Good.
Pocket was actually useful. To sent web content to my e reader…
My Kobo has the Pocket app and I’ll miss being able to send articles to it. Apparently I’ll be one of the few to be sad to see Pocket go.
There are dozens of us!
Somebody suggested Wallabag which can also be self-hosted and is available on Kobo.
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
I found these instructions on how to install KoReader and use Wallabag. It looks like a real pain in the ass. I hope Rakuten does something, because I’m not doing that unless I absolutely have to.
You could consider sending feedback to kobo devs. They could make the install process simpler.
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 never really found it that necessary when normal bookmarks exist.
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.
didn’t fakespot only work in the USA?
Never tried it outside of the USA, couldn’t tell ya.
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.
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!
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.
Yes CamelCamelCamel is still useful. I check it every time before a major purchase.
I’ve found a better way to use Amazon: not using it and fuck you, Bezos.
based
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.
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.
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.
“Read once bookmark”. Problem solved.
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.
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 literally have control of and log every app that’s installed and will bug you until you uninstall it.
Unless they’re doing app signing or binary examination, some of the methods to “log every app” literally look for an executable name. Renaming “firefox.exe” to “explorer.exe” (an obviously allowed executable name) and then executing it will still run Firefox.
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 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.
Thx for this.
Also, shout-out to https://karakeep.app/ (formerly “Hoarder”)
Thank you! Guess I’ll be trying something new.
Thanks - added to Pocket to read it later.
Why doesn’t Mozilla change or add the MIT license to Pocket?
It’s a service. It doesn’t just run in the browser.
It SHOULD!
the main point of it afaik is access from other mechines, and different kinds of devices. how did you imagine it?
You mean, perfect for self-hosting? 😀
good luck pointing your kobo to your self hosted instance.
My wife is the Kobo user, so I don’t know what tools are available.
But seeing how there’s already a self-hosted sync service available, I’m sure it’s not impossible for Pocket (or something like it) to be developed in the open-source community.
Hey Op why was Microsoft Palestine thread removed?
Idiots. Buying a perfectly good service just to shut it down. I wonder if they even bothered looking for a buyer.
Also that new logo with the flag sucks.
Pocket won’t be missed. Self-hosted alternatives like Wallabag are better and private, so switched to it many years ago. Integration (and enabled by default, requiring about:config to disable) ensured I’d never use it out of principle.
Fakespot (the website) was genuinely useful to help ID scams on Amzn Marketplace, though I never used the extension. But I think that enshittified in recent years, so (in the style of Stephen King’s Misery) it’s probably for the best.
Related, the Keepa extension is useful as a price rigging detector, but I expect that will “number must go up!” soon enough, too…
pocket I never used. I found it ugly and just s violation of privacy as it moved a service that should be local only, to external webservers. I can see why it’s finally had the plug pulled
It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you’ve been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the “articles” it suggested to you were actually ads). I can’t say as I’m too sad to see it go.
Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they’re bullshit anyway.
the main thing with pocket and services like it is that it saves and syncs entire pages. like a local internet archive.
Nah, it’s completely different from bookmarks. But obviously there’s no sense trying to sell anyone on it anymore.
shame about pocket - wonder how much of a hole that really burned in their pocket - if much
I liked Fakespot. Amazon obviously doesn’t care whether reviews are legit.
Fakespot has always felt inaccurate to me. Once every 6 months or so I gave it a go to see if any of the updates have improved it but it never felt like it did to me.
Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.
I stopped trusting it much when I noticed there’s a huge difference between the same product on amazon.ca and amazon.com. On one domain it can give something an F grade while on the other domain it will have an A grade.
It’s a nice idea but when you think it about it’s actually kind of hard to determine the quality of a particular listing apart from the obvious checks you can do yourself. Like if the seller is some random drop shipper or actually Amazon or the manufacturer.
Judging reviews with whatever AI system they use is not very accurate anyways. Once again the obvious fake reviews can sometimes stand out. But the better ones a machine can’t tell any more than you can.
I’ve also wondered about Fakespot’s accuracy. I just viewed it as one tool when doing online shopping. I’d prefer not to order crap in the first place than try to return something later.
Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.
Why go through that hassle if you can avoid it in the first place?
Because I’m buying the $8 option from a company called “XYBENOZ”. Without reading the reviews I already know there’s a 56% chance of failure, but I’m willing to take that risk because then it’s Amazon’s problem.
Your 2nd point doesn’t make any sense. Sure, you can spend the time returning things. If they’re bad and you know they’re bad. But what if they’re just bad enough?
Take guitar pedals, for example. I know nothing about guitar pedals. I don’t know the brands, I don’t know the features I should look for, what they should cost, nothing. A company can purchase thousands, tens of thousands, or more fake reviews from a bot farm run by wage slaves. I might buy their subpar pedal based on the good review score. It’s fine, it works well enough from my initial testing and doesn’t die…
But what I wanted was to purchase one of the better ones, which the false reviews told me it was! I could have spent the same or less for a better product, that rewarded the company that made the superior product. And I might not even know it, at least until it’s too late to return. That’s (one of) the problems with how bad fake reviews have gotten.
I’ve never heard of anyone use a shop’s reviews to decide what product to purchase, so you’re literally the first to me.
If I want a product that I have no idea about then I’ll go to forums, YouTube channels, etc about that type of thing and see what they say about it all. They’ll be people who’ve done product reviews and comparisons. And so they’re the people with the knowledge and their the people that care.
So in your example of wanting a guitar pedal I’d be visiting music and electric guitar places on the internet to gather knowledge on the product range.
Once I hit the online store, I’ve already decided what I want to purchase. And so the store reviews are more about the seller themselves and whether the product is genuine/fake, or a good/bad version of the white label item.
part of me thinks “great, those things were annoying”
another part of me thinks it’s a harbinger
I wouldn’t disagree that firefox is about to get enshittififed but I hope its not true.
Noo! I loved Pocket. It’s integrated into my Kobo eReader. It was the only good way to get articles easily synced on to an eReader. I hope Kobo buys Pocket. Or Rakuten, since that’s a tech company and they own Kobo.
I used it extensively on my Kobo as well. So nice to be browsing on my phone and see long articles to read and just save them to enjoy on a nice eink screen later when I have time.
Supposedly Wallabag works Kobo readers. Most people self host Wallabag but I think they do have a hosted option as well.
Pocket is basically a chumbox, but it’s a pretty good chumbox.
“Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire”
This is a misleading statement. 86% of Mozilla’s funding is from google. Modern web browsers are a fucked landscape designed to perpetuate googles dominance
Count me in the group of people sad to see it go because it made it very easy to get articles onto my Kobo e-reader. There are other ways, but they’re all too labour intensive to be practical. Probably should have seen the writing on the wall, though.
If you use KoReader, you can use Wallabag for the same purpose.
