Hacker News Reader

Comment by alimbada | Hacker News Reader

It's a freemium service that doesn't depend on ad revenue. Maybe they're not made of money as Facebook and Google are and that's the reason for not compensating.

View on HN

Here's a picture of their current team: https://getpocket.com/jobs - Here's a list of 7 other positions they're currently hiring for - https://boards.greenhouse.io/pocket

This isn't some free service being run out of the goodness of somebodys heart. This is a company, that wants to make money. If a company has that many employees, they can afford a bug bounty program too.

Not to forget the data they are getting:

1. What people are reading

2. What they will read

3. What they have read

4. What they are just bookmarking/RILing and not reading

5. Etc etc.

That's valuable data imho.

> they can afford a bug bounty program too

Maybe they're just being evil, you know, like Oracle.

I didn't say it was being run out of the goodness of someone's heart. That's why they need money, to pay the bills. Having infrastructure to deal with that many users on a popular service doesn't come cheap.

Uh, they've raised $14.5 million[0] and have over 17 million users. This isn't a side project. Not by a long shot.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pocket

So what? Do you think that money's not going into paying their bills?

I disagree. Mozilla signs a very rich contract with search engines like Google and Yahoo. They have more money than they know what to do with.

They aren't part of Mozilla.

Yes, but Pocket is integrated with Firefox. Pocket and the Mozilla Foundation formed a partnership that almost certainly includes some sort of compensation or resources in exchange for Pocket's service.

Actually no, it appears that Mozilla is not getting any money from Pocket but rather chose Pocket themselves. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/38aorv/psa_mozilla...

That's even weirder.

Don't be so naive. Do you think you can just walk up to Mozilla and tell them: "Sup guys, just bundle this crap into your browser. Please."?

Mozilla claims that they don't get money for the integration, and I don't see a good reason why I shouldn't believe them. Pocket very likely doesn't have that much money lying around, compared to Mozillas budget.

That's makes it worse. Mozilla integrating Pocket into Firefox for free.

Really? Does it? "Mozilla bundles crapware for financial gain" vs "Mozilla bundling add-on it believes will benefit users".

its sounds a lot more like the situation was "Pocket was friends with some guys at mozilla, and they made up a bunch of bullshit about how it was a benefit to users to push their buddies project"

where did you get that impression?

"Mozilla bundles crapware for financial gain" v. "Mozilla bundles crapware without any financial incentive" is a more accurate comparison, and highlights that something is indeed wonky over in Mozillaland.

Pocket + Firefox is a pretty stanky integration. Very unpleasant to have it bundled in.

Maybe it's time for a standard bookmarking service API? It'd be nice to just be able to plug whatever service I want (if any) into any browser.

Greedy is better than stupid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com