HACKER Q&A
📣 rg111

Why do many people hate Pocket?


I see a lot comments on HN that signal a serious dislike for Pocket. It's like many here absolutely abhor it. Whenever a thread has relations with Firefox or Mozilla, many comments pop up about Pocket, and all of them are negative.

Why?

Is it simply because it is enabled by default by Firefox, or are there other reasons that I am missing?

  👤 u2077 Accepted Answer ✓
Because I use raindrop.io. Also, the fact that pocket was integrated into Firefox (with recommendations on the homepage) makes it feel like bloat. If I wanted a browser with garbage pre-installed, I would have used Edge. That being said, I have never given pocket a try and Raindrop works perfectly for me.
👤 kosasbest
> Is it simply because it is enabled by default by Firefox

Largely, yes. Many people didn't signup for the Pocket integration. Mozilla should've ran a poll/survey to gauge interest, but instead it was pushed on users. You can disable it in Firefox if you don't like it. Or just use Librewolf which strips out a bunch of Mozilla stuff.

👤 slater
1) Questions about privacy

2) Could just be a nice lil installable add-on, but that would mess with their precious metrics/KPI

👤 maverick74
WT... ?!

I didn't know Pocket before the Firefox integration, either, but I'm really loving it.

Unlike many other sites, it does bring you news and articles you can trust (many by professional journalists).

Regarding the privacy concerns, according to what I've read at the time, it does create a kind of profile about the user, to target you with articles you seem to prefer, but that profile, unlike the competition, is not stored on the cloud... It is stored locally and never leaves your PC.

So... I'm liking it a lot!!!

👤 jack335
I am still using it but I also get annoyed about it

> App is slow

> App sometimes doesn't have everything offline (isn't that the main point)

> I don't find the button of adding an article from the pocket app :D

👤 muzani
I used to use it a lot. But it feels like a victim of feature bloat, like Evernote.

I just want a bookmarking app. It feels like a dodgy browser. It tedious to find articles I want to read, tedious to actually read them or even open them in a browser.

I think there's a subconscious hate for feature bloat because of the work many of us do.

👤 moltke
I was (very) mildly interested in it until it got spammed into Firefox. Now it exists in the same category as Norton Antivirus in my mind. I stopped paying attention to what they were doing around then.

It probably actually has some decent features (probably some I want) but every time I see/hear about it I have a pretty negative reflexive reaction.