Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews.
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It's astounding how stupid that decision was. Fakespot, quite literally a device to help deter people from buying products, was gobbled up by way too much money by Mozilla - who - apparently wanted it to make profit? How?! Why?! Why did they even buy it?
I think it was just executive idiocy. They searched for extensions with the term privacy in them, bought it, and thought it would make their product worth more. I'm getting really tired of companies just sunsetting products the instant they don't make money.
We really need an open version of fakespot.
I expect that Fakespot already had problems funding themselves, and thus they were a relatively cheap acquisition, and now it turned out they couldn't cover their own costs as part of Mozilla either. But I've never used it so I have no idea.
what’s up with ending FakeSpot? They just bought that.
Assuming the tool was not accepted and used well enough by the user base. Also Mozilla got all user data and the technology. Maybe they plan on a new project that implements part of it in the future? Mozilla is currently experimenting a lot. Shutting down lot of services should be expected.
it was never available outside the usa i think. hard to get useful market penetration then
Sucks, these were both somewhat useful services (pocket particularly)
What a terrible day to hear about Fakespot for the first time :(
Mozilla should make Fakepost source code open-source so that people (with right hardware) can self-host it.
Seriously. If they're not even interested in making money off it anymore then why not?
If it's open source how easy will it be for others then to game the system?
There are open source tools for analyzing if github stars are fake, and they work reliably.
The kind of people that fake reviews/stars target are not the kind of people that are going to be verifying things.
As long as Amazon doesn't crack down, there isn't really a need to game the system.
Owho! This was one of the only useful services provided by Mozilla. Well fk it.
I use pocket to easily sent sites to my e reader.
Same! This is really unfortunate.
Normally postpone to read in the e-book this is Readeck, Wallabag and LinkWarden (taste and color), I have Self-Hosted Wallabag through KOReader.
Owho indeed
Imagine that someone collected and kept the bookmarks there, and now they will disappear. Another reason to remember that you do not need to store anything important remotely.
This is why whenever I want to save a news article, I actually save it to my computer as a PDF. Not only can your online bookmark store be shut down, the article itself can be deleted or edited especially if it's a hot button issue.
I never thought to do this.
Oh nooo.. less bloat? anyway
I kind of liked visiting https://getpocket.com/explore just to read some of the stories they had posted there, but oh well.
Is Mozilla on its last legs?
EDIT: a more highbrow alternative to the pocket explore articles is Arts & Letters Daily.
Cool now kill everything else and go back to just being a fucking browser
Thank you, I've hated pocked ever since the forced integration.
Setup Miniflux to fetch all my feeds, which I can parse through manually during the day and send over the choice pieces to Wallabag for later reading, either at lunch or at nighttime using my phone or KOReader.
God damnit so they bought Fakespot, an extension that actually did good, hiding fake botted reviews and reanalyzing them - and now they're killing it. It was literally an extension to help prevent unnecessary buying. Why the hell did they even buy it?
Then why did you buy it you idiots?!
I'm also exactly on the same boat as you; I use Fakepost frequently and now it will be canned by Mozilla. The alternative I found is https://reviewmeta.com/, but it's quite slow and can't cover all domains of Amazon.
I'll give it a try, but yeah very disappointed