What companies will you never give another dollar to?
What happened that put them on your blacklist?
Reddit because of the API pricing change change
Unity because of the charge per game install thing
Reddit because of the API pricing change
Yeah that did it for me as well. I was a huge fan of Apollo until the developer decided to shut it down because of that.
Luckily Lemmy fills the gap pretty well, and the Voyager app is almost as good as Apollo used to be.
My top company that I will never give another dollar to is Adobe, as they forced me into a 1 year “contract” with a $200 cancellation fee after forgetting to cancel their one month discounted trial in time.
Other companies for myself include Dell, HP, and Canadian Tire.
What happened at Canadian tire? :o
Oh man it was so long ago.
I think the final straw was trying to buy tire rims. Went online and it says it was in stock and my local store, went to it and they said it was out of stock despite the website saying it was. Sent me to the next store over 20 minutes away saying they had some, went there and they told me that they didn’t have any either despite the internal system saying they did.
Wasted an hour and a bunch of gas trying to get those rims. Not a huge deal but if a company can’t tell what they have and when they have it and prefer to waste my time I don’t care to give them my business.
Plus they only stock like 3 items per store for every flyer deal, hoping you’ll buy shit just because you’re there already. Same with Walmart which is also on my blacklist.
Obligatory “fuck Adobe”. My proudest moment last year was cutting our company’s Acrobat licenses by 70% and taking about a million bucks out of their greedy little pockets.
Nitro Pro is great anyway. It does the job.
the adobe cancellation fee is the most evil and greedy shit i’ve ever witnessed in software. they SCALE it so you pay the exact amount you would have paid if you just remained subscribed for the full year, except when you pay that money through a cancellation you immediately lose your license to run their software. they literally make you pay the remaining subscription period while taking away your access to the fucking product
Nestle and it’s many derivatives. Water stealing, baby starving, child slavers.
deleted by creator
Easyjet. They sent us an update in their app saying they delayed our flight a few hours due to ill pilot. We were waiting near the gate (nearest cafe) but not quite within view, and no flight boards nearby. They decided not to delay after all but did not send an update to the app, and nothing over loudspeakers. My paranoia got the better of me so i wandered down to the gate around the original time of flight to take a look. When I saw they were boarding after all i called the family down, but we had missed it by a minute or so. They would not let us board. They preferred to delay the flight while they unloaded our baggage. We had to pay for and book with another airline to arrive at our hotel at midnight losing a day of our Greek Island holiday. When we complained to their service desk, they refused to refund us, and said “we DO suggest you always keep up to date by watching the flight boards”. There was a giant sign by their desk that literally said “download our app to keep up to date on your flights”. I will never give those fucks another dollar, and I tell this story to anyone who will listen.
They preferred to delay the flight while they unloaded our baggage
Thats the part that would have me launched to the moon on a red hot rage rocket.
Cant take 30 seconds to let me board because your shitty fucking service told me it was delayed? But you’ll delay the plane 20 minutes to dig my baggage out of the hold and make everyone elses day on board miserable?
What kind of United Airlines level of pure customer hatred is that?!
Here’s one nobody has mentioned yet. Hasbro. Owner of Wizards of the Coast which recently tried to massively fuck over D&D players and sent hired mercinaries (literally Pinkertons) after one of their Magic: The Gathering players for something that totally wasn’t the player’s fault.
This sounds insane, can you provide more context?
So, D&D first. WotC back in 2001 realized something. There are a few books that they sell a ton of copies of and make a lot of money off of. (The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, etc.) And then there are a ton more books that take a lot of effort to make but that they don’t sell many copies of so they don’t really make much money on them, but they still have to be made in order to ensure that the more profitable books sell. (These are mostly the published adentures.)
They figured that it would be in their best interest to incentivize third parties to write a lot of these published adventures so that WotC itself could focus more on the core books. So they licensed a lot of their core content under a license (The “Open Gaming License version 1.0a” or “OGL 1.0a”) that allowed third parties to use it in their own modules and sell those modules. It created a vibrant ecosystem of publishers.
The OGL 1.0a was intended as a perpetual license. They promised third party publishers that the wording of the license didn’t allow WotC themselves – creators of the OGL 1.0a – to revoke the license. (This was on an official FAQ on WotC’s site.) So you’d be able to sell your module that included verbiage and elements from official D&D materials forever.
Well, in 2022, they changed their tune. They created an “OGL 1.1” (which was not “open” the way the 1.0a was) and started pressuring publishers they partnered with to accept the new license. It basically allowed them to rip off any third party content and include it in official WotC stuff without paying the third party publisher and also ban the publisher from using the material they wrote. It also put ridiculous restrictions on virtual tabletop software (software for playing D&D remotely.) Now, that’s not so catastrophic because they couldn’t revoke the OGL 1.0a and publishers were under no obligation to accept the OGL 1.1, right?
Well, they came up with a legal argument why the language of the OGL 1.0a that they’d been telling everyone couldn’t be revoked on existing works actually was something they could revoke. Basically, if they convinced a court they could do that, every third-party D&D module that relied on the OGL 1.0a would have to accept the OGL 1.1 terms that would let WotC rip off their work or stop sales immediately.
There was massive backlash from the community. D&D players were remarkably unified in their response. And the CEO of WotC was really tone deaf and dismissive and soured WotC’s relationship with the D&D community even further. Enough subscriptions to D&D Beyond (an online service owned by WotC) that shareholders started asking tough questions at shareholder meetings.
So, finally, WotC hired a slick PR firm to smooth things out. And, honestly, I have to admit they did good. They ended up leaving the OGL 1.0a in place (unrevoked it, sorta). But also, WotC had already said “actually, we can revoke it” and nobody trusted the OGL 1.0a any more. So WotC also dual-licensing the same OGL-1.0a-licensed content also under a Creative Commons license that is (more certain to be) unrevokable and is more open than the OGL 1.0a. The upcoming version of D&D will be OGL 1.1 only, but players and third party publishers are pretty unified on the idea of refusing to migrate to the new version and the current version is safer from the evil clutches of WotC than it was before this whole fiasco went down.
Now, the consensus among the D&D players is that WotC isn’t the bad guys so much as Hasbro, WotC’s parent company. When WotC backpeddeled and did the dual licensing thing, I decided to end my boycott of Hasbro. (I was actually DM’ing a D&D campaign at the time.) I looked forward to buying more D&D books. To seeing the latest Transformers movie and the D&D movie. Stuff like that.
And then, very shortly after that all went down, there was the other fiasco started by WotC.
I’m a little less familiar with this one, but some player of Magic: The Gathering purchased packs of MTG cards from a small reseller and the reseller fucked up. The reseller, not knowing the difference, gave the customer packs of a not yet released but similarly-named line of cards that weren’t supposed to be available to customers at all yet.
The customer made an unboxing video of these not-yet-officially-released cards and stuck it on YouTube. And that’s when shit hit the fan. WotC could have DM’d the customer on YouTube and asked if the customer could take down the video and exchange the cards for the ones he’d actually purchased, but instead they sent the actual, literal Pinkertons (a private security/mercinary company known for union busting and lots of illegal quasi-military/quasi-police actions against innocent people) to go harass the customer’s neighbors and intimidate (like while sporting assault rifles and body armor and camo – on the customer’s front porch) and bully the customer.
Now, my understanding is that the customer did nothing legally wrong. The fuck up was the reseller’s. The customer was under no legal obligation to return the cards or take down the video or otherwise cooperate in any way. The customer also said in later videos about the whole situation and the visit he got from the Pinkertons that they would totally have fully cooperated if they’d have just contacted him and asked.
As soon as I heard about WotC sending the Pinkertons after a customer, I recommitted to boycotting Hasbro and I intend never to end that boycott. I really didn’t expect something far worse to follow right on the heels of the OGL 1.1 fiasco.
Nestlé is the big one for me. Their stance on water is…evil.
HP. This one is easy. Low hanging fruit. For me, I bought an expensive gaming laptop that arrived defective. I asked for a replacement, they denied and required I send it in for repairs. Waited a month for them to tell me there isn’t a problem. Asked for a refund instead of having it shipped back. They said that’s not how it works, they have to send it back first. So I get it, with the defect still, and call to get a refund. They initially deny a refund due to being outside the refund period and offer a “buy back” credit. I had to spend an hour explaining why that’s not happening and why they’re going to give me a refund or expect to see me in court. Keep in mind, I hadn’t used this laptop more than an hour or two and it’s been shipped around and forth for two months. I did get my refund at least, but the headache was insane and I refuse to even look at HP products.
Adobe: Already said by others. For me, it’s because they charge an insane amount of money for barely-functional software. I used Affinity products instead.
Google: They cancel their services so quickly, it’s more like they’ve blacklisted ME. I refuse to pay for anything they offer in the event it will be discontinued in a year or two. RIP Play Music.
Amazon: Prices increase, service quality decreases, value decreases exponentially. The product I paid for at $79/year was far more superior to whatever Prime costs today. Mostly third party cheap trash. Unfortunately, and most likely by design, there are just a few specific reasons I’m forced to give Amazon money every so often. But at the very least, I’m making the highest conscious effort to avoid them.
I’ll update this if I come up with more.
Edit 1: Netflix: They keep removing quality content and increasing prices. Anti-consumer shit. They are both the reason I stopped pirating and considered starting again.
Blizzard
Back when they implemented Real ID and forced people to provide real namr and identification for playing the games they paid for, these motherfuckers locked me out of my account for account sharing because someone logged in from another country. That was me, logging in for my lunch break at work, about 1 hour away from home. They demanded I not only gave them my real name, but even send a copy of my passport to them by email. Obviously I refused. I had the original box and the game code, but they didn’t care. There were no other fraud indicators. Just me logging in from work and using a pseudonym. I never got any of my games back. Fuck them
Also, an incredibly toxic work environment, lots of sexual harassment.
And, not as dramatic, but they don’t care about their own lore. For someone who used to be a Warcraft universe enthusiast, it was annoying and disappointing.
Oh, and World of Warcraft has roleplaying servers, but they don’t care to encourage that whatsoever. Anyone can join those servers, they work the same as the normal servers, and most players there don’t know or care about roleplaying. Trying to participate in a fallen comrade’s funeral while the night elf YOLO99 jumps around you and dances isn’t the most immersive experience.
- Activision-Blizzard
- Adobe
- Capcom
- Digital Extremes
- Electronic Arts
- Nintendo
- Sony
- Ubisoft
- Warner Bros.
- + too many more to list
Anti-consumer practices. The gaming and software industries are full of it.
- Unity Technologies
Have shown that they have no problem screwing over their business partners. Even though they walked it back, they cannot be trusted to not try it again. You would have to be a fool to start a project in Unity now.
I’m over it now, but for 5 years I was anti-public transit. After working a 12 hour OT shift I took the train home. Sherriff was on the train and started checking peoples tickets. I opened my bag dug around literally 30+ other tickets, found my day pass and turned it over.
But I didn’t get a day pass that day, I got a one way because of my OT plans was supposed to be an Uber home.
So I got fined $250 for it. The crazies would just get pushed off the train but normals would get fined I guess. Pissed me off so much I just stopped using the public transit for half a decade.
This doesn’t seem like a problem with public transportation, but a problem with your law enforcement.
- EA – killed Earth and Beyond just so they could use the servers for Sims Online
- Blizzard – trust thermocline for me was Blitzcheung and the “We’re sorry you’re upset” excuse for an apology
EA, for destroying many of the dev companies and game franchises I loved growing up.
Nestlé, for destroying the planet, stealing water, and poisoning kids in less-developed countries.
None. Because I’m a realist.
(not only have none of these companies made any effort at improvement, they’ve consistently gotten worse as time goes by – remember one comedian commenting “the bar was on the ground and y’all brought shovels”)
