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.
Investing in what moves the internet forward | The Mozilla Blog
Pocket was always among the first things I disabled when setting up Firefox and apparently, I wasn't the only one doing that.... I'm sure it had its users but I always found normal bookmarks to be more convenient.
Never even heard of Fakespot, though.
Fakespot was kinda nice, whenever I looked at something on amazon I'd get a sidebar showing which reviews are real and summarizing them. It's actually pretty useful. Definitely will not miss Pocket.
Fakespot became defeated years ago and became useless on Amazon.
The best method I've had is to ignore any off brand looking product that's been for sale for less than a couple months, but has tons of reviews, and when I pick something, sort the reviews by newest first and read those ones.
Usually the most paid reviews and fake reviews are close to when a product first starts selling. If the thing has been for sale for a little while, odds are that the most recent reviews are mostly from real people. Also, sometimes they will sale a higher quality item the first few weeks it's for sale, and then start selling the item with cheaper parts on the inside. Like earbuds with good innards getting swapped out for cheaper drivers and processors.
Is camel camel camel still useful for Amazon?
I've found it useful enough not too long ago, mostly for comparing Amazon's pricing differences for identical products between various EU countries.
Keepa is better, and depending on whether you’re conspiratorial, not compromised as 3Camels was accused of some years ago.
Compromised?
3Camels was, maybe still is, fully dependent on the Amazon affiliate program. A program that was reduced at one point, killed off 3Camels competitors, but not 3Camels. Then Amazon asked them to stop tracking during Covid for a time which they did.
This is around the time that I heard about Keepa which has a different model, not solely Amazon but other stores too, and not paid via affiliates program.
Also it’s just faster. 3Cs was getting super slow to notify. You’d get an email, click and surprise, that sale was over yesterday.
I probably heard about the controversy on Reddit at the time but there’s a chance I found this site here which covers some of my recollections.
Thanks!
Yes CamelCamelCamel is still useful. I check it every time before a major purchase.
Never heard of this. Sounds useful, except I'm really only buying something from them because I need it quickly most of the time. I don't have the convenience of waiting for price drops like I do with Steam games haha. Thanks for sharing!
I've found a better way to use Amazon: not using it and fuck you, Bezos.
based
didn't fakespot only work in the USA?
Never tried it outside of the USA, couldn't tell ya.
I use Fakespot but wasn't aware it was a Mozilla product.
The bought it out. It was originally an extension.
still is as far as I know. I am using it.
Not for much longer
Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone's faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.
Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won't be sad to see it go.
I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not "curating content" or whatever the fuck.
I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.
well they are terminating it for a reason.
I used to use Pocket a lot, it was my main way to read long form articles. I somehow stopped doing that years ago as a way to preserve my mental health. Since then I haven't used Pocket once.
Bookmarks and services like Pocket are for different things. Bookmarks are for websites you come back to often. Pocket and other services like it are for saving links to stuff you want to remember and/or come back to once or a few times. Bookmarks are not made for having thousands of, while "read later" services are for saving anything and easily have hundreds, thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of things saved.
Idk man, my "To watch later" YouTube bookmark folder has a couple of hundred videos in it at this point.
"Read once bookmark". Problem solved.
OMG I JUST started using Pocket because my work banned Firefox and made us all switch to Edge!!
Now how am I going to sync bookmarks and pages I want to read later on my personal devices??
I generate a QR code and scan it with my phone. Don't sync work and personal devices.
I'd be very tempted to install Firefox in my local appdata folders (which doesn't require admin rights to install), then install a theme to make FF look like Edge with something like this..
Still use real Edge browser for work stuff, but FF for less-than-work stuff.
They are probably scanning for the binary file executable.
If your work doesn't care about your productivity then give them what they deserve for the tools they provide.
I forgot what it is called but there is an extension that syncs bookmarks between Firefox and Chromium browsers.
There’s Instapaper and once upon a time they even gave you an email address to send links into. Maybe they still do that.
Didn't some articles have the pocket icon, and some were without? I remember trying it a number of years ago and being completely flummoxed by not being able to save things I wanted to read. Though it could have been user error.
i used to use pocket all the time back in the day. slowly realized there arent many articles worth saving for later let alone reading at all.
Yeah, me too. I hate that useless Pocket icon in the toolbar. It's the first thing I disable on every Firefox installation.
Glad it's gone for good.