a timocracy of one

I use a lot of the Google Apps, and generally don’t mind that they are opinionated, as they are usually close enough to right, in my view, and I don’t have to use them, after all. Well, this breaks down for me with Google groups, because there is at least one fundamentally aggravating problem with their interface and you are closer ( I could go back to the stone ages and actually store all the messages offline in a newsreader) to locked in if the owner hosts the group on google; and with their grabbing up everything they can, there is a lot that is hosted on GG. And they don’t even seem to hear complaints about it

So what is are my specific problems? The biggest is that messages don’t seem to get marked as read in any sort of logical way. Big deal you say? It is, in my view. In fact, I say it is one of the most fundamental aspects of the software, and it’s broken. I don’t care about the rest of the fancy features they add if this one isn’t working. It makes the unread messages functionality actually more harmful than leaving it out to have halfway implemented. I’d rather be able to turn it off and thus stop checking on groups that incorrectly show new messages, up until I click down into them (proof that the code works somewhere, since they show correctly then)

In short, Google does a good job of making opinionated software when they say “that functionality will never be implemented, because you aren’t supposed to use it like that,” but that approach doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to your users concerns when they are complaining about things that don’t work, as intended (there is only one way I can figure that “unread messages” is intended, and they already implemented it quite well in their RSS reader).