was a bug at an intersection of two bureaucratic systems, if this was software, it would likely go undetected for a while, until someone started to wonder why nobody is applying for scolarships anymore.

I'm just going to hook up on your example of the document and the deadline, and state the following: You're assuming a (very) pessimistic scenario (that you likely justify with your experience of IT systems and their bugs, but Apollo 11 had IT too, and got it done, and everyone back).

Allow the benefit of doubt that a "software-based" system would only be implemented, if it were superior in such a way, that such a situation doesn't even occur in the first place. That is the benefit. It alleviates the necessity for the "human-wiggling-around-laws-that-actually-make-it-illegal-what-you're-doing,-but-those-laws-are-stupid,-so-whatever,-we-don't-care-about-that-specific-law".

It's most likely a very unknown concept for anyone presently, since it doesn't yet exist, but I believe, if human civilization works more on the aspect of creating a universal law that is language-agnostic, we would have a better solution than the ones we currently have.

Also, tax filings and the like are basically automated. It's just about expanding such automated concepts for more efficiency as well as removing the language-bias laws exhibit. I'm fully aware of the shortcomings of automation, and also do believe that a human "arbitrator", or judge, is required and preferred.

But in essence, my goal in stating my opinion was to plant the idea of language-agnostic law, for which maths, code and logic can form a solution. It's philosophical pondering towards a global government policy in a very long-run.

> but Apollo 11 had IT too

So did the Mars Climate Orbiter.

Anything can go wrong, anywhere. Still, I think the IT guys and gals in space-tech have (necessarily) one of the best track records in reliability.

> And so the next step would be to actually throw out the written word and replace it with actual code.

That is, indeed, that natural conclusion of the deeply flawed premise that law and regulation are basically computer code written by programmers who have to contend with buggy, sometimes malicious, computing units.

But other than the fact that the word “code” is often used in reference to each, law/regulation and computer code are not the same kind of thing.

> Why let "government code" be subject to all the shortcomings and pitfalls of natural language when you could just use cold hard logic and exact math instead?

The fuzziness in law and regulation is very rarely anything close to minimum required because you are dealing with natural language, and very often deliberate to create room for flexible application. And there is a strong overlap between the places that that is least true and widely perceived gross injustices in the law.

> Natural language is just programming for humans, anyways.

No, it's not.

> To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units.

Having spent a fair amount of time working in various bureaucracies, and studying law and government administration, that's very much not true. It's very much the idealized view that many people outside of bureaucracies have of them, especially people in computing, but it's very much not a good approximation of most real bureaucracies, or their governing law and regulation, because the latter usually is written in a way which deliberately relies heavily on discretion within (often deliberately fuzzy) constraints rather than seeking to provide deterministic rules for outcomes, and in many systems regulation is actually written by the bureaucrats enforcing it (who also tend to have disproportionate influence on shaping the actual law).

You'll see down in the subthread that I essentially agree with what you wrote here. However, I still maintain the analogy to a distributed computing system is good and revealing. It's particularly the observation of the flow of forms and documents in and out of bureaucracy, as well as within it, that makes me think of it.

As explained below, I don't agree that it's a good idea to replace bureaucracy with code. However, I think the lessons our industry has learned in architecting software systems could inform designing efficient data and request flow within a bureaucracy. At the very least, it gives us language to talk about bureaucracies as systems.

> However, I think the lessons our industry has learned in architecting software systems could inform designing efficient data and request flow within a bureaucracy.

This I definitely agree with; it's kind of disappointing the information systems engineering knowledge has tended to become siloed within organizations dedicated to information technology, because you get much bigger gains if you apply that knowledge to broader processes, not just within computing systems supporting the processes. OTOH, with people who have that knowledge generally getting paid more to apply it in IT (and getting listened to more there), it's kind of understandable if unfortunate that the knowledge gets stuck in IT.

So true. It's maybe not intended, but no fat shaming please.

I don't think that's really true. Authoritarian regimes are, if anything, more prone to personal foibles of individual decision-makers than others.

This is a manifestation of O'Sullivan's law as applies to corporate culture and it's a spot on assessment

Zomg good thing this is visible.

And its one of the reasons people should stop using google products, or it will get worse.

I am 99% on DuckDuckGo and other search engines, Firefox (which is great), Lots of mail providers these days which excel on every front, lots devtools that don’t need any Google infrastructure,

I really hope one of these days we get a message from Google (btw Google is really the most faceless organization out there, I really need to think hard to give you any names) that they will change their tune, but until that time, its best to leave.

Yup, DuckDuckGo's been my default browser search engine for quite some time now. I'm quite happy with the results. I'm reaching out to google.com less and less every day.

The last straw will be abandoning Gmail :)

I don't if this will help you make that decision, but Fastmail's alias system is a godsend for me when it comes to filtering incoming emails and protecting myself from spam.

With every account you get a finite number of aliases you can create, but in practice that number is high enough that I just use a new alias for every site I visit.

Unlike in Gmail, these aliases don't contain any references to your original address. So if you're signing up for a dogwalking service, you can create an alias for `ilovewalkingdogs@fastmail.com`, and then if you start getting spam to that address, you know where it came from, you know that there's no chance your real address will be reverse-engineered from your alias, and you can auto-reject or sort everything to that address into a separate folder without affecting any of your other emails.

I have separate email aliases I distribute to friends and family members so that if I ever run into a doxing situation or for some reason need to go nuclear on my email, I can turn everything off except for them. I also have my email linked to my own domain of course, but when I sign up for most commercial services, I use @fastmail.com aliases. That way I know that there's no way for those services to track me across accounts/websites via my personal domain name.

And everything gets organized in the same inbox, same account. I consider it to be a killer feature.

I don't want to spoil any joy of yours but this is in my experience pretty standard with most email providers.

With some you can do the + trick (which gmail probably still does) but i just have my domain as catchall and it works pretty great with blacklisting.

And a fairly common trick used by those who want to mask how they got your email address is to strip everything between + and @ in the email address you gave them.

The reason Fastmail's feature matters is specifically because it's not using the + trick or a catch-all domain. They're 'real' aliases, not just Regex filters or wildcards.

If you're using the + trick, you haven't gained any privacy, because I can strip the + and get your original address.

If you're using a catch-all domain, you haven't gained any privacy, because the domain remains a unique identifier for your all of your accounts. It's good for organizing, but not for privacy, because you're still publicly attaching your identity to every email you send.

With fastmail, I don't need to do myaddress+walmart@fastmail.com or walmart@danshumway.com. I can just do walmart@fastmail.com. That's a really large privacy win, since it gets rid of one of the biggest and least regulated unique identifiers that services can share with each other.

I don't know if other providers like Outlook are also offering 'real' aliases. I'm happy if they are, I think this should be an industry standard feature. Either way, switching to any provider does will be a pretty significant feature upgrade over Gmail, even if you're currently using a paid Gmail account with your own domain.

I see so the only difference is that they provide 600 aliases on their domain compared to lets say 25 of other providers. I wonder how they deal with poluted namespace.

So It so different from random domain catchall?

The reason why i would be worried about Fastmail is that they have are Australian company with servers in US. Both of those mean that Law enforcement can simply ask for users emails.

Now i am for sure not target of Law enforcement or goverment so i dont care but i am not sure why i wouldnt use service thats in better juristiction and is privacy focused.

I believe outlook & yahoo mail also have real aliases.

I’ve been looking at Office 365 this weekend as an alternative to my (single person) GSuite account. I’m actually pretty impressed. It feels much more polished than than Google’s software (to me, anyway). Teams also looks like a good slack alternative, I’ve already got good use out of OneNote, and all the Mac desktop software launches very quickly (definitely not the MS Office I remember!).

I think I may actually migrate all my email over today. The idea of having a different interface to GMail is pretty exciting. I’ve been staring at that (increasingly slow) interface for too long.

20 years ago I certainly wouldn’t have imagined myself doing this, but it actually seems like decent software now. Sure I need to jump into bed with MS, but that doesn’t bother me nearly as much as Google.

I agree, Google is not forcing anyone to use their browser, yet people are complaining that Google is evil and immediately after continue to use their products/services. I don't understand the human psychology behind this..

s/these days/always/

Here, fixed it for you.

This feels like 1994 all over again. In 1994 you had one dominant software monopoly in Microsoft. Today you have several: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook with dominance in individual spheres of influence. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In 1994 Microsoft didn't arbitrarily ban applications on their OS.

Also, as far as I know, even couldn't.

They had different knobs available to them, and it's not clear given the opportunity that they wouldn't try it. E.g. it was less common for PCs to be connected to the internet and receive OS updates, so they wouldn't have an effective way of using a policy like that.

They certainly did their best to prevent any other OS from being on your hardware.

They still are not doing it right? You just get the "downloaded from internet" warning.

I think you can argue that current day MS is a little more afraid of anti-trust action than 1990s MS. Game developers were legitimately scared that MS was going to do this for windows and start taking their own 30% cuts from all PC games. I'm not sure if Valve confirmed it, but it seems likely that SteamOS/Steam machines were at least partly a backup plan for ensuring there was a place to sell games without MS skimming off the top.

No, but there was that whole “Windows won’t run on DR-DOS” scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

They would have loved that though!

I mean Steam was made as a panicked reaction when Microsoft announced its Windows store. People in the industry knew very well what they were trying to do.

Steam predates any windows app store stuff by almost a decade, it wasn't a "panicked reaction" to anything.

Yeah, grandparent is misremembering a real event. Steam did do a panicked reaction to Windows store: a hard pivot to Linux support and the linux-based SteamOS.

Steam was nowhere near the app store we know today when it was created. It was Valve's auto-updater and match-making service. They had a few partner games using it as well.

I may recall it badly but I am pretty sure they opened it to general companies and indie studios as a reaction to Windows 8 built-in app store:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377

I've been on steam since a while after it's genesis. IIRC the store aspect of steam started in 2006-2007, which is way before even windows 8 which only came out after 2011-2012

They made PC makers pay a license fee per computer even if the computer didn’t ship with Windows.

They coined the term embrace, extend, extinguish. See the history of Internet Explorer.

It's time to switch to Firefox and advocate for Firefox usage.

> Some anonymized data will be sent to Stanford for research purposes. See our privacy policy for details.

Maybe this text on your front page is triggering someone at Google extensions department?

When you are detained by the police, you don't have to do the guesswork of what you did wrong.

The police should/would tell you.

Make your extension available on Firefox

Would be great if you ported HabitLab for Firefox

While the notice probably comes from some automated system resembling authoritarian governments as described below, it looks like your extension would be undesirable to Google's business model and metrics they would want to optimize anyway. I hope you can find a different platform to run the extension, it seems more friendly than the screen time features in Apple.

I haven't used Chrome since I've left Google and would recommend everyone to move to an alternative non-Chrome-based browser for a more balanced ecosystem. All the bad behaviour can be avoided when companies actually need to look after retaining users and taking care of not so frequent cases and I hope better business practices can come up without the need for government intervention.

I used to feel impressed when someone told me they worked at Google. Now i just wonder if they're apart of the teams that make these horrendous decisions and force terrible UX on us and deprecate features that users love.

I get it, Google loves to automate stuff to save money. Makes sense, I agree. But I'm seriously wondering if all the people in charge of automating such processes are those delusional ego-programmers who think they can solve anything with machine learning, aka "AI". Really, I cannot understand that there aren't basic safeguards in place like "hey this extension got repeatedly flagged and when a human finally reviewed it we found it was a mistake each time, so maybe set a flag on this extension to double-check next time". Or maybe, have such incidents automatically bubble up to the team responsible for the automatic screening. But why do that if you're a wunderkind programmer who never makes mistakes?

Sorry, this is the only explanation I have for this, I've worked with this kind of person twice. Once they got the first version of something running they are done, no further testing, no sanity checks, no asserts or logger.warn() for "this can never happen" branches.

The other explanation is that they don't really want users to have most browser extensions. The browser extensions either become features that google wants to embed in the browser, or things they don't want, for business reasons. In either case it is better if the extension dies after a year or so.

BTW, this doesn't have to be a conscious choice of anyone at Google, it could just be the way the incentives turn out.

User friendly features are only incentivized in a competitive environment.

Until Firefox or Edge catches up in both performance and implementation compatibility to make Chrome-first sites work, extension support isn't incentivized

Tbh I can’t even think of a place where competition solves user-friendliness—user friendly software is highly uncommon in commercial software, let alone more broadly (i’m eying you, canonical).

There are a large number of user-hostile behaviors that stretch across industries: ad-funded software, app stores pushing microtransactions, wildly inconsistent interfaces and behaviors across DOM-driven software, opt-out behavior for things like arbitrary internet access.... user unfriendliness is the default state of software and even the most user friendly software still neglects the needs of many of their potential users.

This is a fact of software built in bounded time to be resold for passive income and “support” (which means “bug explainer” and possibly “refund-giver” in most corporate cultures).

I'd hazard to say that what you're describing (which I agree with) is true actually because in most spheres, there really ISN'T meaningful competition.

Building software is hard, generally, and takes time, generally. Just because you can throw up a set of microservices in a day doesn't mean you can build a properly competing product that quickly. And as time goes on, the standard of competition gets higher and the barrier to entry gets higher, because user expectations grow over time. So most software isn't competitive.

Chrome-first is a fancy way of saying not compliant with standards. Much like UE back in the day.

I think this is unfortunately close to the truth. I think Chrome only entertains extensions on desktop since desktop browsers are somewhat competitive. On Android where their bundling deals ensure Chrome is the default browser, they don't really have to bother. They can just disable extensions and therefore ad-blockers.

A bookmarking service sounded to me like something Google wanted to operate themselves, and I was thinking maybe that was related to why it got taken down.

At the same time, it seemed to not have had that many users yet, so, a bit early for Google to pay attention?

Imagine all the semantics you could extract from lists that people curated. The early web used to be human curated content and then Google came along and extracted all the associations they could out of those curated lists (links) and became the juggernaut it is today.

So your theory about Google wanting to run a bookmarking service I think is correct. Human curated links continue to be the only source of semantically relevant content. Everything else is algorithmic extraction of the relevant associations created by humans.

Google already has a bookmarking service at https://www.google.com/bookmarks/

I have stuff saved in there dating from 2007 to 2015. Used to use a Firefox extension to load them in the sidebar.

I was surprised to see that is not the same bookmarks synced in my Chrome Browser. That's the case with https://passwords.google.com/ . Is their a webview of synced Chrome bookmarks (I couldn't find one) and what use case is google.com/bookmarks?

Oh that is trippy, not only does the link from the GP not include my Chrome sync'd bookmarks, all the recent activity on it is places I've starred in Google Maps (!).

Exactly, they have a competing service. They also took down Podcast Addict while keeping their competing podcast app which violated the same terms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427

This is why I try very hard not to rely on Google, with the exception of Gmail.

I don’t use Google extensions on Chrome, and increasingly I don’t use Chrome.

Search engine?

That's what finally started bothering me enough, I don't feel comfortable keeping my search history and email in the same basket.

I'm currently in the process of switching to protonmail.com, which has been a positive experience so far.

I think it's exactly this.

Chrome supported/promoted its extensibility early on because it was seen as a competitive feature when compared to IE and Firefox at the time. At the time, FF supported a huge library of extensions, and Chrome's job was to eat FF's market share (and IE's). Thus, extensions were an obvious thing for them.

Now, extensions present pretty much nothing but problems for Google:

* Features that compete with Android * Features that compete with their own offerings, like Pushbullet * Features that actively harm their offerings, like adblockers * Features that actively harm their enterprise customers, like anti-paywalls

There's NO upside now for Chrome to support extensions, and ALL downside. They certainly don't need them in order to keep browser share. Too many people use it now.

By the way that description is one aspect of a monopoly (no, I don't want to start that discussion. Just pointing out that that behavior isn't possible in a competitive environment).

Given all the recent postings on HN lately about the DoJ sniffing around google re: anti-trust.... You'd think this would be a really bad time to be doing this...

Isn't one of the 'main' criteria around anti-trust how a company impacts the consumer ? this sort of thing sounds harmful to the consumer (fewer choices, actively taking down products consumers use, etc.)

I agree, maybe the DoJ should ask why it is so hard to make an extension? A little pressure would act against the forces that make them decide when in doubt, shut down extension.

> The browser extensions either become features that google wants to embed in the browser, or things they don't want, for business reasons.

Exactly. This is basically a replay of the way Microsoft treated developers of third-party Windows programs in the 1990s. Only the time scale was different; you typically had at least a few years before MS either integrated your killer feature into Windows, or changed something about the Windows internals that broke your program, either way killing your business.

I think you'll find the people in charge of automation have no programming background at all. They're likely new grad product managers hopped up on Adderall with no incentive to reflect on the unintended consequences of their decisions

I maintain a paid Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shortkeys-custom-k...) and I've had a very similar experience with the frustrating repeat automated shutdown emails, except that so far my extension hasn't been actually shut down. I'm just waiting for the day that it happens at this point. I'm surprised it has not happened before now, since my extension requires a lot of permissions to do its job.

In my case, I make a nice little side income from that extension so it would be a noticeable income hit. But I'm not sure of anything I can really do to prevent it from being shut down if and when Google's robots decide the time has come.

An interesting extension but I am a bit surprised - it seems the target users are developers, which generally have the wherewithal to download the repo and install themselves - how does this result in a "noticeable income"?

Sorry, not trying to be obtuse, just curious from a side-income perspective.

It surprised me too. I started charging a few months ago after it was free for ~7 years. Now I'm making $600 a month off of it.

Paying users seem to be part productivity nerds who maybe aren't technical enough to grok installing from the repo, and part people who just choose to pay for the automatic upgrades or to support the developer. Also, lots of users are web gamers who use it for in-game automation.

I wrote a post about it 1 week after monetizing, if you're curious: https://critter.blog/2020/01/14/week-1-of-monetizing-my-chro...

> Google (Robot): We'll take your extension down

Me: Hey, this must be a mistake

> Google (Robot): No mistake, review these policies, your extension violates one of them

Me: It does not violate any of them, this is a mistake!

> Google (Finally human): Oh, sorry, a mistake.

Obviously someone just needs to create a robot that automatically replies to the takedown notices and disputes them, thus closing the loop!

I had the same reaction. But then the individual programmer/founder won't risk their robot messing this up, while for google it's a numbers game.

Also, someone would have to program that bot and can you even imagine how dead inside you'd feel if that was your life?

Using AI to suggest a reply or to use human approval seems like a low risk approach.

Would you feel dead inside if your tool helped developers keep their projects online? Sounds rewarding to fight the big guy and keep cool projects online.

I am opposed to any job that I feel shouldn't (need to) exist

Somehow I expect that using a bot against their bot violates user TOS part #63836370 section YQ, and they will immediately lock your accounts, associated business accounts, delete the data and offer zero recourse.

And laugh about it, because they think it's funny.

Donotpay probably would if you passed the idea

Step 3 doesn't happen usually. If it did, no one would be upset.

Happened to me twice. Still upset.

I 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.

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

I use Firefox personally and originally made the thing for myself. I added Chrome support because Chrome is much more popular (not far from ten times more popular these days :() and people I would like to use this, eg friends and family, mostly use Chrome.

I couldn't ask them to switch browsers for my little side project. I have to co-operate with Google's bureaucracy. For what it's worth, so far it seems like Mozilla is not exactly streets ahead, but at least they didn't charge me and they seem to be fairer and more helpful to extension developers (they have a "self-distribution" mode with relaxed oversight I used while in private alpha, and their tools and docs are better).

I think it would be perfectly reasonable to promote Firefox to your friends and family as "simply the better choice" irrespective of your own interests.

When Chrome was better, I suggested friends and family use Chrome. Now I think most people would benefit from using Firefox as their primary driver.

Are you including the change cost here, which will be many times higher for most of the population vs. HN? Even if I thought that Firefox was a better choice, I'd recommend to my friends and family to keep using whatever they are using unless they have to switch for some reason.

What, precisely, is the cost?

Lazy web devs that only test in Chrome and maybe safari that constantly break things in other browsers. I don't mind sending the angry support email and using chrome for a single task here and there but others might.

I never used Chrome and never encountered a website that didn't work on Firefox. I think this concern is a bit overblown.

Bank of America didn't work for the better part of last year. Chase Rewards are currently broken since last week. Its easy to drop small sites that don't test but my experience has been they actually bother testing and it's the major sites that actually have problems.

I've had Firefox fail to work properly on the sites of Slashdot, Amazon, Newegg, Chase, BoA, GE, Walmart, the IRS, PennDOT, Mozilla's own org site, WaPo, NPR, Fox, Disney, and a whole host of others.

Effort, time, unlearning workflows and re-learning them in Firefox, etc. Switching costs would probably have been a better term to use.

I got my retired mother to switch to Firefox without her hardly noticing the difference. And she's happier now that she gets fewer ads.

I think we as developers overestimate the resistance to switching.

I think this is because programmers have very specific and personalized workflows for all the tools they use so they assume other people are the same way when in reality a browser for most people is just a tool to get what they want.

>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.

Man, I haven't updated my extension for years because it's already feature complete (at least for my use case) and at this point I'm afraid when I push an update, Google would outright ban it because the extension requires full access to all sites and tabs (it's an automatic tab suspension extension).

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.

its not so much forgotten as aggressively dismissed and mocked as tin foil hattery.

It’s almost like the companies with more money than governments and complete control over what content users see might shape the world to keep their profits high.

One way to tell if a conspiracy is crazy is if it doesn’t benefit rich people. This pretty clearly passes that test.

You don't have to believe conspiracy theories to think centralization is bad. Sometimes bullshit "they" don't want you to know about is still bullshit.

Developers go where the money goes. The money goes where the users go. The users don't know the difference between a walled garden and a free ecosystem.

Maybe they're still angry with him about leftpad.</joke>

Yes, it really is the same guy: https://kodfabrik.com/journal/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules. And, joking aside it would be wise to bear in mind that we're reading only one side of the story here. As with leftpad, there's another side to this.

With leftpad he told Kik, "fuck you" (https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breakin...), and then wrought global havoc on npm users. Now he's claiming the Chrome Extension Team "continuously troll developers", and is pulling down something he's created... again.

I only have two data points, so the behaviour here is a coincidence rather than a pattern, but I will guarantee you whatever you think of Google there is more to this than meets the eye.

I'm not without sympathy for the author, but neither am I about to uncritically take his side.

On the other hand we've seen this kind of behavior from Google time and again, even on its flagship platforms like Android and YouTube. The Chrome Extensions store is likely the bottom of the barrel when it comes to priorities, so I have no trouble believing things would be even worse there.

If you're referring to the recent controversy around Pushbullet - I thought that was revealed to be them asking for all access to any HTTP/HTTPS websites you viewed...which is a major security breach.

They removed that permission to limit it to only Pushbullet, and then were able to get back on.

I'm not saying there couldn't have been more hand-holding - but it wasn't exactly like it wasn't for a fairly egregious security breach.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in any Chrome/Android/Store team, or anything even vaguely related to that - this is purely my own opinion).

They removed that permission and were denied again. Only after the story got a lot of publicity did Google decide to accept it.

Did PB fall through the cavernous CS cracks or are they competition?

Chrome + Android are busy building a competing feature and that's part of the narrative about Pushbullet - this was seen as an attempt by Google to kill a competitor through nebulous "rules violations".

If the PB team hadn't gotten it to be as visible as it was, they very likely would have gotten away with it.

They were only allowed back on after they've turned it into a big story online.

I believe Pushbullet needed it's permissions for the features it offered, they even tried removing features and permissions just to appease Google.

Regardless of that, just tell people what they've done wrong, developers are surely jaded by being told absolutely nothing about what or why some faceless mega corp is trampling all over their day.

Is it any wonder people like OP lash out in frustration and just pull all of their work when one has no means to obtain a straight answer? The man has a young child, and that is work enough, but it also puts things into perspective, and honestly, as a father of a months old child, I'd probably respond to this in the same way and think "fuck it, one less frustration" and just pull it too.

I believe Pushbullet needed it's permissions for the features it offered

The PB post describes them removing permissions they realized they didn't need, you can check their writeup. Google's handling of this was poor but PB had real problems.

In this extension's case, we haven't even seen what notices Google sent.

I'm all for enforcing strong privacy rules, in fact, I stopped using PB very quickly after trying it for the first time, because of the _feeling_ of a lack of privacy/security it gave me (based on no actual evidence), so I'm not defending PB.

That said, calling Google heavy handed is an understatement, and there have been several cases which have made it clear that kicking up a fuss online and being big enough to get some attention is the only means for recourse.

I didn't call it 'heavy handed'. I'm just correcting your assertion that PB didn't have unnecessary and overly-broad permissions. This is in their writeup.

This might be okay as long as you give clear and specific points to correct.

But Google just said "you're asking too much permissions". After the first fixes the extension got rejected again, without explanation.

I'm not really trying to re-litigate the whole PB thing. It's just not the case that they got dinged for nothing which is what the comment I replied to was suggesting.

And the other (I think more important) point was that we know even less about whatever happened to Kozmos.

Oh, I understand your point. I was calling Google heavy handed.

FWIW, someone workin on things related to it felt like it was something that needed apologizing for: https://twitter.com/DotProto/status/1261047663669084161

Rejecting a fixed version is not lack of "hand-holding", and far-reaching permissions are not by default a "major security breach" (unless Google has a policy of shipping products with major security breaches built in?)

In the links you've shared, I thought the author (Azer) was on the right to behave the way he did. I don't see it as a reason to discount his current experience because of that either.

Just came here to say the same thing. He didn't need to swear and be so bratty about it, but yeah it seems to me he was not wrong.

"Integrity" is not a desirable trait in this day and age. A developer is of little use if they don't respond to short term individualistic incentives.

Au contraire. A developer with integrity will become a senior with integrity, and when you're dealing with people -- which you will be if you are not already -- you get a reputation for being fair and just. People will not deal anywhere near as favourably if you have a reputation for displaying a severe lack of integrity.

They would have no case if they actually tried to go after him to "defend" their trademark. His mail was just empty threats.

You can't just trademark 3 letters in a way so that nobody else can use them. In fact there's hundreds of trademarks that are the letters "kik" in various logos[1].

What they trademarked is a bunch of specific logos containing those letters. Doesn't prevent other people from also using those 3 letters in some other way.

In fact when he wrote "kik", my first thought was the he was talking about the German textile discount store - which is the first result for me when I google those letters.

[1]: https://trademarks.justia.com/search?q=kik

What is the cost to defend against a lawsuit where the person suing you has “no case,” especially in the USA where the American rule for lawyer fees governs?

BP, BMW, and GE (among countless others) disagree and would be happy to haul you into court to prove to you that you are wrong if you misuse their trademarks.

It's easy to be an armchair HN lawyer when you have no skin in the game.

> BP, BMW, and GE (among countless others) disagree and would be happy to haul you into court to prove to you that you are wrong if you misuse their trademarks.

As an attorney, do you think he was misusing the "Kik" trademark?

I know this sounds like a cop-out answer, but as an attorney, I would zealously represent my client on either side.

I don't know all the facts here, but I do know that as a practical matter, it comes down to a whole bunch of factors, among them, use in commerce, possibility of confusion, etc. But I can say that judges take a dim view of people who tell others to "fuck off" and who appear not to have a justifiable reason for using a name nor a long history of doing so.

I also know that bullies don't always win - Nissan Computer still owns nissan.com, not the motor company.

I'm tempered to rename my packages with a prefix "kik" just to fuck with them. I don't live in the US, so good luck enforcing their empty threats on me ;)

Actually if anyone behaved poorly, it was npm not Azer.

I'm shocked to see that something like this could happen on npm - where a single threat of getting lawyers involved can get your package transferred away from you. It really wants to make me not publish anything on npm too actually.

Totally agree. I'm shocked to see that people actually think less of Azer because of what he did. Why keep your work on a company that bullies you like that?

I believe that in the left-pad case, NPM severely violated the overall trust put in their management by handing over a package name (that other people might depend on) without a legal process. Now that NPM has faltered like that once, you basically need to verify yourself that every package that you use is still the same one by the same author, i.e. that NPM hasn't silently transferred the name to someone else.

I maintain quite a few high-traffic packages on npm and have done so for years. Npm is really bad about handling any sort of situation with any amount of grace.

Per my anecdotal experience, they are really good at choosing the outcome that benefits them the most/harms them the least - which wouldn't upset me since most companies do this, but it's Npm's "we're here for the community" type of fake attitude that has always bothered me.

What was the "other side" of leftpad? As far as I remember, the broken system wrought havoc, not the developer who chose to withdraw his modules. I don't think the developer's reasons are much relevant when discussing how reliable their word is.

The broken system allowed him to be a dick.

OK, so the is more to it than that and he did have a genuine grievance (I forgot exactly what) bit in dealing with that he caused a pile collateral damage for innocent bystanders.

(Innocent bystanders who errantly put too much faith in dependency oriented programming which brings us back to the broken system)

It's his work, and he had every right to pull every module he hosts there in protest. If this was a walk out or some other form of protest, nobody would be calling him a dick, I think that's a little out of order.

That said, the system is definitely broken.

His reaction to the Kik thing is probably where he was at fault, I think it would have been reasonable for him to back down there; companies, in the US at least are obligated to protect their IP in order to retain their rights over it (as far as I have understood from various discussions on HN), but perhaps the forceful lawyering got his back up?

Also I have no idea of jurisdiction of any parties involved, I just assume US.

It's always safe to back down if you don't have the guts to go on, but you can't say it's a fault not to back down.

> Innocent bystanders who errantly put too much faith in dependency oriented programming

and who need an external package to leftpad a string... the most fascinating part of that story to me...

> too much faith in dependency oriented programming

Which is why it's a distraction to even consider this particular person's track record.

Even if this same person pulled one critical package a month for the next year, the fundamental problem is still that the ecosystem in general relies on parties with no obligations to manage critical dependencies.

> With leftpad he told Kik, "fuck you"

In response to a threat starting with "We don’t mean to be a dick about it" and ending with "our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that", I did say "fuck you" to Kik.

If that makes me the character in your mind, enjoy your imagination.

It seems that lots of people are missing that part. The Kik guys were doing their corporate double-speak b/s about ‘let’s find a solution’ when the only solution is handing over the name. All while threatening with door-banging lawyers.

And he did offer them a solution: $30,000 dollars, to which they promptly - albeit indirectly - replied with fuck you.

well, friendly solutions don't charge per hour, unlike lawyers...

Because they didn't have to pay him $30k. They had a registered trademark and a right to use the name. And in the end, they didn’t have to spend nearly that amount. All they had to do was send a few emails to the npm maintainers.

I’d say they made a logical decision.

The right to use that name in a certain context. Kik was a dick. 30k is a lot, but lawyers would’ve cost way more than that

An initial consult is often free, and even a $500 consult would have been worth every penny because the lawyer would have (correctly) told him to back off and let them have the name.

In any event, escalating - even when you think the other party is being a dick - is never the right answer.

An initial consult is often free

If you're hiring a lawyer off a television commercial in order to make a quick buck off of a fender bender. Corporate law is different.

When I was sued I was able to get an hour with many of the initial attorneys I called. The biggest challenge in most cases was ensuring there were no conflicts.

And as an attorney, if I go back into practice someday, of course I’ll do the same.

I have a hard time seeing your position here. Because of their actions they broke their own build and made a lot of folks in the open source community upset. Was it even worth it to waste the time fixing their broken build? To investigate the failure and replace a dependency of a dependency? To lose credibility in the community they've evidently just decided to become involved with? I really don't see how that's not worth 30 grand. They have a right to use their name but they don't have the right to use someone else's work.

It is a principle of American and English law that the person who uses someone else’s property unlawfully is responsible for the foreseeable injuries caused to others by its use - not the lawful owner of the property.

You are being downvoted because you fundamentally misunderstand and mischaracterise the situation you are referring to.

I am referring to naming an npm module “Kik” that has nothing to do with the service of the same name. What do I misunderstand?

With regards to the trademark issue:

> and we’d have no choice but to do all that because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them.

They aren't threatening him for the fun of it, this is classic trademark stuff.

Also the "solution" he offered them was:

> Yeah, you can buy it for $30.000 for the hassle of giving up with my pet project for bunch of corporate dicks

Would _you_ give this guy $30,000, after he calls you a dick multiple times and tells you in no uncertain terms to fuck off?

No one comes out looking good in this interaction, don't get me wrong, but Azer was super unprofessional and nasty during those interactions. He gets no sympathy from me.

Good luck trying to enforce trademark law for namespace on a public code repository.

It’s “classic trademark stuff” insofar that people classically don’t understand what a trademark is or how it’s enforced.

Consider reading through Github’s policy on trademarks[0] to better understand why a casual fuck off should be given whenever you get misleading, threatening emails.

[0] https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-tradema...

I agree with you. And I don't understand this normalisation of threatening.

And just because it's a lawyer does not make things better. If you want me to cooperate, try to be nice. If you threat me, don't be surprise to hear a 'fuck you'.

> but Azer was super unprofessional and nasty during those interactions

Does he even have to be “professional“? Even though two of the parties involved happen to be corporations, he owes no allegiance to them and the exchange does not take place in a corporate context. I mean, we are talking about corporate overreach, why should we be assessing his words by corporate standards? “Professional” usually means “don’t show emotions and suck up the abuse”. I’m glad he was both showing his protest and standing up to the overreach.

Does he have to be? No.

Can others judge him harshly for said decision? Yes.

It’s not the judgment itself, it is by what standard he is judged. Everyone could judge him by their religious, cultural, personal standards. But in a solo dev vs. corporate overreach case judging him by corporatist standards bring a framing that further empowers the overreach.

There was a time when hacker culture was associated with rebellious and playful values. Such an irony on Hacker News we are discussing if he should be penalized for saying “bad words” in the face of corporate unfairness.

Don't be confused by the "Hacker" in hacker news. Paul Graham found a cool label to get impressionable youths to want to work for him, nothing more.

The guy made a very valid point:

We must pursue our trademarks or risk losing them. We must. So can we make this amicable instead of hostile?

The maintainer could have requested things like "Okay can I make some blog posts and you help me with some SEO to make sure people are aware of the changes to my project name?" etc. Sounds like Kik was willing to be reasonable and help where they could. Clearly they could have gone in with an opening statement saying "this is the lawyer, I am sending trademark takedown notices, fuck you, go to hell" but they clearly did not.

This is one person trying to make the best of an awkward situation, and one person just saying "duces".

This trademark thing must be the next biggest popular HN misunderstanding after the whole "act in the shareholders interest" debacle.

Could you explain the trademark misunderstanding in a bit more detail?

According to GitHub [0]:

> Using another's trademark in a way that has nothing to do with the product or service for which the trademark was granted is not a trademark policy violation.

Many people think that if you have a trademark, you have to sue everyone who uses your name no matter what capacity they're using it in, which doesn't seem to be the case. If their usage is unrelated to yours, you have no authority to prevent them from using it however they want.

There are some exceptions to this, like the American Red Cross's logo of a red cross on a white background (nobody is allowed to use this except the red cross in any context, although it isn't always enforced) [1].

[0]: https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-tradema...

[1]: https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2012/04/one-cr...

Also people get carried away with how estoppel works. Estoppel is a basic principle in civil law that says if Alice tells Bob it's fine for him to do X, then even if Bob is infringing on Alice's lawful rights by doing X, she doesn't get to come back later and tell a court "Hey, Bob was infringing my rights by doing X".

And that's where it definitely stops, but people get carried away and imagine now if Alice tells Bob, "Enough, I need you to stop doing X by this reasonable time" and Bob says "Fuck you Alice" and keeps doing X the court will rule for Bob. Nope. And they imagine Bob's friend Charlie might show up too, and do X and Alice has to accept that because she told Bob previously it was fine, again Nope. As a result some businesses become convinced that unless they pay lawyers to threaten every hobby project starting with the same first letter as their product the terrible "estoppel" will destroy their business.

Also just as a general principle lawyers are for avoiding disputes first, fixing existing disputes as a last resort. If you're actively paying lawyers to start shit you are probably Doing It Wrong™.

“We must” is nonsense on the part of Kik. That’s part of the corporate b/s where people make it seem like things are “out of our hands.”

If he was releasing a messenger app called KikAss, then sure, they “must” enforce the Kik trademark.

But if I release a brand of shoes called Kik, with an api that allows users to poll how many steps a user has taken that day, that’s not a trademark violation.

Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they could be unintentionally confusing (for example, if Kik has been talking about releasing shoes for a while or if it’s a well known brand of soccer balls).

Neither of these things have occurred, so the trademark doesn’t have to go through a (futile) enforcement process.

This is it, really.

Not long ago I was involved in a company that defended their trademark. The other group said to us 'f- you' and refused to comply. They then continued to do marketing and interviews with our brand name and an almost identical logo. It's like they were trying to dig a hole.

So that behaviour actually just created more evidence of infringement. We contacted their partners and explained the situation and they started pulling their support. They lost half their board members. So eventually their own lawyer said "Hey guys, we really should comply." and that was it.

No money exchanged hands and we only dropped 30k into a lawyer. I assume they sunk money into rebranding, lawyers, new partners, and a whole bunch of things because they were being petty.

> Trademarks require intent to mislead

Is this a legal requirement?

I meant trademark violations. My bad. I edited the post and added the missing word.

As someone else mentioned, your correction is also incorrect. One can violate trademark unintentionally.

No, my correction is fine. It helps if you read the sentence in its entirety rather than stop reading at the comma... you know... where I specifically go on to say "or" followed with a whole bit on how it can be violated unintentionally and give an example of such.

The next sentence also goes on to say that either one of those two needs to take place - again, referencing more than one way a trademark violation could take place.

Maybe my English wasn't clear. English isn't my first or my most recent language, so my grammar sometimes goes a bit funky.

Your correction is not fine. English is my first language, and I am telling you that the way you wrote the sentence makes it incorrect. It's probably your grammar more than your misunderstanding of the facts. Another commenter said the same.

The sentence taken as a whole does not make the wrong part right. That you think we must not have noticed the rest of the sentence demonstrates that you don't know why it is wrong. You are choosing to get defensive instead of accepting a correction to your grammar that you acknowledge as being funky.

> Maybe my English wasn't clear.

What is the effective difference between your English being unclear and the correction being written in a way that makes it wrong?

> Trademark violations require intent to mislead

No, they don't, only probability of customer confusion.

Criminal counterfeiting charges require intent, IIRC.

If you see the second half of that sentence, with an example of how...

> or they could be unintentionally confusing [to the customer]

We see the second half. Your sentence reduces to:

> Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they do not require intent to mislead.

You are trying to assert that this makes sense and that the second half makes the first half correct. Neither is true.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve by leaving multiple successive comments threads about the same topic. I will reply to this message and will withdraw after this.

——

The sentence reduces to “trademark violations are considered to have taken place regardless of when there is either an intention to mislead or if a customer was unintentionally misled.”

If the grammar was poop and you can’t make a good faith reading of it (to go so far as to follow me around on this post) then by all means feel free to comment away but I won’t be responding to it.

We don't need you to respond. You have made it clear that there is nothing anyone can ever say or do to convince you that you are wrong.

Another expression of your stereotype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23360585

> Neither of these things have occurred

How do you know unintentional confusion did not occur?

About twenty years ago, I learned a lesson the hard way I received a much more strongly worded cease-and-desist letter. I responded much the same way as you (though without the salty language), and a few weeks later, I got slapped with a multi-million dollar lawsuit for copyright infringement.

You're lucky you were treated as nicely as you were. It could have been a whole lot worse.

Lessons learned:

1. Hire an attorney when you get a takedown notice if you think you are likely to decline, and seek counsel before responding.

2. Telling people "fuck you" doesn't get you anywhere, and it doesn't matter how impolite or wrong you think the other person is.

That's really sad that that's good advice. I can't help but sympathize with him, and with you 20 years ago. Basically, your advice boils down to: "when a larger company tells you to do something, do it".

That's essentially what the lawyers at my friend's company told them as well, as they're dealing with a similar problem. Just because you have lawyers doesn't mean the answer will be any different; you very likely won't be able to deal with a lawsuit from a much larger company.

No need to feel for me. Growing up is about making mistakes, taking your licks, learning your lessons, and moving on. I was on the wrong side, legally and ethically.

If anything, it made me feel both unwise and ignorant, so I addressed that by going to law school and passing the bar. I have a great career and I keep my nose clean.

I also have a different perspective now - one of the creator instead of the consumer. And I disagree that Goliath always has to win. Sometimes the big guy is wrong; and thank goodness we have folks like EFF to help out when they abuse their wealth and power. When the little guy is on the right side of the argument, I will also stand up for them.

Keep in mind, too, that Kik doesn't exactly have overflowing pockets. They can barely pay their bills and nearly shut down last year.

So what happened with with the lawsuit in the end?

I entered a judgment on consent and had to pay restitution to the plaintiffs over a number of years. Most expensive mistake I ever made.

I just wanted to say, thanks for standing up for what you believe in. It took courage to do what you did.

Did it though? This seems to be his MO.

Vote with both of my hands

How true!

Your own comments come out as one-sided as anyone can be...

The perspective of the other side is not hard to guess here: support costs money, it's way easier and cheaper to automate it, and if it hurts a few people here and there no one really cares because there're millions of other users (and no much alternative anyway).

We all know that Google's support sucks, even they know it very well, just they don't give a shit. Everyone's pissed about this for years - anyone who ever tried to debug adsense, gmail or youtube account getting blocked out of the blue, or android app being flagged for no reason has gone through pretty much the same process this guy describes. Internet is full of horror stories of this kind, it's very well documented.

The only difference here is that most of us goes "c'est la vie" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and we continue using their services because - well - everyone else does it, what else could we do... while this guy doesn't mind giving them the finger... which will, and of course he knows that, hurt him much more than Google - but that's a move to be respected imho...

> I only have two data points, so the behaviour here is a coincidence rather than a pattern, but I will guarantee you whatever you think of Google there is more to this than meets the eye.

You seem to want us to question the narrative based on the likability of the developer, but is it really relevant? Can you really imagine a data point that we don't know that will change the narrative of "solo developer getting steamrolled by corporate machinery"? Because that is what is happening in both cases. I want to be clear, this is not even about the solo developer actually being in the right, it is about the process or lack thereof that takes place to reach the conclusion. You might not like this particular guy, but I guarantee you a more likable guy would be/will be/is being equally strong-armed in these lopsided processes. Transparency, accountability and fairness would make all of us happy and not left guessing who might be right based on who writes the most likable emails or has the most popular brand.

To add to this, I think the reason this particular developer is seen negatively by some is that he does kick up a lot of dust in these situations. Most developers would (understandably) feel like this wasn't worth their time and just silently give in to the bigger company's wishes.

So while his "likeability" is completely irrelevant, how else would we even hear about these issues if he didn't make a big fuss about it? I think that also might explain why we heard of this story twice from the same developer. The truth is people face similar issues every day but no one hears about it. I'm glad that some people kick up a lot of dust and make the issue visible to everyone.

>this particular developer is seen negatively by some is that he does kick up a lot of dust in these situations

Developers are often pushovers (no disrespect, I'm often one myself). Anyone who isn't gets passive aggressively labeled with terms that make them easy to conflate with actually bad people.

Give 'em hell, Azer.

We have a lot more than two data points for Google screwing Chrome extension developers.

Nobody can uncritically take his side but what you are implying here is that we should consider him "less" because of an unrelated story.

Why can't you uncritically take his side? Because company good, developer mean? If you want to say kik has a right to the three letter package name so be it but absolutely no one has the right to continue using someone else's work for their own gain. Especially not a company that threatened him with lawyers within three emails.

In my opinion, the party that behaved the worst in that exchange was npm. Why do Node developers trust such an unprofessional institution?

Sounds like he's a pretty prolific developer who's sick of dealing with mega-corporate bureaucracies screwing him over.

You've remembered that the author has written another article at some point that is completely and wholeheartedly unrelated to this story; and the point it attempts to make. Why is this the top comment?

Perhaps your position might be better understood if you shared your own story about a project that you have invested so much time and energy creating and building. You may have tread a different path when confronted with such obstacles. The community would be enlightened by your experience.

He's got a pretty good shitbird radar.

Npm not only didn't realize that this guy was more important to their community and NodeJS on the whole than a one off from Kik, but they sold out to GitHub / M$FT.

All that for something that hasn't been updated in 2 years https://www.npmjs.com/package/@kikinteractive/kik

This comment is just straight ad-hominem.

Not true at all. I'm saying we don't know the whole story. That's not to say that what he's saying is untrue but that, without some corroboration, or hearing from the other party (Google), it can't be relied upon.

Granted, all I know of the author is based on what I've seen of his past behaviour. That does make me a little sceptical that his account of events represents the sum totality of truth around the situation. I don't believe that's an unreasonable perspective.

It does not mean the account is false, or that I lack sympathy for him[1], or that I'm unwilling to see or understand his point of view. What I was concerned by is that in the comments I was seeing nothing but unalloyed support, which I did not think was warranted based on what we know. I think I've been pretty clear about that.

I also think it's a shame that he's chosen to yank the extension, but that's obviously his choice and I can understand why he made it.

[1] Different context entirely but I've had my own issues with Google's algorithms, along with the sense of being left in the dark about why. I made some, actually useful, changes but I've still no idea if those are the reason the issues were resolved. Regardless, I'm glad that they have been resolved.

To me it sounds like both sides had their own (though different) tone-deafness.

"Oh I didn't know there was a company with that name" well, now you know. How would you like to go into NPM and find someone has created a package with your or your company's name?

At the same time Kik's answer of "we're nice people but we're sending the lawyers" does not come across as friendly.

And yes, NPMs response is not surprising. They're going to side with the trademark owner, unless there was a very good reason not to (like the MikeRowSoft case)

Note to npm (or some future package repo site): create package namespaces. Allow renaming and maybe aliases.

> Note to npm (or some future package repo site): create package namespaces. Allow renaming and maybe aliases.

I have a friend who encountered a similar scenario with a company claiming trademark on a name. In their case they simply changed the package name. It was frustrating but it meant everybody was able to move on without any drama. Subsequently, as far as I'm aware, the trademark holder has never even published a package under the original name. So I suppose that makes it doubly irritating, but such is life.

I think your suggestion would have neatly avoided a lot of these kinds of issues in the first place.

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? 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 become a sprawling mass of interconnected yet disjointed divisions but without any real customer service department that can handle the amount of requests or situations like in OP. I am not on their side in any way, but Occam's razor and all, it just seems the most likely explanation to me is that they are just too cheap to pay people to handle the volume of customer issues they have? Or would it not be economically feasible? What do y'all think?

[Edited to divide into two paragraphs for slightly easier reading]

> 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.)

I'm still a bit surprised they're not offering a paid support tier. That'd still suck for non-commercial extensions, but at least help with the "extension filtering is killing our business!" cases.

I'm afraid is more complicated than that. If they were to add non-mandatory paid support, any time someone were at risk of losing its extension would feel/believe it's an extortion scheme to force him to pay for support (whether that's true or not).

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.

I somewhat agree, yet wouldn't a healthy extension ecosystem (excellent term, btw) attract more users to Chrome and in turn keep users more entwined in the larger Google ecosystem? I guess there is a cost/benefit analysis done. They put just enough effort into it to get the return or results they want. The little guys like OP (who arguably make the best content because it's open source and not full of trackers or other junk) just get stepped on along the way.

I don’t know at all, but if I had to guess extension usage is pretty low. I’m not sure the average user really sees browser extensions as something they need. They aren’t as obvious as say mobile apps. On the flip side, extensions like Honey seem to suggest at least enough people use them to be of some worth.

Some of the more popular extensions have thirty+ million users, and this is for trivial fluff functionality. When you hit up the extensions dealing with adblocking or say, interacting with Instagram, they can hit 100+ million easily.

If people increasingly head back to FF or other alternates?

> they also are not in the business of putting us out of business

Actually, the way they've expanded their range of products I'd wager they've put quite a few people out of business. It's especially bad if your business happens to not be one of the ones they acquihire, but one of their competitors, as evidenced by a handful of antitrust lawsuits.

It's clear that Google don't want to hire humans and run customer support centers. According to reports, this has bit them in GCP adoption as well.

That's fine but at least have a human review before taking disastrous actions like taking down extensions, lockdown Gmail accounts. If you can't afford even that at least have an appeal process where human would review the case. If you can't make the economics work even for that maybe just don't run the app store.

GCP does have support engineers who work with you on things.

It does? Haven't used it yet and have no near future plans to change that. As long as there's a single account, the support of each part of Google matters, because it could cause your account to be closed.

GCP most certainly does have support engineers available!

https://cloud.google.com/support

There's a variety of different tiers to suit your required level of support, and some products (e.g. G Suite) come with free in-built support.

(I work as part of Google Cloud support organisation).

The problem many people have is that they're (rightfully given the horror stories on HN) afraid that anything they'll run afoul of GCP guidelines (i.e. some AI flagging "fraud" or "spam") may also close down their personal and all other Google accounts with no way of reaching a human.

If GCP wants more adoption then you have to fix this shit. Seriously.

Hi, I currently use Azure which has strict lines between organisation tenancies/domains/accounts and personal ones. This means I know that my liability is limited to my business.

Can you assure me that if I move to GCP, have a VM get infected and you ban my GCP account, my personal account will never get banned too? Or that of my next employer? Because I keep reading about that happening...

Well, in general - would you use your personal email account for work?

So for example - say I have a personal Gmail account (e.g. cute-boy-88@gmail.com)

But if I was working for a company that had spun up GCP infrastructure - my work would likely provide me with a work email address (e.g. trevor.jacobs@bankofengland.co.uk) - which I would use, rather than cute-boy-88@gmail.com.

This also covers the use-case that for example, you leave the company (in which case the company still controls those accounts), or an employee goes rogue and tries to takeover their work account.

In general, you would try to keep your work/personal accounts separate - you're not going to put your personal account as the recovery email for your work account for example. Your system administrator (or IT team at work) is going to be the one who resets your password, or recovers your account - and they're not going to send private work passwords to a personal email account (or they shouldn't).

Hopefully the above helps.

No, of course I wouldn't, but my understanding is that Google (unlike any other company I know) will "pierce the corporate veil" and ban people not accounts. It's not hard to correlate accounts, my chrome is logged into both my personal and work accounts. My computer has a unique ip address. My phone has both accounts logged in as users.

Is that enough for the ban to follow through and hit both?

If you sign into multiple google accounts in the same browser window, then those accounts are linked behind the scenes. You do not have to explicitly link them together. There are plenty of stories on reddit of devs whose company accounts got into trouble because their personal account was in trouble.

You'd need to hire more than "hundreds", especially since people get mad about false positives and false negatives. How long do you think it takes a reverse engineer to completely and thoroughly vet a browser extension or mobile app? A day maybe if you are doing it quickly and longer if you are doing it thoroughly.

Now do that for every app and extension. And repeat it for every single version that is ever uploaded.

As someone who's Google ad account was mysteriously suspended for no given reason (even before a single ad was run) and am now up to 4 days waiting with no reply nor phone number I can call, I hear you..

It 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 such code that terminates account without human intervention? Please do not blame it on Project Managers.

You are human - so is some one that was affected by your code.

Amen

> What kind of programmers wrote such code that terminates account without human intervention? Please do not blame it on Project Managers.

One who gets paid half a million a year to not question the policies and their consequences and just does what they are told?

It’s pretty apparent that they think people who don’t work for google are vastly inferior human beings. It honestly runs counter to their “social justice” facade.

I really think this is unreasonable. Even at google there are different subcultures, including many with an anti-corporate streak. Furthermore I’m not going to blame an employee for not sticking out their neck for client businesses who also don’t give a shit about them. This isn’t a problem of individual providence.

Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

> Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

The problem is not mainly with how Google treats their employees (though there's definitely something wrong there), but with how they treat their customers.

Its true - they believe themselves to be so damn smart they behave with rank condescension towards everyone else as the "top 1% of intelligence".

If they were so smart their lunch wouldn't be getting eaten by the likes of Amazon.

I was referring to the use of a union to give employees say about the products they make. They provide collective leverage far more broadly than in the negotiation of work conditions and compensation and can negotiate directly with the board, who would normally go to great lengths to avoid speaking to their own employees (in my experience).

Hell, I’ve met more investors footing my salary than board members per se, and they definitely have zero interest in employee negotiations—that’s what management is for.

Nobody who get a Google paycheck has a sincere "anti-corporate" streak.

An anecdote: I was running my bootstraped company with 5 employees when in 2013 I suddenly started getting Google recruiting emails about once every 4 days. They wanted me for a "role" of a SRE, probably because I asked stack overflow sysadmin questions. I never responded.

> Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

I'm pretty pro-union in general but I don't follow your reasoning. Cops are unionized, and when they murder innocent civilians in broad daylight, the unions are right behind to pay for their legal defense. Unions don't bring reason to a workforce; they merely represent that workforce.

> including many with an anti-corporate streak.

So basically the worst form of slacktivist hypocrites.

I was not looking to start an argument; you are entitled to your opinions, at least.

I’m not arguing either. But dude, google? Google!? Its business is selling ads for corporations. A google software engineer can get a job at countless places including nonprofits sometimes making close to google money, but even if they made half that income they would be living more comfortably than 3/4s of the US.

Anti corporate soapbox or google job, please just pick one.

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 I can ask.

This is just an inconvenience to me. I can't imagine what it's like to have a service I actually rely on and then lose it.

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.

Dialpad is useful for this. They're one of the few alternatives I've found that allows for routing calls over POTS.

I like the Unlisted app https://www.unlistedapp.com I got it a few years ago and haven't had any problems. I think it might be iOS only. There are plenty of other burner phone number apps which work on both Android and iOS.

Thanks for using and recommending Unlisted! We added an Android version last year and both apps are under active development. I'm happy to answer any questions (or receive feedback about what we could do better) - erik@unlistedapp.com

Perhaps I'm missing your actual requirements (based on what's been suggested below), but I've been using voip.ms for years now. They support voice and SMS, and even my bank's SMS "2FA" works with them now. They don't support MMS, however (though you may have meant that when you said SMS).

SMS is available as a FLOSS app (I use the F-Droid voip.ms app), or through another portal - able to be sent/received through email, another number, or a web interface.

I honestly have only good things to say about them (despite being a consumer of their seemingly B2B product). As a disclaimer, I don't work for them, have no affiliation with them, and made a point of not using any kind of referral link.

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.)

gaslighting doesn't mean hiding.

Hiding = post is invisible to you and everyone else

Gaslighting = post is visible to you, and unbeknownst to you, invisible to everyone else

gaslighting also doesn't mean lying, or cheating, or fraud. it involves some of these things, but that doesn't mean that all hiding and lying is gaslighting. to quote wiktionary:

To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance. The verb sense derives from the 1938 stage play Gas Light, in which a husband attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment.

in what way does hiding one's post cause them to "question their own memory, perception and sanity"?

>To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance.

I suspect a lot of people caught up in "shadow bans" already have a tenuous grip on reality in the first place. What a disgusting, mean spirited and wholly pointless thing for them to be engaged in. Why couldn't they just tell said individuals they've been auto moderated or banned? It's not like it will result in additional support being required - Google already make a point of ignoring their users.

while this is arguably true, it has nothing to do with the misappropriation of the original word. something can be terrible and yet not justify using words commonly agreed to mean different things. it reminds me of the recent trend to use "assault" when referring to all types of harassment, regardless of whether physical violence was carried out or even implied. you can argue that shadow banning is bad, but if you go say that it's "literally raping their identity" or something like that then you just sound like an idiot.

I think the term is shadow banning

Shadow banning, hellbanning, slowbanning, error banning -- it all falls under the umbrella of gaslighting in my book.

They invented the term shadow banning because "gas lighting" has very negative connotations.

Shadow banning is 100% a form of gas lighting, and IMO should be considered just as unethical. If you are going to ban someone, words, or actions be upfront and clear about the rules and bans

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.

Happens on other platforms, too

I had a Firefox plugin that would tweet all my bookmarks. Years later I noticed all the tweets were hidden from search

Voice was a really frustrating product for me because it was so clearly years ahead of its time and also ignored by Google for so long that everyone else caught up and passed them.

In 2010 I was able to have one number ring multiple phones, automatic transcription of voicemail, text people from a web browser (!), switch between network providers without having to deal with number porting, it was great.

What killed it for me was that MMS was silently dropped, no images, but worse group SMS was handled by MMS so if people added you to group chats you just wouldn't get any of the messages and they would have no indication that you weren't getting them.

This went unsolved for years.

Eventually iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook - basically everyone else took this market. Then Google started some anemic work on it again, along the way making and killing a bunch of other chat products that all sucked in different ways.

Along with google plus and cloud, this is probably one of their biggest strategic failures.

The odd thing is that they can't even make a cost argument for this. If they charged a cost recovery fee for human redress of these sorts of issues, it would not cost them anything, and that's assuming they don't lose money from improper automated enforcement, which they almost certainly do.

It's pure incompetence.

Why would I want to keep paying google for their shitty AI’s mistakes?

The alternative is being disappeared without recourse, if you have to pay 40 bucks when they screw up, it is what it is, and you can make a decision.

That is (morally) wrong on so many levels. It’s basically what regulations were invented for.

What would your brilliant regulation entail? Forcing companies to publish software for free when their automated systems think it's malware?

Could you even summarize a piece of legislation that doesn't amount to "describe Google, then make everything that annoys us about Google illegal for companies fitting that description"?

Apply anti-trust law as is currently written for starters. Standard Oil and Ma Bell were split for less egregious offenses than we've seen from Alphabet/Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

In Standard Oil's case, vertical integration across markets was enough, and pretty much everyone in Big Tech is guilty of this.

>>What kind of programmers wrote such code that terminates

The Human mind has an infinite capacity to justify any manner of things as "just doing my job" or "just following orders"

This has been seen in all industry, in all types of roles and at all times in history

There is nothing more dangerous than a group of people "just doing their jobs"

Also hubris. Hubris is a hell of a drug.

So it's easy to think with a human customer service agent, all will be well. But then I think about all the customer service calls I've made or emails I've sent, and I almost wish that they did not exist so I don't get my hopes up and waste my time. Most customer service is worse than a computerized flowchart.

And even if they do understand your situation, and have authenticated you, and aren't just reading a script, then most of the time they can't offer you anything else besides what's possible on the website anyways. Sometimes we just like having someone to complain to.

Sure thing, but I still prefer to talking to the worst human, than the best KI avaible.

Also, I bet no one think all will be well, without KI, but it will be better dealing with incompetent, overworked and underpaid call workers, than dealing with a "smart" KI, with you cannot talk at all. In the first case there is at least the hope, that someone escalates the problem to someone with more knowledge who can finally solve your problem.

That's not my experience of call centres. While they are generally reading from a script and often they have no more information than you do, they crucially have the ability to recognise when things aren't working right and escalate your issue.

With Google's bot approach that can never happen. The only way to escalate issues is to be famous and write a blog post or tweet about it.

The problem is that regardless of the number of programmers that refuse to implement the whole thing, you only need one to ever say yes to get it.

So every bad idea eventually gets implemented.

Not surprising, given the amount of so called "engineers" they hire, some of whom don't really have a background in CS, just studied for the interviews, or came from a coding school. It's astonishing how many fresh code bootcamp grads that companies like Google pick up and pay 6 figures for.

The absence of an appeals process for online forums and stores is one of the great threats to public life today.

Most societies actually have something to solve such disputes: courts of law.

The real tragedy is that we decided to let corporations grow so big that they can say "fuck you" to courts and people alike with no repercussions. Twitter is famous for this, ever tried to appeal a ban?

I fear this is overstatement...people don't have a recognised right to an appeal if their app is shutdown. Only if the agreements were written in such a way as to define such a right, would a court of law even be involved.

This isn't about companies being too big, it's about an absence of rule making. If there were some rules defining the rights, then the courts could, indeed, be involved; but courts can't be brought into something just because it is "wrong". People agree to the ToS when they submit an app to the store; and the ToS more or less say, it's Gapplsoft's platform and they may do what they like.

> people don't have a recognised right to an appeal if their app is shutdown.

In Germany, people and political parties have obtained court judgements to unlock their Twitter and FB accounts. Generally the principle behind these decisions was that Twitter and FB are a public venue for discourse and therefore it goes against free speech to ban accounts for acceptable speech.

The only downside is that it are mostly hardcore actual Nazis which obtain these rulings, e.g. from the NPD party: https://www.belltower.news/gerichtsstreit-facebook-muss-seit...

That is a Twitter account, not an app.

It is unlikely that any common law jurisdiction would apply freedom of speech so broadly but it is uncertain. It could be that even Germany only applies it in cases where it is clearly a matter of political speech. How broadly do you think this precedent applies?

It 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...

I made such a mistake - hosted a static page on AWS S3 with a redirect. Google didn't like that. AdWords account blocked, no one to talk to but the bots!

Do 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.

There's this quote about how the dictator are benevolent in the beginning in their appeals to people's safety needs.

Slowly but surely, the people handover their rights and are shocked by the power the dictator "suddenly has."

When the chrome team was tightening their grips on chrome, people here hailed the move because some windows programs like anti-viruses, download managers and adware sideloaded extensions.

I like this.

We do keep giving power to some system because they "protect us" (Google and Apple in 2010) but there's always a chance that they'll stop caring once they don't need your support anymore.

Microsoft is also trying to buy our support by being benevolent, I wonder how long and if that will last.

Until the nanosecond they regain enough ground they’d lost when they missed both mobile and cloud.

Not saying it wasn't a better time, but I do remember the era of half a dozen IE toolbars installed on folks' computers doing God knows what.

Wouldn't a better solution be a pop-up that says "your browser has bad plug-ins. May I uninstall them for you?"

Hostile is a better word for their moderation than ineffectual.

Yes I do remember.

Then extensions started being a spyware / malware delivery mechanism, with popular ones being bought and turned overnight. Coupled with browser plugins shoved down on the user's throat by various Windows software, this made Firefox unusable, at least on Windows.

It's why back in 2010 I started recommending Chrome to family, because Chrome installations kept being clean. It's why we can't have nice things.

From malwarebytes: "Spyware. Although it sounds like a James Bond gadget, it’s actually a type of malware that infects your PC or mobile device and gathers information about you, including the sites you visit, the things you download, your usernames and passwords, payment information, and the emails you send and receive."

Yep, Google is certainly protecting us from companies that do that.

Both Chrome webstore and Google play are infested with spyware, maladware and such. Yet it’s not a problem when the big G is pimping them.

I think you still can by clicking 'enable developer mode'? I get 'bypass paywalls' that way.

There are people inside Google that must have thought this review and communication process was a Good Idea. It wouldn't have gotten built otherwise.

Will these individuals continue to be putting Good Ideas into production indefinitely or is there some sort of immune response inside Google?

I have no interest in a scape goat or anything like that, I'm just curious if there's a way to incorporate the real-world consequences of choices like this into who is empowered to make choices going forward.

One thing I've noticed working for a variety of companies is that highly profitable companies generally do not have consequences for even fairly dramatic failures, both in terms of how they treat customers and how they treat employees. They simply have too much money, so there's little need to do so.

In a tiny company, a large failure can easily be the end of the company, so they're far more motivated to care about things like customer happiness, etc.

Relevant: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/gap/

This story is about infra, but it applies just as much for product.

Interesting read. I've never worked for a company that tried to do a reasonably serious post mortem on a disaster. Or perhaps I was simply never one of the cool kids that were invited.

It's pleasant to think that that's actually happening somewhere. Usually it's probably more like Google+ (gosh, we did everything right, but somehow it just didn't work out--oh well, it wasn't that much money after all, and hey, we can keep using it internally).

VP of ATT Wireless Billing fired the number portability group and hired an outside firm to do it, right before the date the FCC mandated people be allowed to switch carriers and keep their cell number. Took a few months to fix the issue, and ATTWS was fined millions per day.

The VP made a boatload in a bonus for outsourcing a major group with expensive Seattle engineers and offshoring it. Then the company paid millions to the FCC in fines for the fuck up. He kept his job.

Saw this cycle repeated all over, VP replacing expensive hundreds of millions in telecom equipment then go working for that vendor as a VP for them cough nortel cough...

Shit kept moving along, saw VP's back in the day push for the expensive per minute charges on low income phones while allowing the cheapest rates or inclusive long distance for normal users. The costs to keep the extra expensive billing and bad press of gouging the poor was ignored util it made the news. Shrug, change policy, nothing to see here.

Google is losing Joe Rogan due to censorship, while Google is running off their most watched creators due to guest censorship. Theres even people making plugins to get around googles censorship (msm channel blacklist, pockettube, etc).

The whole control angle of companies strangles customers and developers to create new platforms, bad mangament is a great opportunity for startups to take on these issues and grow into major companies. Spotify is just the modern day Napster. Bitchute is a wayward home for censored conversations. Paypal decided to ban people for politics and now dozens of companies are biting into their market, Square/Stripe etc.

People are tired of being controlled by FANNG companies, nextdoor took off due to facebook, companies are trying to keep the afloat with the largest consumer base, but once the market is shattered with fleeing/banned users and customers, new companies will pop up. Myspace tried to control the market, facebook took over, now facebook controls what you see in your feed, and people flee, so facebook buys up the startups people flee too.

Tiny companies fill the need, we just need to make sure they get funded to continue and grow, crowd sourcing is one area that helps.

I'm loving that hackers and programmers who hate being told what to do and how to act, are coding and design ways around this problem. Chrome extensions is a good idea, but soon google will ban them, Dissenter as an example. When chrome is too controlling people flee to the next browser. Look at how many browsers there are now doing what Google is lacking.

I cant wait to see what people build to rebel against "the system", and theres now methods to fund them, the future looks great. Everyone keeps talking about the same issues, as if its an accepted fact, then someone comes along and builds a platform/app/extension that fixes it.

And people move on...

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, maybe even sell "Google insurance", a group of small devs could pool some money to pay for access to Google support when the hammer randomly falls on one of them.

This idea brought to you by my experience with various government bureaucracies, which are nominally publicly accessible, but, due to under-staffing and high demand for services, are more productively approached through the right kind of lawyer.

That will be great but that’s just corruption.

> 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.

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

Old and busted: Google unexpectedly cancelling their products.

New hotness: Google unexpectedly cancelling other peoples' products.

Google must be an awesome place to work as an engineer because apparently you just generally don't have to worry about deprecating your products/services or interacting with your customers. Amazon is notorious for their oncall and stubbornness when it comes to sunsetting services. Everyone I know that works there hates the burden that comes with being "customer obsessed." I never hear any complaints like that from the people I know at Google.

hmmm I wonder why GCP is having such a hard time getting enterprise customers...

I wonder what both AWS and Azure have that google does not???

Amazon is good if you are the customer. If you are a vendor, you're as fucked as if you'd use Paypal, the horror stories about automated systems booting people off of Amazon with no way to reach a human that can override the decision are rampant.

Amazon is good if you are the customer, right up until they use the data they collected from your product to launch their own competing service.

Weird. My mind automatically pictures this in the Drake and Distracted Boyfriend memes, which is the reverse purpose of what memes were designed for. Repetition is powerful.

I feel you...

We had similar issues with the Google Play store for the ArtStation App (https://magazine.artstation.com/2018/12/happened-artstation-...), it simply got taken down and appealing continually got rejected. It was only after the issue got picked up as the top story on Hacker News and other sites that exposed the dysfunctional nature of their moderation that finally Google subtly changed their policy so that if the content is primarily “artistic” it’s allowed, but the catch is that only they deem what is appropriate and not...

We recently updated our Chrome extension also and it just seems to me that not a whole lot of effort is going into the Chrome Web Store, at least on the developer side where you update the extensions.

As a web developer, i am tired of JavaScript and whole web ecosystem and want try desktop or mobile apps. But then I read stuff like this and just cannot imagine building a business where AI or one single outsourced moderator can upend my business.

I hate regulations but I am of opnion that if you are a platform that other people use to make living then you should be regulated. Don't be platform of you cannot provide processes to handle appeals or able to pay massive damages in case of false positives.

For now, I will stick with webdev.

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.

There are no shortage of workplaces where viewing nudity in your web browser isn’t considered professional. That’s...probably 99% of U.S. companies.

Oh I knew Apple applied the prude-policy to their store. I did not realize Google did too. Interesting.

Yet for some reason does not flag the Reddit, Instagram, and Twitch app with similar or worse content. I wonder if their algorithm has special exceptions built in to ignore apps specifically by name or by "downloads > X".

Wish I had known about this product. This seems like a really awesome bookmarking service -- better than most I've seen. :(

This is also so terribly common. I had a Twitter account get suspended for 2 months...with no explanation. I appealed it but it still took 2 months. What if that had been my main source of revenue? They restored the account without much explanation.

We really need _real_ people to make decisions like this. Oh it's not scaleable? Then maybe it's not a product you can sustain.

> What if that had been my main source of revenue?

I'm not saying that people who did are in the wrong, but yeah, don't do that. Likewise, it is very risky to have Youtube as a unique source of revenue, etc. Or even to diversify but across the same platform company/holding...

You should not take such critical dependencies even if they had real people doing proper reviews, because they can very well change their terms when they want, in unpredictable ways.

Oh, I agree! There are so many YT creators now that discuss how their videos are demonetized and how it's fucking them over but they're okay because of Patreon support.

Same with me. If I lost my Twitter account, I could rebuild it -- my _actual_ following at the time had more to do with my blog and RSS (miss those days :( ); however, it shows that you can't really trust that an account is yours or that as long as you follow rules, you get to keep using the site. Or that you'll get a "fair trial" when you're accused of breaking rules.

It doesn't help that these companies also punish you for getting accused when they _do_ have manual review. One of my photos on FB got mistakenly flagged, reviewed and approved that it's fine, and I still had a 7-day ban from posting/commenting. Youtube has that 3 strikes rule or whatever where if you get accused 3 times or more of copyright infringement (even if false and retracted), you lose monetization.

Hi Azer! It's been a while.

I had the same problem with a Chrome extension for my side project Defero (school information system). It uses InboxSDK to integrate the Defero address book with GMail. Unfortunately, it got flagged for security review and it kept getting rejected no matter what I changed. I ended up concluding my authentication mechanism and/or my use of InboxSDK was causing problems so I'm going to try changing the authentication mechanism.

But working with the Google to try to get it fixed and finding the cryptic warnings they hide in various parts of the developer console has been extremely annoying. I don't blame you for your decision.

I have to wonder how PayPal are feeling about their $4 billion acquisition of Honey now, which requests permission to read/write on all websites and exists solely as a browser extension. They're on multiple browsers, but I doubt either Mozilla or Apple will be particularly interested to protect what's presumably now a massive PayPal data mining operation.

I would think lawyers at PayPal would have a little more 'pull' than a single developer though.

I doubt it would have to go to the lawyers, I am sure the exec's of both companies are members of the same organizations, country clubs, or other social circles

Good question, Amazon apparently is also curious:

Amazon suspiciously says browser extension Honey is a security risk, now that PayPal owns it

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/9/21059083/amazon-honey-brow...

It's a shame that so many of the comments have to do with left-pad. Kozmos was a great piece of software and I will miss it even though I haven't used it in a while. It came very close to how I personally think a bookmarking service should work, which is pretty incredible for something made by a single person. Seems like a lot of people have been complaining about the Chrome extension store lately. I wonder what's going on behind the scenes there. Anyway, looking forward to your next project Azer.

I would really benefit from this product. I'm working across three computers and I have book marks all over the place. A central repository that enhances searching and categorization would be awsome.

Yea, I actually offered to take over development of Kozmos, but wasn't taken up on the offer. I'm going to build my own solution one day, just because I am so interested in it, but until then I use Raindrop.

Does this suit your needs? https://histre.com/

I'm the person building it, so please let me know if you have any questions.

I imagine it must be painful to tie your agency to a large corporate entity that clearly doesn’t give a shit about you.

All hail our indifferent corporate overlords.

I had a small harmless extension which does not access ANY user information and completely client-side. I received cryptic takedown notice and was not able to convince them it is not in violation of their policies. They never specify what policy exactly you violate, just keep referring to the whole document. Finally I decided it is not worth it and took down my extension.

I’m sorry that you had that experience. Maybe enough up votes will get Google’s attention.

There’s only one developer advocate on the Chrome extension team; hopefully they see this!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23198629

Instead of coming on here and addressing the issue, he tweeted this instead:

Thanks for the tag. Looks like the author's core issue is (understandably) with the construction of the system itself. I'm not sure what I can do here other than listen and reiterate that we are trying to work to address these issues.

- https://twitter.com/DotProto/status/1264331488029376513

A month ago he said:

For context, we're currently planning to create a team that will respond to escalations with more meaningful information about a rejection.

- https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-exte...

But the situation only appears to be getting worse and no one at Google appears to care enough to do anything about it.

I have an extension that is once again in rejection form mail purgatory and it makes me want to take my extensions off of the Google Chrome Web Store as well.

google dgaf

There are only a handful of extensions that are deal breakers (the lack of which would send users to other browsers). uBlock Origin, for example. All the others can fuck right off.

lol. If you think uBlock Origin going away will make people switch browsers, I think you've got another think coming. We will soon see...

1. When (not "if") Google kills UBO 2. How Chrome's market share doesn't drop

Google have already given notice that they are killing uBlock Origin. Manifest v3 will eliminate the ability to have your own adblocker. In its place will be the ability for an extensions to provide an interface to a built in functionality that is deliberately gimped.

Adblock addons will be drastically limited in functionality, must bundle the block list with the addon, can't update the list outside of updating the addon, are limited to a fraction of the size of existing block lists.

This will end the arms race in favor of ads vs blockers by ensuring that ad blockers can't win while pretending its not ending adblocking.

As a Firefox user I can only laugh at this.

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.

I think the parents comment's argument is that since it's based on chromium it also can eventually be forced to acquiesce, so any chromium-based browser is just a stop gap solution.

Chromium is Open Source, Google can t force Brave or MS or anyone else to do anything they don't want to. Google can make their life difficult, leading to a fork, but they can't force anything beyond that.

With all that said- I still prefer Firefox and think it is the best choice right now for the Web.

The difference in scale of effort and money/time of being downstream vs a fork makes it at least possible that they would do no such thing. I personally think it would be extremely unlikely they would fork it.

In theory. In practice, Manifest v3 (the changes to adblockers) will be implemented at the C++ level, meaning you'd need to fork Chromium in order to avoid it. I would be surprised if Brave even had the engineering power to do that. Microsoft perhaps, but I doubt they actually will.

Maybe with enough exposure it will get people to move away from digital sharecropping where anyone even can accidentally take away your livelihood.

I wonder if anyone is keeping track of just how many developers are completely writing off Google just because their support is so terrible, and their policies so absurdly draconian.

People give shit to Jeff Bezos all the time, but compared to Google, there is no comparison to the level of company-wide user hostility and blatant privacy violations with such little public accountability, as that of Google's.

Scrolling through the comments, many seem to think this was unintentional, mistake, or overzealous AI. However, the author said this has been ongoing for 2years:

> "Google's Chrome Extension team has been giving me a complete nightmare since last two years."

What if the extension violated some policy that he either overlooked or is not publicly stated?

Generally if you take the approach "what might I be doing wrong?" instead of aggressively asserting "I am doing nothing wrong!", you're able to uncover some solution on your side. I rarely ever try to deal with support because it often ends in no/poor resolutions.

I would guess there's something in this extension that looks very similar to suspicious activity (regardless of whether it is) and some light refactoring would resolve the issue of repeated flagging.

Not suggesting this is right or good, but it's probably less time consuming and more effective than emailing back and forth for two years.

I keep seeing these things pop up on here and I am starting to get the sense that the Chrome team at Google feels it is too big to fail. They don't seem to care about fixing their system, but once developers leave to your competitor you're in trouble. Just look at Windows Phone, pretty solid OS had some nice features that Android and iOS didn't but at the end of the day no developers really wanted to make apps for it so it died a slow death.

With the new Edge supporting Chrome Extensions, I wonder if some of these devs are going to move their extensions over to that or do like Kosmos and just move on to some other project that is outside the reach of Google.

All in all it is sad to see Kosmos go, I used it back in 2017 and really liked it. I didn't make the jump to the paid version but it was a well put together extension and solved a problem I think many users have.

Eventually, somebody will write bots to deal with this robotic bureaucracy and it will be matter of how much licenses and CPU power you have to negotiate a better deal. Essentially, it will be like rich people nowadays solve issues between themselves using lawers.

This story explain perfectly why I will never create anything relying on Google tech or services again... Too many horrors story... And I have 2 projects killed by their dumb AI and without any possibility to talk to a human Google is Skynet!

I'm keeping an eye on cookiengineer's "Stealth" proxy ( https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth ). It reminds me of the old (and still kickin') Proxomitron ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron )

If you MITM your own browser you can do whatever you want without an extension (that's almost a hostage to browser makers.)

Another victim of the Chrome Extension AI. Seems like the PR move of last week was nothing beyond that, a PR move. I expect them to backpedal again like they did with Pushbullet, but it's too late now.

But thousands other will perish

<rant>

I feel Google, Facebook and Twitter need to take a big step back and stop antagonizing paying users: be it developers or advertisers. A majority of the issues stem from horribly strict enforcement of policies. What these sites expect from us mere mortals is to do a tightrope walk every time we create and launch something. And some of these policies are actually ridiculous. I understand the fallout of Cambridge Analytica has caused all these sites to give more importance to policy enforcement but the solution to that problem does not lie in automating it through use of technology alone. Business and people's livelihood depend on these policy enforcement. God forbid your business Ad account is shutdown for good because you used a word that causes some stupid algorithm somewhere trigger an automatic ban.

It has happened to me. And worst part is you have no recourse. I have spoken directly with Google Execs who were assigned to a client of mine for managing a big ad account. Even they were clueless as to why the system suspended the account. After a lot of digging around I realized that it was because I had used the same credit card in two different accounts. I mean really? Come on! I am lucky I had a Google Exec who was in contact with me because the client was high value. What would small businesses be going through if the same thing happened to them? I shudder to think.

All these sites need to relax with their enforcement of policies. Deploy humans for this. We already have a lot of unemployment due to this pandemic and this would be a great time to payback some of those profits by employing more support staff. AI is good but it is not good enough yet to have such levels of control.

</rant>

Humans require salaries and Google is a giant machine for turning attention/intent into money. Adding humans into the loop just creates friction for the money printing part. And as you noted, they care when the person spending money is rich enough. It's everyone else that loses with their system.

I've been reading these stories for as long as I can remember knowing about HN. People don't seem to quite learn that Google is a machine for printing money and unless you're paying them they don't care.

I 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 about anyone (users or the people who make content for their platforms) yet we still use their products. These days I try to avoid them wherever possible, not only for a small satisfaction of boycotting the company, but also because if I grow to like one of their products it will just shut down eventually.

What can we do about this?

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.

Actually, I regularly have to go through any APIs we use from Google and yell at the developers who use them.

I can't risk having a corporate rollout/demo/pilot fail because some developer made the Googlebot pissy and got everything they're associated with banned.

I trust Microsoft way more than Google at this point. That says something.

Google is clearly guilty of neglect because they like to do everything in an automated way ...even if it can’t possibly be done well at this point.

But that is way different than Embrace, Extend, Extinguish from MS. I would not trade, say, Chrome for the world of IE. the tension between Google and Apple is far healthier for developers and consumers.

> Stop worshiping the ground Google walks on, which seems common on HackerNews.

I've had the exact opposite observation here. There are few places on the Internet I see Google get more consistently browbeaten and held to account for its mistakes and abuses than on HN. This has been the case for at least the past six or eight years or more. Threads on Google here are very rarely laudatory; they typically make the front page because of bad things.

HN comments tilt toward overwhelmingly disliking Goliath and favoring David. You see this in most Intel v AMD threads from the past decade. You'd think Intel killed HN's favorite puppy or merged with Oracle. Intel having an inferior product now doesn't explain the visceral response, it's something deeper psychologically, it's a revulsion of big tech broadly. It's mostly just a matter of rooting for the underdog and against big tech. The same thing is common re Amazon and Facebook here (increasingly Apple as well, which has lost a lot of its favor on HN). Microsoft is slightly in favor by contrast, they took a very long big tech lashing previously and people like a comeback story (their open source olive branches help a lot).

Pretty typical, forever repeating psychology. Underdogs, comebacks, goliaths v davids. They won't like you again until after you fall.

> You'd think Intel killed HN's favorite puppy or merged with Oracle.

To be fair, Intel engaged in some really evil practices to prevent AMD from gaining market share for a very long time. And, unlike Microsoft's slap on the wrist, Intel never really got punished at all for it.

Yeah, Intel isn't as bad as Oracle simply because they don't have Larry Ellison. However, Darth Vader isn't magically good simply because he's not The Emperor.

> Underdogs, comebacks, goliaths v davids. They won't like you again until after you fall.

Yeah, the fact that once "the davids" of the past became today's goliaths changed their behavior from (at least pretending to) caring about being social net-positive forces to being purely business machines has nothing to do with it.

For instance, Google's code of lost this paragraph two years ago [1]:

> “Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.

It may not matter to you but it does for some others. I'm one of them.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

> These days I try to avoid them wherever possible, not only for a small satisfaction of boycotting the company, but also because if I grow to like one of their products it will just shut down eventually.

> What can we do about this?

I think you've already got it; don't use Google products. Ideally, pay for alternatives.

I honestly don't think this does anything besides give me a small satisfaction. I can't think of a time when voting with your wallet actually worked.

> I can't think of a time when voting with your wallet actually worked

I suppose it depends on how you count, but Fastmail seems like a good example.

> What can we do about this?

Purchase software from other providers. With like, cash.

> What can we do about this?

There is a much harsher solution that I'm not even sure I advocate yet: stigmatize employment there.

At-will employment somewhere when we can easily go elsewhere means that, while we don't necessarily condone all that our company does, we in general support/accept the company and its approach. Therefore, absent hardships, we must assume Google employees generally support Google actions as a whole (even if not this one). If others disapprove of Google's actions as a whole, they are allowed to disapprove of those that work there.

In my opinion, the best you can do is disapprove of working there (including passing opinionated judgment, albeit politely, on those that do work there). Maybe you take such character judgments in your personal or hiring decisions. Having said that, I don't agree with it as I generally support Google's actions/presence as a whole, but the further their average lowers, the more myself and others won't.

Some of the kindest people I know work at Google.

The truth is that it is become an enormous company and somebody working e.g. on the internals of Compose code has no power over how Chrome handles extensions.

I despise Google more and more as a company but that's not going to affect them.

In the areas where Google has some real alternatives, switch to these.

I saw this in my top-5 school. Internships at google were laughed at pretty hard. All the best guys wanted SpaceX or Tesla. Apple was also considered good but not great for your resume and you couldn't talk about what you worked on much.

> When I used Google Play Music a couple years ago there was a feature that was broken for YEARS

Not sure if this is yours, but mine was that it would often swap out my tracks for radio edits, even though I uploaded the original. I'm an adult, I bought this music, I don't need the kids' version. There's a built in feature you can use, "fix incorrect match," that would fix this only about half the time.

Oh right, it also capped the max size of playlists to 1000 songs for some reason.

Now it sounds like YouTube Music won't even let me listen while switching to another app, like a workout app, and won't let you turn off the screen without the music going out. Hard to believe.

Looking around, I'll be moving to musicolet I guess. Sounds like AIMP and BlackPlayer get good reviews too, but I really love the idea of an app that actually tries to limit the permissions it requests from you.

https://www.androidauthority.com/best-music-players-android-...

I had that issue as well, but in this comment I was talking about editing a track's album art. It would upload the picture but not do anything with it. Very weird to have such a basic function be broken like that for so long.

As for YouTube Music, it supports background play only if you subscribe, like regular YouTube.

Why are google unable to offer ongoing services? Anything that requires management is always a disaster for them (DCMA notices on YouTube, hell any part of YouTube for creators, Nest, now this). I’ve worked at small trading companies where if you’re not directly involved in the act of trading, you’re just a cost centre to be minimised. Is it that?

Someone should collect all those HN posts and send them on LinkedIn to all google employees as a PM, there must be someone important that will review this or forward it directly to a department? https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrent...

I remember when the Free Software movement really started to make inroads into the corporate world, which in my circles was the late 90s / early 2000s.

It was like a revelation.

No longer were we tied to inflexible, command-and-conquer style platforms. We could fix bugs ourselves, instead of waiting for years for vendors to maybe fix the bugs we diligently reported.

We could distribute our own libraries and packages in minutes, with licenses of our own choice. There was no corporate gatekeeper standing in the way. (But what of security, you ask? Look at Lenovo and Superfish ... that was a MITM attack produced by the supposed gatekeepers).

Now it seems things have come full circle, and a younger generation of developers is discovering, once again, that writing software for closed, proprietary systems is a mug's game.

Only now, those platforms seem even more strongly entrenched, courtesy the mobile duopoly and web monopoly.

I wonder if it would be possible to build a casa against Google and start a legal litigation on this matters.

This is same the guy who owns the leftpad package on npm :)

Digital needs a human touch. Google never understood this, and I would never trust them with anything important. Too many nightmares with their robots. Generally, I don’t care, dumped Google and Chrome, but the Nest thermostat hurt.

The worst part of the so called modern Google experience for me is that somehow mediocrity seems to be accepted as good enough. Quality human work has been replaced by software that is far from perfect. The worst part: others try to emulate that, "because Google is doing that." But Google is a Behemoth that can afford not caring. Moreover, since they know they can't be search leaders forever, they really can't afford not diversifying and not experimenting with all possible services, trying to see which one sticks and which could be monetized. So I expect it's going to be much worse in the future.

> 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.

It makes me wonder when behaviors like this becomes an anti-trust issue.

I like that the author called automated answer system of Google Chrome extensions what it is. And it is bullying indeed. It is yet another raport about misbehaviour of this company torwards developers. Why in earth we should accept corporation bullying developers when we set up policies in communities for everyone to feel safe? There is no place for double standards. I hope the author will support the free internet by providing services outside the closed ecosystem of Google

This isn’t a Google issue. This is a platforms-that-can-enable-censorship issue.

Google is just an instance of the class. All of the instances of the class are subject to this problem. Fixing Google’s policies will not eliminate this danger.

Censorship platforms that do not permit the user an escape hatch (iOS App Store, I’m looking at you) are ultimately able to decide what we see, what we read, what we are allowed to think. They can disappear entire bodies of work without even a notification.

Do not use censorship platforms.

This seems like a cool service. There are few bookmark managers implementing full text search. Move to safari or firefox and notify the users ?

I had the same things 3 years ago. The stupidest user experience I have seen is the process of publishing the google chrome extension.

Keeps 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.

Chrome can load unpacked extensions by enabling Developer mode in about://extensions. Google will definitely get up in your business if you try to distribute an extension on your website this way though.

Can you go more into what they do if you try to bypass their distribution mechanism? Is there any existing posts sharing experience? I'm curious as this has always been my backup plan if Google takes this action against my extensions.

It's fine on MacOS (albeit a bit clunky), and sideloaded upgrades end up creating two copies of the extension so you'll have to ship your own autoupdater. On Windows, it's a no-go as Chrome will display a scary warning every time you start the browser: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23055651/disable-develop...

Yikes. I use macos but definitely ship up windows. Appreciate you sharing this.

There is a trend here, Safari 12 killed off extensions. Now Chrome is killing off extensions. And possibly Firefox too?

Unlike Safari and Chrome, Firefox doesn't have a financial incentive to prevent ad-blockers. In fact, they did extra work to their Firefox Preview (mobile) app to integrate an ad blocking plugin as early as possible.

I guess the Product Manager(s) from Chrome extensions at this should reply with clarity of how they are dealing with this.

It wouldn't be the first time developers where "trolled" with take down notices. The same thing just happened to pushbullet. Fortunately they were given notice & resolved it & will stay on the store. At least for the time being anyway. We'll see if it happens again. Is this a really common problem?

I replied to the latest version update rejection email (referring to policies) from the Chrome Web Store. They actually replied and my latest extension revision went through. Point is, you can actually reply... there is a channel (form) in the Web Store as well, but of course you can only hope to get a reply.

Now with MS Edge, wouldn't it be an option just to move to its store and flip Google off? Just a thought.

Developers 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.

The great thing here is that it is literally 100% compatible with Chrome extensions.

I have been working on an extension that uses Chrome's Debugger API, lots of tab / network related APIs, and DevTools. I spun it up on Edge the other day and...it just worked. Everything worked.

I can't say the same for firefox. They do a good job bringing over some extension APIs, but I find it severely lacking for my use case.

Agreed, why are they shutting down instead of doing that?

Not sure there's a lot of Firefox users paying for extensions. especially one which seem to just be a sexier bookmark search.

I generally try to avoid bitching about Firefox design decisions in Chrome threads, but possibly because of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409675 - the original WebExtensions breaking change removed the ability for newtab-style extensions to do a lot of things their XPI counterparts could, in particular focusing on the address bar after opening a new tab. That bug went WONTFIX with no suggestions for an alternative interface, basically telling extension devs to come up with their own proposal for how to implement it if they want that bit of the API back. I'm not familiar enough with the extension in question to say whether any of those specific issues would have affected it (and from the article it sounds like time was a bigger pressure) but developing newtab-style extensions for Firefox is definitely harder than it should be.

While I generally agree with the reasons behind moving away from XPI extensions, it's been really disappointing to see Firefox not be as focused as I'd hoped they'd be on restoring lost extension functionality. That's especially important in the context of Google fuckery like the OP.

This wouldn't be a problem if browsers weren't walled gardens that are controlled by corporations instead of the users running them. Yes there are security issues with ignorant users doing things. But sometimes the fix causes a problem worse than the original.

Firefox and Chrome both don't let users install any add-on without their permission. Switching to Firefox ecosystem just means the leash is longer (and the protection is fake because of their automated signing portal).

If google takes down an extension but it has loyal followers, they can still side load the extension, right?

roadbeats, why not port to Firefox? That browser/company respect your privacy, which seems to matter a lot to you. I don't have any personal experience, though I haven't read any(maybe one, many years ago?) horrible situations like yours at Moz://a

If anybody at Google is wondering why they are about to face antitrust action... Here you go.

Google excels at closing down projects. With all the recent stories I’ve been reading about problems with the extensions team, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Chrome is losing extensions. No extensions - no ad blockers - more money for Google.

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 company. They use their products to steal your information. They aren't meant to help the user, because the user is not their customer. I'm sure you will get a real human employee if you are interested in buying ads from them.

Contrary to popular belief there are many companies that provide software besides google. Use them if you want a provider that might care about your problems. "It's not exactly the same as google ____" is not a valid excuse for not giving it an honest try.

> 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?

are you suggesting that if you paid, then they would not trade in your data?

I'd go further and suggest that some of those services don't trade in your data even at the free tier.

I guess you might be right. For example, here is a semi-official answer on how Google makes money out of Google Docs:

https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-Docs-and-Drive-generate-an...

It's not unlikely that in this case they use the more traditional business model of having the free tier do the marketing for the premium option.

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...

I didn't realise it was actually that much - it's just the only HD product that anyone I personally know has ever bought, which was why it came to mind.

You did inspire me to go look up actual numbers for google though. Looking at FY Q4 - https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings...

If I'm reading the first table correctly, the number for "google advertising" is the sum of all the lines above it, so that's the number I'll take. If we compare that against the bottom line, we get 82.3% for Q4, or 83.2% for FY19.

So either it's improving (from the viewpoint of someone with a distaste of the ad industry, at least), or I mis-remembered 2016's 86% - either way I can update or correct my claim.

Lol. You get different support yes, but it’s equally as shitty if not more so.

I’ve been an enterprise customer of Googles services. When you have a problem simply finding the link, to the obscure dashboard login, to post an issue may take hours. I’m not even joking. Like Google is built to prevent you from using it discover useful support pages with contact information. “Account Executives” otherwise known as sales people, provide zero support after the contract is signed and I mean zero.

Once you write in, you wait, and hope. It’s kind of like filing a radar with Apple but a bit shittier because you have still idiotic, naive, hope you’ll get a reply or help.

If you ever do get a reply it’s likely a bot. If you ever have to disagree chances are it won’t be seen or acknowledged. Google is by far the worst service provider on the planet if you ever have an issue.

The point of that statement was not to say that they don't provide those services at all, the point was that providing those services aren't their "thing". There is not a paid tier of any google product that will stop them from spying on you. Any payment you make is just to subsidize their spying so they get your data at little or no cost to themselves. If you are paying for google services you are not only giving them your data, you are paying for the privilege.

Developers who publish Chrome Extensions also pay for them. I paid $5 initial fee twice for publishing Kozmos extension. In return, I can't even see a contact information to reach out about a bad review made.

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]

The only main Google service I still used was Gmail (and occasionally search when DDG doesn't return something immediately useful). I'd seen comments about Fastmail over the years, but moving seemed like it would be a hassle.

With more at home pandemic time I decided to just do it and have been super impressed. The Fastmail docs are really good, setting up DNS to use my custom domain had explicit steps and pictures for my specific provider (gandi.net) along with a ton of others.

They have super easy to setup import from Gmail to get things over initially and to keep things coming as you convert accounts.

They have really good instructions for all IMAP clients and it's been painless to set those up.

I did have to spend a day going through every account in 1Password and changing emails, but the super simple aliases you can setup in Fastmail make this great. I have a bunch of different ones for different types of sites (some very specific, some general catch-alls) on my domain which I can now blacklist in the future if I need to.

The main issue is that you realize a lot of sites are just terrible, many don't let you change your email at all and require contacting support. Some don't even let you change after contacting support (postmates just says to 'create a new account under your new email and abandon the old one').

In general though I'm happy I did it and the Fastmail site has been pretty impressive. I like paying for software I think is high quality and valuable (where the business and customer have aligned incentives).

I went through a similar process during quarantine, but for bluehost.

I found the process of changing emails over meant I also was able to make Pass entries for them (another way I'm taking control of my data), and at the same time delete my account for websites I don't need anymore. It's been very cleansing.

What is a pass entry and what do you use it for?

Another thing I should mention is I wanted to try hey.com since it looks like they’re doing some interesting things (alerting users to tracking pixels to push back on clients like superhuman, whitelisting incoming mail, etc.) but they make it hard to get an invite so I gave up trying and paid for fastmail instead.

Not GP, but I’m assuming https://www.passwordstore.org/. Pass is a CLI password manager using Git and GPG to store and manage your passwords. I use it and sync passwords across devices through a git repo on self-hosted Gitea. Works really well if you’re comfortable with the CLI.

Also switched away from Google to Fastmail with my own domain about a year ago. Happy with the move, although Gmail still sees some activity because I never took the effort of migrating historic mails and all non-primary accounts.

Thank you, this is what I meant.

Makes sense - thanks, I thought it was some domain level thing.

Re: Tracking pixels - disable images by default in your email client. I get emails now from people like "we've noticed you haven't been opening our emails..."

Hey, i recently switched to Fastmail too! It's been surprisingly painless, even with importing mail, calendars and what not. Like you mention, the most time consuming part has been going through my accounts to update the email address to the new one.

What is a truly private European based alternative to Fastmail? Other than Proton ail.

I've started to switch all my email stuff to https://uberspace.de/en/

It's a kind of shared hosting with full ssh (non-root) access. They offer a pre-installed Roundcube Webmailer, but you can host your own one as well.

I run my own Roundcube with my own Domain and configured a maildrop instance to sort incoming mails.

So far it works as a charm. The hoster is based in Germany and I trust them to be privacy-aware.

I like

https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html

You pay based on traffic rather than per account/domain.

There's a fairly general way to do mail import that works fine with Fastmail, and might be more flexible if you would like to combine the import with reorganization your mail folders. This assumes both providers support IMAP.

1. Set up both providers on an IMAP client that supports multiple simultaneous accounts.

2. Copy messages from the old provider to the new by simply selecting them in the old provider's folders in your IMAP client and dragging them to wherever you want them in the new provider's folders.

As long as you pick an IMAP client that supports copying between IMAP servers, this should do it. I used either Apple Mail or Outlook for this. I don't remember which.

My wake up call came in May 2018 when I was starting a cannabis dispensary YouTube channel and they decided to terminate all content creators. But this also included the gmail account. Completely. Flipping the switch off just like that made me realize I’m an idiot for using Gmail as my “central” email address (I’ve navigated all my critical emails offline and now use my own email server.)

Not wanting to rely on Google - especially Gmail - as my central identity provider is why I switched to Fastmail. Sure it costs and the migration took a couple of days but it's been worth it.

This reminds me of when sports fans say things like, those odds are meaningless, they’re just set by bookies to get action.

True from a naively pedantic POV, but also ignores that betting odds happen to end up efficient also. Like saying shopkeeps set prices to drum up business and aren’t subject to the principles of supply and demand.

Google is an advertising company, but as part of its strategic goals it develops a high quality email client that beat out competitors on its own. I bet you the Gmail team is full of brilliant people who don’t give a shit about advertising and just want to make an awesome email client and spend night and day thinking about just that.

It doesn't matter what brilliant ground level people want if they don't get to do anything about it because of pressure from management.

I have seen this first-hand. I bet you have too. A brilliant user friendly idea stays at the bottom of the product log, as middle and upper management product asks get piled on top of it, pushing it deeper and deeper.

Sure, I guess you could donate the small amount of free time you get to your employer and do it after work, but I can't think of anything more demotivating than working for free for a company with revenue in the hundreds of millions.

This may be true, but follow the money. The facts of their business plan are a simple matter of public record. Users are the product and their customers are advertisers. As a company, they exist to service advertisers. Everything else is just noise. Sure, they have some incredibly talented engineers trying to create good stuff. None of that matters. The focus of the company remains the same. As potential users, we must choose to support that business model or not.

As long as someone understands the Faustian bargain and enters into it willingly, no problem. The difficulty is that it is unlikely most users really understand the details of the deal they are entering. "Hey, cool, free email." That's about the end of the thought process for most users. Google's approach is brilliant in its simplicity. "Free" stuff.

> I bet you the Gmail team is full of brilliant people who don’t give a shit about advertising

I mean they better give a shit about advertising because it’s what lets them have a job at Google.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, but: I bet you the arms industry is full of brilliant people as well, but developing systems that are designed to kill people is still wrong.

I think all of this is moot, because several big companies that have a business model arising from direct transactions with end users ... are also routinely losing sight of their obligation to end users. Did anybody want Windows 8 tablet UI on their desktop? Did anybody say, you know, this Macbook is great, but it'd be even better if it no longer launched my 32-bit software, and please make it phone home for everything I do?

I think this story is better told more simply, that when a company gets big it becomes arrogant, bad at social awareness and serving anybody. I'm sure you can find advertisers or would-be beneficiaries of what you call "data theft" that are fed up with Google breaking their stuff too.

If only the experience was good on the ads buying side with Google, it is not.

They lost their way but keep riding their initial wave.

Yup, take a look at their financial statements. I haven't done it in the last few years, but for most of their existence advertising revenue has been >95% of their total revenue.

Everything else is a loss-leader or a rounding error.

> 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.

I remember Hotmail

I remember postmaster.co.uk and hotmail.com, they were around way before Gmail, and were less invasive, but I got my own domain and I serve my own emails since 2000 so I got that covered. I like my emails like I like my newspaper: NOT to read them together with someone else. I do know that emails are clear text etc but it's not fun that I get an email about XYZ and then every website I visit shows me ads about XYZ.

Yes, I remember plenty of free providers (as well as quality paid ones, and ISP ones, for example GMX and Ilse), including with IMAP/POP3, TLS/SSL support, anti spam features, anti virus features etc. Gmail was unique in three ways: it had a huge quota (for that time), and it offered a slick web interface. The other way Gmail was unique was the invite. If you gotta get invited to become part of the (secret) club, that makes it more special.

This is why I have slowly de-googled the last year. Finally switched away from Gmail after 15 years. I've removed pretty much all Google from my life except some searching at times.

Google is a provider of all those things. Advertising is the biggest revenue line and supports free access (to products that are still best in class) but they also sell paid versions to both consumers and businesses.

Bureaucracy and customer support problems with large companies is not a new or unique to Google.

> I'm sure you will get a real human employee if you are interested in buying ads from them.

That’s a fact. Speaking from personal experience, Google Ads/Admob seem to be the only services where human support exists.

We had a problem at work with receipts and support request replies to all our customers on a certain popular free email provider that also had a big ad business (but was not Google or Microsoft...) getting filtered out as spam. We'd contact them, and they'd say they would fix it, and in a few days the mail would start going through--for maybe a month then it would go back to getting blocked as spam.

Word of this got to our guy who handled ad buying. He called our ad rep with them, and asked pointedly "why the fuck am I spending $X thousand dollars a month to buy ads from you to get new customers, and then you are blocking those new customers from getting their receipts and support replies???".

The ad rep put our guy on hold for a minute, then came back and said he had their head of IT on conference. He asked the head of IT that question. The head of IT put us all on hold for a couple minutes, then came back with a couple engineers who worked on their email system on the line, and told them to whitelist us so that nothing of ours could be blocked as spam, and promised it would be done in something like half an hour.

It was, and we never had a problem there again.

> They use their products to steal your information.

They aren’t stealing from me. I get to watch YouTube videos, store my files in Drive, and use gmail — all things that I like quite a lot. Yes there are alternatives to gmail and Drive, none of which are good enough for the hassle of switching. There is no YouTube alternative.

A lot of people aren't aware of the data collection. In those cases I think calling it stealing is fair.

Why exactly? You’re not getting a better deal on milk if you understand the economics and logistics of the dairy industry.

Sure but people understand the basic transaction (give money -> get milk). If on the other hand they gave you free milk but tracked your milk usage without telling you, I'd argue that's a non-consensual transaction and falls under stealing (roughly).

What about if someone gives you a free lunch but doesn’t tell you that they’re going to film you eating? Is that stealing?

> What about if someone gives you a free lunch but doesn’t tell you that they’re going to film you eating? Is that stealing?

More sinister than actually, "film you taking a shit and then sell it". As perverse as it sounds, but you won't even know it.

> film you taking a shit and then sell it

I actually got rejected from YC Summer 2019 with this idea. Demo Day would’ve been one to remember.

Check out privacy friendly alternatives to Google products on https://nomoregoogle.com/

Honestly, I'd be willing to pay $50 a year or something if that means that the bots are less strict when reviewing my app (sort of like what Apple does)

One important thing that's missing from the author's story is the why. What is it that's triggering the robotic take-down notices?

This is of course an interesting point that would satisfy curiosity.

But if we are to accept the author’s central claim that it was reviewed and accepted by humans many times in these two years, the why isn’t really important. IMO it would just make the story more interesting, not critically different.

Now if you have reason to think that central claim is bullshit that’s another question.

PS: also in this types of automated triggers, getting to know what triggered the warnings is in itself a pretty hard task. I think a number of extensions just get removed without ever knowing exactly why it happened.

I've been on the receiving end of cryptic takedown in the past and there was absolutely no indication of why. Had to just start trying different things to see what stuck.

Especially since it seems that this extension is for paid users, you can tell them to use Firefox instead (or use Chromium and sideload the extension).

Google should really look into this. Improve your developer support experience, that’s the right way to treat your ecosystem contributors.

Like with appstores, Big Co are taking too much power over our free will.

Let's hope that antitrust agencies will finally investigate them on this subject!

Don't relies on somebody else's distribution platform as you sole way to distribute your software. They totally deserve it.

I think Google is shutting down chrome extensions

I wonder if increasing the store publish fee from $5 to something closer to $50 would enable better customer support.

Well, now with MS Edge, wouldn't it be an option to move to its store and flip Google off? Just a thought.

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.

I switched to Firefox because of Google's draconian extension policy and don't regret it

You could always switch to firefox. Hopefully they don't have stupid algorithms like that.

Firefox isn't an option?

Is Firefox any better in this respect? I am seriously considering switching.

If it bothers you enough "to switch", that implies you've not been writing extensions using universal web extension code, in which case.... what? Why not? The only massive difference is the namespace ("broswer" vs. "chrome"), which is trivially shimmed, and promises vs. callbacks, which is also easily made universal.

But having said that, if you're considering switching you probably also want to consider telling your paid customers how to install your extension themselves, rather than sending them over to Google's extension "store".

Probably, but browser extension developers need to go where the users are. Google has leverage and knows it.

Kozmos, can someone suggest an alternative / replacement?

Google never invest/pay attention enough on support.

It’s really stop me to make a extension business.

Hi there Google employees that occasionally come here to comment!

THIS IS WHAT YOUR COMPANY DOES.

This among MANY other reasons is why people are pissed off with you.

When are you going to fix your toxic corporate culture?

I hope Google will go bankrupt

I have a theory about Google: They're using AI to handle moderation (among other tasks) and it's sort of effective but fails in a lot of frustrating cases, but they cannot admit that the lack of explainability is a serious flaw in their model or that they'd actually need to have humans in the loop to filter out the garbage experiences. Instead, they use humans but treat them almost like bots (probably easier to build more training datasets that way) and put up a hermetically sealed firewall between these moderators and the public.

Google briefly disabled my Google account last year, and it spooked me. I had created a "brand account" to use with YouTube, and for some reason the new account was flagged for suspension within the first day. I was annoyed, but it didn't bother me too much, and I submitted my appeal (aside: I always feel wonderful having no clue what I'm appealing - I'm pretty sure even the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany would have given me the dignity of knowing what I'd been convicted of before the trial + execution/Gulag). Two days later, I woke up to two emails from Google: the first indicating that my main Google account - the one where I have my email, several domain names and YouTube TV - had been suspended; the second indicating that the team reviewed my appeal and had found I hadn't violated any policies and my account had been reinstated, but that I'd need to login soon. I logged in posthaste and found that my brand account was still disabled, but at least I could read and backup my email. (At the time I also happened to be in salary negotiations with my then-client and now employer. Really wonderful timing.)

I tried to submit another appeal on the brand account suspension, explaining that I'd received a reinstatement email referencing the original ticket number, and that all their team had done was erroneously disable and reenable my main account. This time, I got a response saying that I already had an appeal pending so I'd need to wait for it to be resolved. If I really cared that much, I could have tried again to explain again that actually it was their mistake, yada yada, but it wasn't worth it. I didn't want my account to be suspended again with very little recourse other than trying to use my network to get something done internally. Like with a corrupt cop, the prudent strategy was to just walk away and avoid conversation.

I've since stopped using Chrome, and I find that I prefer DuckDuckGo to Google (DDG feels like Google Search used to before $GOOG started blindly trusting deep learning to solve everything). I have hardened my resolve against ever touching an Android device, and I use an adblocker zealously. I haven't fully moved my mail or DNS stuff away, but I am much more cautious. I didn't realize in 2004 when I signed up for Gmail that I'd be entrusting my life's records to an organization that makes the DMV look like an expert at efficiency and customer support.

I'd hope that OP and the various other developers here could maybe band together and maybe consult a lawyer. I have a feeling that given the legal realities of discrimination law and the like, Google's policies and enforcement procedures are bound to be in violation, especially considering the law in its home state. Google's behavior is not merely evil in these cases, but evil and incompetent.

Next time on HN:

Postmortem and lesson learned: Don't make yourself dependent on BIG_COMPANY when building a product

This comment is trite. No Android app, no iPhone app, no Google search listing, no Amazon product page, no Stream/Epic store listing, no browser extensions, no cloud servers. Can you rely on an internet provider or should you lay your own fiber? What technology product are you going to make that relies on nothing? HN deserves better comments imo.

Do not relay on one solution, diversify. Have a backup plan. Assume that whatever it is you rely on has possibility to dissappear anytime for any reason.

Every stock market investor knows that you should always diversify your risk. So never make yourself deoendent on the whims of some single or few BIG_COMPANIES.

Specifically:

> no Stream/Epic store listing

There exist lots of stores: Epic, Steam, GOG, Humble Store, itch, ... So diversify the risks of being dependent on the whims of one or few of them.

> no cloud servers

Write your server-side applications in a way that does not depend too much on the specific details of the cloud implementation of a specific cloud provider so that you can rather easily switch to another cloud provider if necessary.

One 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 user can invoke to request human intervention, and a confirmation email that a human will review the decision that was made within 30 days

3: Public statistics and transparency - any decision that was made that did not involve a human must be published, with stats on % of decisions made, number of cases flagged to human reviewers, and the success/failure rates (for example, number of cases resulting in an overturned AI decision by a human).

This could also be beneficial in other sectors too, like automated credit decisions and insurance policies, to publish statistics and data to afford transparency and identify possible biases. It should also be a requirement in law to preserve any code or algorithms should they need to be audited, including an AI system to be preserved "in time", so that the 2017 version can be audited in 2020 if an investigation is launched for example.

Right now, it's a complete free for all, too many edge cases and ways to game the system if you can figure its loopholes, and no requirement in law to provide a fair basis for users to appeal to a human without causing a PR shitstorm.

This early adoption of AI is quite bad, and I suspect we'll see such developments in the long term future as it matures.

[1]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

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

I think what's needed is case studies or case law. A ruling in a court that becomes a "model" as to which the GDPR is applied.

People look at historic court cases which defines future societal behavior (like acceptance of Gay marriage in some places).

It'll take time but get there eventually, and then we'll see changes based on that.

STOP BUILDING FOR CHROME. THEY WILL DELETE YOU. THEY WILL INVALIDATE YOU. OR THEY WILL COPY YOU.

Go ahead and downvote... same goes for Amazon (hello antirust), Facebook, and any other company. They are not your friend... they are your adversary.

Everyone should realize by now there are no bots at Google. There are only Google engineers and outsourced workers behind every single “bot”, figuratively and literally.

Every nightmare story about accounts being disabled by a bot, or Adsense payouts being canceled, or apps taken out of the App Store, or extensions being shutdown, all done by Google engineers or outsourced workers.

These Google people are doing it because they can and because they are jealous of others’ success. They are also doing it because Google has lost their way in the last few years and they are bored, among other reasons.

They also continually screw with web site search results to harm certain sites, individuals, and companies for much the same reasons as mentioned above.

Trust me when I tell you that there are no bots behind these final decisions. It’s being done by Google engineers and their outsourced workers.

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