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The mods on the support forums who make it sound like basic functionality missing from their product is your own fault for not submitting some kind of ticket de

The mods on the support forums who make it sound like basic functionality missing from their product is your own fault for not submitting some kind of ticket deserve the gaslighting prize of the year for each of the last 5 years. They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage. https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en

mcny 6y ago
> They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage. 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.
- 1-6 6y ago
  That sounds like a great way to extend storage beyond the limit!
  - techntoke 6y ago
    How so? someone has to share the files first and there is a quota on the amount of times a shared file can be accessed.
    - distrill 6y ago
      open a dummy account, upload and share it with your main account
      - stickfigure 6y ago
        ...or spend $2/mo and get way more storage without the hassle. This fits into the same category as "you can get as much free catsup as you want from fast food restaurants" - not a really useful life hack.
      - neurostimulant 6y ago
        Until google's automated process ban all those accounts. That method is used by many pirate video sites and they'll have to constantly play cat and mouse with google. Do not try it if your account contains anything important as once you got banned there is no way to restore your account due to absolute lack of human tech supports on google side.
      - techntoke 6y ago
        Have you tried opening a dummy account lately on Google? You typically need a phone number to verify, and not some VOIP number but a major carrier. That is a lot of effort for 15GB of extra data, when you can just pay $12/mo for unlimited with G Suite.
        malka 6y ago
        Is it that hard to get a burner number in the US ? In France it literally takes 30s to get one at a shop
        techntoke 6y ago
        Yes it is pretty difficult, and like I said they limit what phone numbers you can use. It ends up costing more money than just paying for additional storage.
  - andinus 6y ago
    Unlimited Drive Storage by splitting binary files into base64: - https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271
varjag 6y ago
Just shows how little talent there really is at Google. Everyone who can code are now on the doodle team.
- neutronman 6y ago
  Keeping an operation like Google going forward at that scale going is not a job for talentless hacks,
  - varjag 6y ago
    …but closing the UX tickets apparently is.
  - obidan 6y ago
    I mean, no it isn’t. At the same time, an operation which works like this is certainly extremely flawed. I doubt there’s one engineer working on GDrive that doesn’t think a folder size feature wouldn’t be useful and relatively simple to implement. So that’s more of an argument towards the operation going bad, instead of the engineers. Maybe this slipped through the cracks but this thread already contains a bunch of examples of stuff like this happening. They can be architecting Tensorflow really well and that certainly is impressive but when GMail takes 3 seconds to load the main page and downloads 10MB during that process you know something is going wrong.
    - wolco 6y ago
      3 seconds to load the main page is a complaint? How far we've come and how little we actually travelled. 3 seconds to download 10 megs. I remember when using a 300 baud modem each letter would slowly appear.
      - Kye 6y ago
        The speed of a car stuck in first gear is impressive next to a horse-drawn carriage. Something is still broken.
  - 6y ago
xtracto 6y ago
Google support forums are terrible. Every time there is a missing feature (I usually find it in Google Spreadsheet) or a bug, the corresponding entry in the support forum would be answered with some pretext of why said feature will never be supported.
- jimmytidey 6y ago
  Isn't being strict about what features you add the core of good product management? (Doesn't apply to bugs I guess.) Explaining it to users is a nice bonus.
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    No. The core of good product management is making decisions that make your product so attractive to users that they get their friends and coworkers to use it, too. 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.
    - baddox 6y ago
      If a bunch of people are asking for a bunch of features it sounds like they have made their product attractive to users.
      - mc32 6y ago
        Not necessarily. There was a time there were few players in the SaaS office collaboration suites, so the default was google apps. Now that other alternatives exist people might be asking for some of the features offered by others.
  - II2II 6y ago
    Not really. There may be conflicting demands from customers that have to be dealt with, and conflicts between those customers and the realities of software development, but you generally need to offer the features that customers need to get their job done. In particularly bad cases, the failure to deliver may effectively dictate corporate and government policies. (Yes, I have lived through that.) 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.
mey 6y ago
Even better, they make it pretty impossible to manage your online storage of photos since they split it out of drive.google.com
- techntoke 6y ago
  It isn't impossible, just not convenient like it used to be. What I do is sync a copy to my backup device, and use the web interface to download any collages or effects that it auto-generates. You can then use rclone to sync deletions, which uses their API.
  - exhilaration 6y ago
    How do you sync a copy to your backup device? My understanding is that it's no longer to programmatically grab the original images, only compressed images are available via the API.
    - techntoke 6y ago
      I use one-way Syncthing, so my phone automatically backups my pictures to Google Photos (using the Google Photos app) and my computer (using Syncthing). Then I copy them into a folder locally like they existed previously on Google Drive by year. Then I run rclone sync: rclone sync --dry-run gphotos:media/by-year /local/storage/path Then if I delete some pictures from Google Photos, the same sync command will delete them from my local backup.
- pottertheotter 6y ago
  What do you mean by that? I'm curious because I switched to Google Drive after Dropbox discontinued any real photo support a few years back. I like Dropbox more for file syncing, but put up with Google Drive's weaknesses because I get much better photo management.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Google Photos is now a separate standalone product from Google Drive. You can upload images to either place but they are not synced.
knolan 6y ago
This reminds me of the obnoxious know-it-all that lives under the bridge on the QNAP forums.
- cyclotron3k 6y ago
  I know exactly who you're referring to
  - knolan 6y ago
    I can’t imagine how a company like that would let such an individual interact with customers.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Do you like QNAP products? I have experience with a few Synology NASes, and was looking at QNAP’s media center NAS products, and they seem nice. It seems like QNAP has a bit more open source support, which I definitely like. Ubuntu Linux Station looks neat, like a first-party supported integrated Ubuntu Docker container? That QNAP’s web management and the device itself runs Linux under the hood is awesome; this may be the case as well with Synology products, so I don’t mean to draw a comparison where there is none. Anyway, any recommendations for QNAP gear?
  - pmarreck 6y ago
    FreeNAS /partial sarcasm
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      I’ve run FreeNAS as well, but I found there was something strange about the involvement of iXsystems I couldn’t put my finger on. It just didn’t seem professionally done on the web site, or the web GUI. It was 98% of the way there functionality-wise, but the GUI was just overwhelming. Personal preference I guess. Perhaps there are other themes, and being open source, I’m sure it can be configured to my liking. I am glad the project exists, all that said. I just don’t know if it’s something I can sell to a client. I am more than comfortable running it myself, and have done so; to catch network scan jobs for SMBv1 only MFPs, for instance.
perennate 6y ago
When I read the recommended response in thread you linked, I just feel like they're acknowledging the feature doesn't exist and suggesting to use Send Feedback as a potential avenue to increase the chance that the feature gets implemented. It may be that important features are missing, but I don't think the forum mods can do anything about that and the reply didn't seem rude to me.
- Simulacra 6y ago
  This could be because Google may outsource everything, especially their customer service, and so you’re essentially communicating with a call center in another country that has no incentive to be nice.
- prepend 6y ago
  That’s a failure on Google’s part. If feedback forum mods can’t also influence the roadmap, that’s a missed opportunity. 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.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    I’m surprised Google hasn’t hopped-on to the UserVoice bandwagon like Microsoft and Adobe did.
    - wincy 6y ago
      Yeah it’s so cool how Microsoft Teams hasn’t implemented custom emojis. Had to write a script to pull all our Slack ones down since we’re being mandated to switch over.
      - 6y ago
throwawaysea 6y ago
Apple forums are also like this. There are a bunch of Apple apologists full of zeal, trivializing problems and giving people false workarounds.
makecheck 6y ago
Wasting space in Google products is comically easy too, because it’s so “integrated” that you can have crap everywhere and may or may not know how to get rid of it. 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.
- 48bb-9a7e-dc4f2 6y ago
  It goes deeper. Last time I checked I found previous uploads or deleted images in two different Picasa interfaces, one had YouTube and profile related images, even wallpapers from Gmail. The other had some of my Google Photos. I don't have an account to confirm but it's probably still there.
  - VRay 6y ago
    Wow, meanwhile Google lost all my vacation photos back in 2014 or so. It was a painful lesson, but I'm glad that all I lost was one vacation's worth of pictures, haha. Never trust a cloud
arthurcolle 6y ago
Yeah I asked why I couldnt download old emails between when I started the Gmail Pro or whatever subscription and then subscription lapsed and the genius bootlickers on Support duty said "well its your fault for not continuing to pay, what do you expect?" 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.
- rrdharan 6y ago
  Forever is a very long time (and therefore a very bold claim for any SaaS app to make). See also "lifetime passes".
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    See also "lifetime passes". And SiriusXM "lifetime subscriptions."
- Igelau 6y ago
  > genius bootlickers 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".

mcny 6y ago

> They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage. 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.

1-6 6y ago
That sounds like a great way to extend storage beyond the limit!
- techntoke 6y ago
  How so? someone has to share the files first and there is a quota on the amount of times a shared file can be accessed.
  - distrill 6y ago
    open a dummy account, upload and share it with your main account
    - stickfigure 6y ago
      ...or spend $2/mo and get way more storage without the hassle. This fits into the same category as "you can get as much free catsup as you want from fast food restaurants" - not a really useful life hack.
    - neurostimulant 6y ago
      Until google's automated process ban all those accounts. That method is used by many pirate video sites and they'll have to constantly play cat and mouse with google. Do not try it if your account contains anything important as once you got banned there is no way to restore your account due to absolute lack of human tech supports on google side.
    - techntoke 6y ago
      Have you tried opening a dummy account lately on Google? You typically need a phone number to verify, and not some VOIP number but a major carrier. That is a lot of effort for 15GB of extra data, when you can just pay $12/mo for unlimited with G Suite.
      - malka 6y ago
        Is it that hard to get a burner number in the US ? In France it literally takes 30s to get one at a shop
        techntoke 6y ago
        Yes it is pretty difficult, and like I said they limit what phone numbers you can use. It ends up costing more money than just paying for additional storage.
- andinus 6y ago
  Unlimited Drive Storage by splitting binary files into base64: - https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271

varjag 6y ago

Just shows how little talent there really is at Google. Everyone who can code are now on the doodle team.

neutronman 6y ago
Keeping an operation like Google going forward at that scale going is not a job for talentless hacks,
- varjag 6y ago
  …but closing the UX tickets apparently is.
- obidan 6y ago
  I mean, no it isn’t. At the same time, an operation which works like this is certainly extremely flawed. I doubt there’s one engineer working on GDrive that doesn’t think a folder size feature wouldn’t be useful and relatively simple to implement. So that’s more of an argument towards the operation going bad, instead of the engineers. Maybe this slipped through the cracks but this thread already contains a bunch of examples of stuff like this happening. They can be architecting Tensorflow really well and that certainly is impressive but when GMail takes 3 seconds to load the main page and downloads 10MB during that process you know something is going wrong.
  - wolco 6y ago
    3 seconds to load the main page is a complaint? How far we've come and how little we actually travelled. 3 seconds to download 10 megs. I remember when using a 300 baud modem each letter would slowly appear.
    - Kye 6y ago
      The speed of a car stuck in first gear is impressive next to a horse-drawn carriage. Something is still broken.
- 6y ago

xtracto 6y ago

Google support forums are terrible. Every time there is a missing feature (I usually find it in Google Spreadsheet) or a bug, the corresponding entry in the support forum would be answered with some pretext of why said feature will never be supported.

jimmytidey 6y ago
Isn't being strict about what features you add the core of good product management? (Doesn't apply to bugs I guess.) Explaining it to users is a nice bonus.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  No. The core of good product management is making decisions that make your product so attractive to users that they get their friends and coworkers to use it, too. 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.
  - baddox 6y ago
    If a bunch of people are asking for a bunch of features it sounds like they have made their product attractive to users.
    - mc32 6y ago
      Not necessarily. There was a time there were few players in the SaaS office collaboration suites, so the default was google apps. Now that other alternatives exist people might be asking for some of the features offered by others.
- II2II 6y ago
  Not really. There may be conflicting demands from customers that have to be dealt with, and conflicts between those customers and the realities of software development, but you generally need to offer the features that customers need to get their job done. In particularly bad cases, the failure to deliver may effectively dictate corporate and government policies. (Yes, I have lived through that.) 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.

mey 6y ago

Even better, they make it pretty impossible to manage your online storage of photos since they split it out of drive.google.com

techntoke 6y ago
It isn't impossible, just not convenient like it used to be. What I do is sync a copy to my backup device, and use the web interface to download any collages or effects that it auto-generates. You can then use rclone to sync deletions, which uses their API.
- exhilaration 6y ago
  How do you sync a copy to your backup device? My understanding is that it's no longer to programmatically grab the original images, only compressed images are available via the API.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    I use one-way Syncthing, so my phone automatically backups my pictures to Google Photos (using the Google Photos app) and my computer (using Syncthing). Then I copy them into a folder locally like they existed previously on Google Drive by year. Then I run rclone sync: rclone sync --dry-run gphotos:media/by-year /local/storage/path Then if I delete some pictures from Google Photos, the same sync command will delete them from my local backup.
pottertheotter 6y ago
What do you mean by that? I'm curious because I switched to Google Drive after Dropbox discontinued any real photo support a few years back. I like Dropbox more for file syncing, but put up with Google Drive's weaknesses because I get much better photo management.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Google Photos is now a separate standalone product from Google Drive. You can upload images to either place but they are not synced.

knolan 6y ago

This reminds me of the obnoxious know-it-all that lives under the bridge on the QNAP forums.

cyclotron3k 6y ago
I know exactly who you're referring to
- knolan 6y ago
  I can’t imagine how a company like that would let such an individual interact with customers.
aspenmayer 6y ago
Do you like QNAP products? I have experience with a few Synology NASes, and was looking at QNAP’s media center NAS products, and they seem nice. It seems like QNAP has a bit more open source support, which I definitely like. Ubuntu Linux Station looks neat, like a first-party supported integrated Ubuntu Docker container? That QNAP’s web management and the device itself runs Linux under the hood is awesome; this may be the case as well with Synology products, so I don’t mean to draw a comparison where there is none. Anyway, any recommendations for QNAP gear?
- pmarreck 6y ago
  FreeNAS /partial sarcasm
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    I’ve run FreeNAS as well, but I found there was something strange about the involvement of iXsystems I couldn’t put my finger on. It just didn’t seem professionally done on the web site, or the web GUI. It was 98% of the way there functionality-wise, but the GUI was just overwhelming. Personal preference I guess. Perhaps there are other themes, and being open source, I’m sure it can be configured to my liking. I am glad the project exists, all that said. I just don’t know if it’s something I can sell to a client. I am more than comfortable running it myself, and have done so; to catch network scan jobs for SMBv1 only MFPs, for instance.

perennate 6y ago

When I read the recommended response in thread you linked, I just feel like they're acknowledging the feature doesn't exist and suggesting to use Send Feedback as a potential avenue to increase the chance that the feature gets implemented. It may be that important features are missing, but I don't think the forum mods can do anything about that and the reply didn't seem rude to me.

Simulacra 6y ago
This could be because Google may outsource everything, especially their customer service, and so you’re essentially communicating with a call center in another country that has no incentive to be nice.
prepend 6y ago
That’s a failure on Google’s part. If feedback forum mods can’t also influence the roadmap, that’s a missed opportunity. 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  I’m surprised Google hasn’t hopped-on to the UserVoice bandwagon like Microsoft and Adobe did.
  - wincy 6y ago
    Yeah it’s so cool how Microsoft Teams hasn’t implemented custom emojis. Had to write a script to pull all our Slack ones down since we’re being mandated to switch over.
    - 6y ago

throwawaysea 6y ago

Apple forums are also like this. There are a bunch of Apple apologists full of zeal, trivializing problems and giving people false workarounds.

makecheck 6y ago

Wasting space in Google products is comically easy too, because it’s so “integrated” that you can have crap everywhere and may or may not know how to get rid of it. 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.

48bb-9a7e-dc4f2 6y ago
It goes deeper. Last time I checked I found previous uploads or deleted images in two different Picasa interfaces, one had YouTube and profile related images, even wallpapers from Gmail. The other had some of my Google Photos. I don't have an account to confirm but it's probably still there.
- VRay 6y ago
  Wow, meanwhile Google lost all my vacation photos back in 2014 or so. It was a painful lesson, but I'm glad that all I lost was one vacation's worth of pictures, haha. Never trust a cloud

arthurcolle 6y ago

Yeah I asked why I couldnt download old emails between when I started the Gmail Pro or whatever subscription and then subscription lapsed and the genius bootlickers on Support duty said "well its your fault for not continuing to pay, what do you expect?" 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.

rrdharan 6y ago
Forever is a very long time (and therefore a very bold claim for any SaaS app to make). See also "lifetime passes".
- reaperducer 6y ago
  See also "lifetime passes". And SiriusXM "lifetime subscriptions."
Igelau 6y ago
> genius bootlickers 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".