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.
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.
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.
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
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.
This is off topic but it reminds me, every time I look for some Windows 10 problem, it mostly leads to some Microsoft forum (answers.microsoft.com). In there however, the questions systematically get answered by a billion "MSFT specialist consultants #not working for MSFT", and it always weirds me out. Are these people there for self promotion, for the thrill of it or is it MSFT that has some reward system for third parties to participate? I know helpful strangers is nothing new to the internet, I guess I'm just weirded out because there's never an official answer on MSFT's official forum and these sorts of questions are not really the sort of "playful" puzzles one might encounter helping strangers on SO/Reddit/Discord.
They also seem to just skim read questions for keywords and give you canned solutions for problems they already know how to fix. If your problem is either new or something that's not actually fixable the thread turns in to a back and forth of them clearly not actually comprehending that and you restating your issue in different ways in futility.
It's comical to read when it's someone else's problem.
Or they'll ask for rafts of info that anyone paying attention can see is unrelated. Those posts, I always imagine them ending with "heh heh, THAT should keep Batman & Robin busy for a while! mwa ha ha, ha HA HA HA HA HAAA!"
It's the same on the Apple discussion boards. You won't ever get an official answer, only a guess of an answer from somebody with no more knowledge than yourself.
HP is the same, but occasionally you will get an employee answer, but it will be just as useless.
My assumption is all the big tech companies don't want to give support away for free when you should be paying for a support contract for it.
And yes, there is for some unknown reason, a legion of people who will give this fake support for free for internet points.
Maybe Apple consumer forums, but I’ve had amazing support from the developer forums. Especially Quinn “the Eskimo” ... saves my butt every 6 months it seems, and isn’t the least bit offended when my questions relate to an opaque electron code signing issue. Seriously, bless this person for doing the “lord’s work.”
He's been doing it since the late 90s too... I still remember getting an answer from him regarding a dusty corner of the Mac OS 8 internet config API when I was trying to bulk provision Macs for campus internet access in 1998. It was all mailing lists then.
Honestly, that last line reads exactly like something from BOFH[0], right before he gets the PFY to commit some heinous act of domestic terrorism on the unsuspecting enterprise support salesman. Some things apparently never change.
Apple's discussion boards are useless, but at least they have actual phone and email channels to get an answer from an employee (usually). And Apple doesn't generally charge for the phone call itself (they will charge for out-of-warranty hardware work, but generally don't for software support even out of warranty).
With Google, more often than not, community "support" through their forums is the only option. Where official phone and email channels exist to get support, they're generally restricted to paying customers only, on the business side of their business only-- users of their general consumers services have no options.
The Apple communities are next to useless, especially when it's a design flaw; butterfly keyboard. You practically have to sue companies like Apple to get them to take notice.
Google support forums are the same, the "product experts" who write most of the answers don't work for Google and are limited in their ability to escalate things.
In the '90's I had a mission that I carried out by offering answers to questions on CompuServe fora pertaining to Windows. In 1996 Microsoft decided to embrace and extend this by offering perks to the people who were most active. That program has been revised and renamed over the years. I wouldn't say that I succeeded in my mission, but I would say I don't feel I need to do such things personally. The people you are pointing out seem to need to offer you a solution, however off-point, and need you to accept it formally if you indeed find it to be a solution, and I speculate, seem to be paid and possibly try to make a living doing it now. A possible explanation is that Microsoft doesn't want to be obligated to provide online support any more than Google does. But they want to indeed offer online support for the time being, as casually as possible, and they are regulating some people by measuring some aspects of the support activities of some people.
Getting Microsoft MVP is based, in part, on community involvement. This is one way to show community engagement.
Note, MVP is a quite valuable achievement, including licenses to pretty much all Microsoft products and access to product teams within Microsoft. Many partners will hire MVPs favorably, as well.
And maybe this has changed, but I think the Microsoft support forum used to show the "accepted" answer twice, once in the thread and once in the accepted answer section. Or something similar; whatever it was I felt like I was reading the same thing twice.
Are the people that answering questions on that support forum actually google employees? I got this impression that google employees never post on that forum and the people that answer are just unpaid forum members which somehow take it upon themselves to post answers.
Reminds me a little of the scenario where people bizarrely ask a forum if they can bring their dog to a hotel, some random person says "yes" and then you wonder if the hotel declined to accept the dog if the owner would say "well Bob off the internet said it would be fine"
I like reading Q&A on Amazon listings, because lots of people answer "I have no idea" or similar. I've only received a few of the email prompts for these things, but as I recall they almost make it sound like some potential shopper has decided to ask YOU, specifically YOU, about a particular product feature.
The amazon ones are truly amazing. I have wondered for years who is answering those. I had thought that questions were routed to previous buyers somehow, but that's never happened for me...
Oh that reminds me of a funny story. I used to work for a company that sold various software and one month after their purchase, they'd get an email asking if they would like to review the product. If they ignored that, after another month they'd get one more email asking if they would like to review the product (after that they'd get no more emails).
Well I was going through and approving the reviews (just for stopping spam reviews), and I found a guy leaving a review explaining that he's very sorry but he hasn't had time to use the product as his wife has come down with a bad case of the shingles - I seem to remember he went into quite a lot of detail and obviously hadn't realised this review could have been made public.
I've received a few email notifications for amazon products. They seems to be sent for new questions when you previously purchased the product (not necessarily received it yet).
> When you become an expert, you'll get exclusive program perks, like special badges in the Google Help Communities, direct access to Google employees to provide product feedback and a chance to test Google products before they're released.
So, the reward for helping with the forum are some badges and a chance to be Google's beta tester, and it appears to be working? Maybe they can launch some sort of mechanical turks service in the future where the workers are paid with this "rewards" instead of money.
Sounds like a great opportunity for Box and Dropbox to provided helpful forum answers about alternatives to Google Drive. Knowing Google they are probably training bots on these forum answers so the Google bots themselves might start recommending competitor products.
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.
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.
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.
Google products are more likely to be suddenly deprecated with no offboarding plan than to care what features an overwhelming majority of customers want.
Most Google products exist solely for the benefit of the Google engineers who use them for resume padding & career growth. They lose money for Google the company and they infuriate loyal customers up until they are capriciously surprise decommissioned.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
I'm not a person who uses to return products, and I had mine for just two weeks. It was constantly reading/writing to disk. All the time. It wasn't indexing: the QNAP system has a lot of small services and some of them write logs to disk or do god knows what. Given the particular architecture of the NAS processor I wasn't able to install cli tools to analyze the problem further, but at this point I realized the NAS wasn't doing what I wanted in the first place: ease my life and allow me to automate backups.
I ended up adding one of the disks to my PC and the other to a home server.
I must admit though that the QNAP solutions look very helpful if you disregard the abusive disk R/W activity and the inconsistent UI. You may be able to set up complex backup schemes quite fast with it.
If you are interested in virtualization and advanced usage, be sure to get one with an ARM processor at least, because it may be difficult to get packages for it on other obscure architectures.
I've got a QNAP TS-451 and it works, but I don't find that the added features are really worth anything. I basically use it as a dumb storage server (NFS, SMB, and iSCSI) and for that it works really well. The only bit of smarts I use is the Hybrid Backup Sync utility to back up important folders to external drives and, when I get around to setting it up, some kind of off-site backup.
I've just found too many odd limitations with the device to use it for much more than that. For example, you can set up VLANs and you can bind services to specific physical network interfaces, but you can't bind a service to a VLAN interface. This is what made me give up on the added features.
Also, be aware that some added features have moved to a subscription model[0]. And, if you expose your QNAP to the internet, there's a risk of getting malware[1]. On the plus side, this has made them open up a tiny bit[2][3].
I’ve a 10 bay system populated with 4TB drives that I use as a dumb data dump in RAID6. They’re okay systems, but as others have said they come with a lot of useless complexity. At a previous job had an 8 bay system that had a dodgy backplane that was a pain to deal with.
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.
Well, they almost had a way better GUI which I was using in beta, until the lead developer on that and iXsystems got into a big spat and he left, causing iXsystems to have to quickly slap together an upgrade to their old UI themselves, so...
This move frustrated me to no end. Makes backing up my Google Photos that much more of a PITA because you have to use Takeout, which isn't straightforward - if you have a large library, you manually have to download 50+ zip files and "auto download" extensions don't seem to work with the Takeout interface last time I tried.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure what leads you to believe that the forum feedback isn't taken in consideration. My guess is that it is, but that there are about two dozen other things of similar importance and the team can only knock so many of them off.
Good point, I’m assuming because the only advice given by mods is to submit feedback. I’ve never seen “I agree, this is important, I’ll work with the dev team.”
I think that if there was consideration, that would be in the mods scripts and posted on the forum.
I understand it’s hard to prioritize features but I’m familiar with so many years old common sense suggestions that don’t have any explanation of why it won’t be fixed.
The mod in this situation isn't an employee, it looks like. Just a user doing their best to help other users, so directing to the feedback tool sounds reasonable to me...
Maybe an employee could chime in. The problem I've seen with responding "I'll work with the dev team" is that some users at least will then have some timeframe expectations on the order of weeks based on what they imagine a fix to look like. But they don't really have a good idea of the system complexity, and realistically, these kinds of issues can linger for years because either it turns out most users actually care about other issues more, or the business needs to focus on making money, or some other complication shows up; and people end up being disappointed more often than not. I think it's unfortunately better, in this realm, not to say anything until you have the fix implemented, tested, and ready to roll out.
All the free online services that I can think of have this kind of annoying issue that advanced users run into. (And unfortunately the paid ones often have that kind of issue too, but at least they have much more reason to be responsive to support calls.)
I’m taking about paid tools- gmail, google docs. And in Microsoft’s case Office.
I don’t think it’s better to go from recommendation, to X years of silence, to rollout. I’d rather know if something is prioritized and in progress. I’d like to plan for rollout. Maybe it changes my upgrade and purchase planning.
My main point is the current technique sucks and makes me want to use products less. I’ve used support forums for decades and they can be non frustrating when I feel I am part of a community.
The current method seems “us vs. then” with neglect for any meaningful change. They should just do better. Not perfect. Just not horrible.
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.
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.
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.
As recently as January I'd accidentally stumble into some kind of thursday party on the top floor of one of the SF offices. As for memegen, us contract peasants are not worthy of that group, so I have no idea.
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