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Comment by WaxProlix | Hacker News Reader

I assume this is related to the other Google post today[1], wherein the moderators are accused of gaslighting their customers instead of responding appropriately.

Not sure of the context here, so I'll let better informed voices prevail, I guess.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23969442

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Somewhat OT, but in what world does "This has been a running problem with Google Drive and there is no workaround for now. What we can do is to send feedback to the team so all of these can be heard." qualify as "gaslighting"?

This term, at least until recently, meant dismissing abnormal behavior by making the questioner doubt their own sanity. I have a hard time getting that even from the least charitable interpretation of the above.

Gaslighting is just a vogue term. Nobody who uses it nowadays knows or cares what it actually means.

In this case I assume it means that Google appears to solicit feedback but than responds by saying it's the users fault since not everyone used this feature. Calling this gaslighting may be hyperbole, but it does somewhat match the definition of the word as I understand it.

Related: I live in Vietnam and Google maps won't load photos on desktop here. I and many others reported the issue, which has been going on for over a year. The solution: set your location to a rich country. Anywhere in the EU, US, Australia, New Zealand. Photos instantly work again. Set it to somewhere in the middle east, Africa, SEA, no photos. Support started replying to people on the thread with this workaround. Unfortunately, it breaks all localisation for search, shopping, and so on. When I brought this up, support asked me to provide proof that it breaks localization, and when I provided it, they then said that Google is a for-profit company and can't be expected to fix every problem in poorer countries where they make less money. At that point, I gave up in frustration.

Gaslighting? Maybe not. Shitty support? Absolutely. At the very least they have made sure that I'll never try and use Google support again.

Uh, I know what it means. Millions of others do, too.

No way to prove it, but I'd actually be pretty surprised if you're right about millions of people knowing what it actually means.

Stop gaslighting all of us. ;) There are over 250 million adults in the US. So you think that less than 1% of the US population comprehends what "gaslighting" is?

I doubt you'd wager much money on that.

The way I see it used in practice is wrong like 100% of the time.

It was a quote from the other thread, which I'd just seen. Seems it struck a nerve with some folks.

It was my comment that described it as gaslighting. I think it's a reasonable use of the term when in the thread the mod says it's partially your fault you can no longer see the size of a folder, the way you have been accustomed to doing for the last 30 years.

    "Well, a big part of the problem is how few people actually follow through with requests using the mechanism."

No, Google, I think a big part of the problem is that you didn't implement a feature that has been a staple of computers for decades.

https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en

Wait. Neither Unix directories nor Windows folders nor Mac folders track the size of their contents. The only way to get the "size of a folder" in any of these environments is to enumerate all of their contents recursively and add up the sizes of all the files, using some kind of tool, because this information is not stored in the directory or folder.

Now who is gaslighting?

On macOS: right click a folder, pick "Get Info" from the contextual menu and you get a window with all the info on the folder , including size and number of files in it.

... which recursively enumerates the contents and adds up their sizes.

Nope. The original comment said "using some kind of tool". That's false.

Well, yes, that’s exactly what it does. Operating systems include many tools.

In this case, as you already know (or should), no external or extra "tool" is needed. You hit "get info" and it tells you. Boom. Done.

That’s still a tool, even if it’s included with the OS.

This is getting a little bit silly. But the comment that started this discussion was just making the point that this stuff isn’t built into the filesystem.

First, many filesystems do track recursive size. This feature is present in any filesystem that supports quotas. But this argument is a red herring.

Any service that charges a unit price should make the unit cost of a service-set available easily to the customer. Failing to do so is user-hostile. "Unix directories nor Windows folders nor Mac folders" charge the user per byte.

> This feature is present in any filesystem that supports quotas.

That's not true. No Linux filesystem supports recursive size tracking even though they mostly support quotas. The quotas are enforced and tracked by the block/extent and inode allocators.

CephFS is the first counterexample that comes to mind. Recursive size and filecounts are available through extended file attributes (e.g. getfattr -d -m ceph.dir.* /path/to/dir) and can be made to be default in e.g. ls -l output.

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