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Sad news, but trimming the fat is what people wanted Mozilla to do. Anyone know a good alternative to Fakespot? I absolutely don’t trust amazon’s own review summaries, and expect other alternatives would be for-profit data harvesters.
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.
I’ve found a better way to use Amazon: not using it and fuck you, Bezos.
based
Is camel camel camel still useful for Amazon?
Yes CamelCamelCamel is still useful. I check it every time before a major purchase.
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.
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.
I use Fakespot but wasn’t aware it was a Mozilla product.
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.
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.
If your work doesn’t care about your productivity then give them what they deserve for the tools they provide.
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.
Yeah, I don’t know how they’re doing it. They’re using some “zero trust” system. It’s beyond me.
Pocket was silly, just use tabs and buy more RAM.
You don’t need to. Modem browsers will suspend unused tabs, cache them on drive and free up the memory, while quickly restoring as soon user activate them. On at least moderately fast systems this happens so quickly it’s hardly noticeable.
great way to run into rate limits tho
with that plus auto tab discard i can have plenty of tabs :)
The point was to have stuff to read when no connection, such as airplane. Which browser doesn’t try to refresh the tab? Any setting that allows to cache to HDD on a mobile browser you know of?
It did that? That’s nifty. Maybe a little deliberate for me, personally, with my adhd, but I can see how that would be very useful. Kind’ve a bummer that’s gone, actually. Shoot. And there are no decent and trustworthy alternatives?
Nobody cared to use Pocket so its not surprising, btw what was that Fakespot thing?
I used fakespot a lot. It used huristics to attempt to determine how authentic a product’s reviews are. It analyzed the reviews for things like repeated phrases, odd review activity like bragading, and other things. It then gave a letter grade to the veracity of the reviews and an “adjusted” aggregate review score after removing any reviews that it considered to be suspicious.
I’m going to miss fakespot. I don’t know how accurate it was but it definitely informed my decisions.
Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.
Alternative? 11Labs Reader will let you build an article library and will read them to you with superior voicing then pocket ever had.
It tried to show how authentic a product review was
cant say if it was accurate or notI feel like that’s a critical function lmao
Unfortunately hard to verify, plus its technically still an opinion written in code by someone.
bUt iT’S jUSt bOoKmARkS
- people who are privileged enough to never have experienced multiple days without an internet connection.
it’s a shame to see it go, it’s been the first read-it-later service that I was aware of and used. I’ve moved away to Omnivore (RIP) and then Wallabag (https://wallabag.it/ for 11€/year, but you can self-host it or find someone else to host it for you for a lower fee), but I’ve still been thinking fondly of it, despite Mozilla clearly trying to force people into social reading rather than just serve as a convenient offline storage of articles.
edit: this post isn’t a request for advice, I’m very happy with my current Wallabag setup.
people who are privileged enough to never have experienced multiple days without an internet connection.
I have, and if you need an SaaS for that, I am sorry for you. Pocket was great for getting around paywalls for a while.
if you happen to be an apple person Safari’s Reading List can save pages offline.
Check out LinkedIn for this
Edit: multiple days later… Linkwarden not linkedin…
Why would you need a saas solution if it’s for offline reading? Seems like a contradiction
…so that you can read it on a device other than the one you’ve initially opened the link on? I can save a link to Wallabag from my laptop’s browser at home, have my e-reader sync it, and then read it offline while on a train.
what OS does your ereader run? can it run syncthing? can it open HTML?
well shit, i loved pocket. i guess time to make my own del.icio.us social bookmarking/saving app like i’ve been wanting to for years.
Yeah I’ve been using pocket since it was Read It Later. I got shit in there going back about 15 years I guess I’ll be exporting and finally going through lmao.
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yeah fair lmao
I’ve been using raindrop.io for years now and highly recommend checking it out
The moment I setup an Omnivore account, it gets acquired and dies, the moment I switch to Pocket it’s dead lol, I think I’ll just move to some open source self hosted read it later app like Karakeep
No! Use your power for good! Switch to Facebook and X!
I know what I need to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it!
As a Kobo user who sends articles to my Kobo via Pocket A LOT, this is some hefty bullshit.
Yup, just got a Kobo and absolutely love the Pocket integration… I hope some alternative is implemented…
Mozilla has tried so many things: I wonder if anyone there has considered releasing and maintaining a browser. They might have some luck against Chrome.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I generally have already decided what to purchase before I load Amazon’s website. I also rarely purchase cheap white label products, and so Amazon’s reviews are mostly irrelevant to me. I’ve rarely needed to return items too and recently they were all my fault anyway, eg, not quite the dimensions I thought I needed.
Really disappointed to lose Pocket. I am a big user of it and found it very convenient to save articles of interest as well as collecting anything that looked interesting that I might want to read. Have both the Android app and use it on the desktop.
Now I’m going to have to find a substitute.
I liked the concept but immediately thought “this is gonna get dropped eventually and I’ll lose all the shit I saved”. Looks like I was right.
Let us know if you find a replacement. I have pocket on my e-reader and I’m going to miss it
The real Pocket is the Google money they made along the way.
Is this cause of the money they lost from the google thing?
Fakespot was what finally convinced my wife to leave chrome. Fuck these fuckers.
Pocket goes hand in hand with procrastination.
