They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage.
I tried uploading a title image to my YouTube channel, and somehow doing so created an entire Google Photos account (even though the channel image is not a photo!). I dragged-and-dropped several replacement images because the YouTube UI for layout preview/cropping is so terrible that I didn’t get it right the first few times. Except the images are not replaced, they’re added, and there is nothing in YouTube to delete them. You have to go into Google Photos, and several screens later “delete” your “photos” of useless uploads. Except they’re not deleted, they’re in the “Trash”; etc. etc.
These are basic things that wouldn’t be stupidly hard to do if anyone there had any power over, or concern with, the full flow of using their products.
It's comical to read when it's someone else's problem.
HP is the same, but occasionally you will get an employee answer, but it will be just as useless.
My assumption is all the big tech companies don't want to give support away for free when you should be paying for a support contract for it.
And yes, there is for some unknown reason, a legion of people who will give this fake support for free for internet points.
1. A word-for-word copy of generic support steps (e.g. try restarting, try clearing your cache, log out of iCloud and back in again, etc)
2. Have you reset your PRAM?
3. Wow you have? Then you'll need to reset your NVRAM.
“Look we got one guy keeping the system alive, we’re not paying for another one.”... later...
"Can I get that support that I paid double for?"
"Oh no, for that you need enterprise support, that's extra!"
With Google, more often than not, community "support" through their forums is the only option. Where official phone and email channels exist to get support, they're generally restricted to paying customers only, on the business side of their business only-- users of their general consumers services have no options.
Note, MVP is a quite valuable achievement, including licenses to pretty much all Microsoft products and access to product teams within Microsoft. Many partners will hire MVPs favorably, as well.
Reminds me a little of the scenario where people bizarrely ask a forum if they can bring their dog to a hotel, some random person says "yes" and then you wonder if the hotel declined to accept the dog if the owner would say "well Bob off the internet said it would be fine"
Well I was going through and approving the reviews (just for stopping spam reviews), and I found a guy leaving a review explaining that he's very sorry but he hasn't had time to use the product as his wife has come down with a bad case of the shingles - I seem to remember he went into quite a lot of detail and obviously hadn't realised this review could have been made public.
So, the reward for helping with the forum are some badges and a chance to be Google's beta tester, and it appears to be working? Maybe they can launch some sort of mechanical turks service in the future where the workers are paid with this "rewards" instead of money.
Explaining it to users is a nice bonus.
Sometimes that means minimalism. Sometimes it means that you have ease of use. Sometimes you realize that your users are actually not your customers, and you need to make the product attractive to the customers, not the users. That way lies madness and enterprise sales.
At a less dire level, it also affects the ability to acquire and retain customers. If a product does not offer the features a person needs or fails to reflect how they use it, the product becomes more trouble than it is worth. Compare Google's and Microsoft's office productivity applications. There are many things that you simply cannot do with Google's product that are addressed by Microsoft's product, or even in the often criticized LibreOffice.
Most Google products exist solely for the benefit of the Google engineers who use them for resume padding & career growth. They lose money for Google the company and they infuriate loyal customers up until they are capriciously surprise decommissioned.
iirc unlike Dropbox, files shared with you do not count against your quota on Google Drive as long as you don't add it to your drive.
Of course the data is available to download if I pay, but my previous 2 years of payment didn't count. (mysterious)
Will literally never pay Google for anything ever again after that, its actually evil.
Compare that to the new service hey.com which claims you can download/export forever.
Fuck Google. Just bought a new MacBook Pro yesterday and I will never install or use any Google products on it ever.
I guffawed. I don't understand who thinks it's a good idea to have a bunch of clueless volunteer fanboys represent your first line of support. So many forums are like this though. Microsoft is especially polluted with it last I checked. It screams "so big we're officially completely out of touch".
See also "lifetime passes".
And SiriusXM "lifetime subscriptions."
Anyway, any recommendations for QNAP gear?
I ended up adding one of the disks to my PC and the other to a home server.
I must admit though that the QNAP solutions look very helpful if you disregard the abusive disk R/W activity and the inconsistent UI. You may be able to set up complex backup schemes quite fast with it.
If you are interested in virtualization and advanced usage, be sure to get one with an ARM processor at least, because it may be difficult to get packages for it on other obscure architectures.
I've just found too many odd limitations with the device to use it for much more than that. For example, you can set up VLANs and you can bind services to specific physical network interfaces, but you can't bind a service to a VLAN interface. This is what made me give up on the added features.
Also, be aware that some added features have moved to a subscription model[0]. And, if you expose your QNAP to the internet, there's a risk of getting malware[1]. On the plus side, this has made them open up a tiny bit[2][3].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/hmsw6a/beware_of_prem...
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/27/qnap_attack_warning/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/fd0g71/psa_im_having_...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/fgmeu3/psa_qsnatch_up...
/partial sarcasm
You can then use rclone to sync deletions, which uses their API.
Then I run rclone sync:
rclone sync --dry-run gphotos:media/by-year /local/storage/path
Even if it’s as simple as having 50 votes on the bug tracker, there should be some way for forum mods to synthesize and share feedback to the dev team for what to build.
I personally hate how there’s never a feedback loop on these posts noting how a change was made. Microsoft is pretty bad about this too.
“Please submit a suggestion” is a really unsatisfying experience to a user. Especially for really basic functions. Especially when not implementing makes the company money.
I think that if there was consideration, that would be in the mods scripts and posted on the forum.
I understand it’s hard to prioritize features but I’m familiar with so many years old common sense suggestions that don’t have any explanation of why it won’t be fixed.
Maybe an employee could chime in. The problem I've seen with responding "I'll work with the dev team" is that some users at least will then have some timeframe expectations on the order of weeks based on what they imagine a fix to look like. But they don't really have a good idea of the system complexity, and realistically, these kinds of issues can linger for years because either it turns out most users actually care about other issues more, or the business needs to focus on making money, or some other complication shows up; and people end up being disappointed more often than not. I think it's unfortunately better, in this realm, not to say anything until you have the fix implemented, tested, and ready to roll out.
All the free online services that I can think of have this kind of annoying issue that advanced users run into. (And unfortunately the paid ones often have that kind of issue too, but at least they have much more reason to be responsive to support calls.)
I don’t think it’s better to go from recommendation, to X years of silence, to rollout. I’d rather know if something is prioritized and in progress. I’d like to plan for rollout. Maybe it changes my upgrade and purchase planning.
My main point is the current technique sucks and makes me want to use products less. I’ve used support forums for decades and they can be non frustrating when I feel I am part of a community.
The current method seems “us vs. then” with neglect for any meaningful change. They should just do better. Not perfect. Just not horrible.
I agree, completely unironically.
Some things just don't belong in "work" chats, sorry.