Hacker News Reader

Comment by y04nn | Hacker News Reader

I had to click through more than 100 links to download all the data, how can this be acceptable? Specially coming from Amazon. How hard is it for them to create an archive with all the data? This is ridiculous, I can't imagine how was the meeting when they decided to produce purposefully such garbage UX.

View on HN

Here's a picture of the UI for the download, with 123 different "Download" buttons. https://twitter.com/nelson/status/1503848290193862658

I did an Amazon download too, after Amazon's subsidiary Goodreads lost all my data of 9 years. I'm grateful for how the GDPR and the CCPA mandate that companies provide data downloads. Amazon is clearly doing the bare minimum to comply. Other companies do more; Twitter's data download comes with a fully working offline Javascript app for reading and searching your tweets!

I'm not sure "an archive with all the data" is what you really want either. At some point you'll hit the limit of how much data does your filesystem allow in one file. Not sure if your browser is that good at resuming failed downloads too.

Google Takeout lets you split into multiple zips based on size. Amazon's take on this is just willfully evil.

Exactly the problem I had.

It would take Amazon almost no effort to make a single archive with all those files in.

I cannot help but view this as deliberate obstruction.

Pretty sure there are a gazillion browser extensions that can do that for you. Not ideal but hardly the end of the world.

Can't you open up the developer tools use a css query to select all the buttons, and send a click event to them all?

Yes, it's doable in a one liner, but then you get a warning of your browser, then 100 windows asking to confirm to save the file, it still is terrible UX. And form my experience, most users are not aware of the dev console.

For others that may be interested by the data you get, it is quite detailed, I would recommend to use VisiData that make it really easy to navigate inside zip files and csv the files inside (most often a single file).

Yes, most commenters on HN could could, but for the general public, it's not a great interface.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com