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Comment by extesy | Hacker News Reader

> In other words, there a great many developers who are likely to be open to someone else buying up their creation along with their user base.

As a maintainer of a relatively popular extension (hoverzoom+, ~360K users) I get business offers all the time [1]. A few of them are pretty good, actually. I'm not surprised that some developers eventually give up and take one of those offers. But I am surprised that there aren't more of these "under new management" extensions, or maybe we just don't know about them.

[1] https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

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Related current thread based on that link:

Many temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27327892

The Hover Zoom extension I'm seeing in the Chrome Store [1] refers to a prior version that was overrun by malware and removed from the store.

> This is an open source version of the original HoverZoom extension which is now overrun by malware and deleted from store. In this version all spyware has been removed, many bugs were fixed and new features were added.

Were you involved with the project when that all went down?

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hover-zoom%20/pccc...

No, that was a different developer.

Do you think reporting these requests to the store(s) in question might result in investigation, or at the least, a list of suspicious investors to use to vet extensions/apps?

I would love to see a public database of app buyers. I think some interesting insights could come out of it.

I don't think that would be useful, for two reasons:

1. What rules are being violated by these offers? It is what happens after the sale might break the rules but I can't report someone for having bad intentions.

2. I do not believe Google would be interested in spending even a minute of their precious human time to do any real investigation. If they can't automate the solution then they ignore the problem.

> 1. What rules are being violated by these offers? It is what happens after the sale might break the rules but I can't report someone for having bad intentions.

They might be people who were already banned for modifying other extensions into malware, back at it again on a new account. The hint that they're trying the same tactic might be enough to link their previous and new accounts, and then ban them again.

Seems like the stores could investigate this on their own by creating fake extensions that appear to have lots of users.

I moved from old HoverZoom to Imagus, wasn't aware a reboot of HoverZoom around, thanks for sharing. I'm curious how the sieves and also writing custom sieves compare, if anyone has experience with both.

Imagus has been abandoned by the developer. Its no longer work on many sites

Makes sense, recently had it break with a couple sites, and I noticed the seive is a big json file it downloads from its own server. Will try Hoverzoom+ and see how it goes.

Reminds me of Pirate Bay posting those DMCA emails or takedown notices. Of course not in the same league as random "Business Development" cold emails but it's interesting to public service.

Especially for other extension devs to see who may share similar experiences and helping exposing a pattern of waste-of-time proposals (which I think at that point over values any assumed privacy it was a cold email after all).

Half of those were probably scammers anyway.

Woah indeed. Just doing the math it's about $1k per year for 10k-$15k users? Roughly?

That could be very enticing for a lot of developers.

Thanks for sharing this.

Yeah, knowing the financial incentives makes me very cautions about installing any new extensions. And even for the old extensions I check the recent comments from time to time to see if there's any suspicious new behavior.

Woah. That's really quite something O_O

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