mine is BlackRock if you consider that an tech company if not then my second is meta facebook
Nobody mentioned Adobe yet. They’re absolutely the worst. They offer creative products behind a 70$ / month paywall and they hold a monopoly in their field. Only need their software sporadically? Sorry, no plan for you.
They haven’t significantly updated some of their software in like 20 years. I currently have the displeasure of using After Effects again and apart from not even supporting system dark mode on macOS or even fullscreen mode, there are all kinds of weird small bugs that you just get used to when using the software for a while.
Fuck Adobe.
Remember kids. It is always morally correct to pirate adobe products.
I’m a graphic designer and honestly, been thinking long and hard about switching to Affinity. Affinity Designer even seems like it would streamline most of my workflow.
I use Affinity sometimes, but PS, AI, & AE rule the roost because they are just better at most tasks.
PSSm: Apple Motion flies way below the radar and can do a LOT of things better/more elegantly than AE.
I delivered two seasons worth of graphics for a network show, and 85-90% was done completely in Motion.
I switched to Affinity! It’s great. Not all of the features are there but most of them. It’s also much less buggy and the interface is way better thought out.
They don’t make a replacement for After Effects though, that’s why I’m stuck with it for one project.
That’s my experience. Less features (like still no object blending in designer), but much faster and smoother over all. Admittedly I haven’t used an Adobe product in a few years, but when I first switched I was amazed at how much more performant the affinity suite was.
Blender
Affinity designer is a great tool if you are looking to use it. I can’t say for the newer versions due to reasons, but some 4 years ago that I tried it, it absolutely blew me away. Easy to use, lots of advanced features, stable, great pricing. And they got a v2 as well, unfortunately v1 customers will need to rebut though at a discounted price.
I really like Affinity, but I’m using it casually for my photography hobby
Have you heard of Oracle? It’s the database version of Adobe, but maybe worse. They seem to deploy more lawyers than technical staff.
They’re also the company who mainstreamed the software subscription model.
It used to be that only services required subscriptions. Applications would be a one time payment. But, Adobe converted to the subscription model and because they hold a monopoly over the design space, people/companies had no choice but to go along. Once they were successful, every business in the world decided that they also wanted that sweet monthly payment and now software licensing sucks.
I refuse to even pirate Adobe products on principle.
TL;DR Fuck Adobe, use open source.
Which Adobe product doesn’t have a good FOSS replacement?
The suite itself. Being able to drop photoshop files into after effects and after effects files into premiere timelines while being able to go back and edit any piece is huge for efficiency.
DreamWeaver.
And thank god for it, too.
Microsoft - erosion of any motivation to understand your PC so they can put whatever they want in their updates and you won’t know until you dig through the logs
Facebook - erosion of any critical thinking by rewarding echo chambers and groupthink. Just look at their Metaverse shite.
Amazon - erosion of labour standards and publishing anti-union propaganda to prevent workers from realising they’re being abused. Also, instituting anti-competitive measures and strongarming third party sellers.
OpenAI (insert any LLM/generative model company) - erosion of the creative process thus allowing people with zero artistic expression to plagiarise other artists’ work
EA (or any AAA studio but also Nintendo) - erosion of consumer rights to own the products they buy and preventing any effort to preserve their games AND THEN complaining about piracy.
Dear lord, it is so exhausting to list these out.
“Erosion of consumer rights” goes for pretty much all tech large companies.
“you will own nothing and be happy” seems to be the way the new standard way of living.
Very true. Subscription services and live service models are among the most parasitic inventions that have become common.
And you haven’t even reached Nestlé yet…
Not a tech company, just one of the worst companies. Thanks Switzerland.
gamefam
Just naming a company isn’t particularly useful. Some context would be great, so others can hate the company too. 🫠
One specifically bad thing about BlackRock is them buying up huge swaths of single family homes which increases prices and makes it more difficult for anyone to own property. Then they rent them out to people after they were not capable of getting a mortgage.
But BlackRock is absolutely enormous so that is just a drop in the bucket of what they do.
Oracle. They have the midas touch of enshittification
Same with IBM. I pity you of your business decides to go with IBM for vital enterprise services that you have to maintain.
Kill me
Used to work for IBM, can confirm
ETA fun story from my onboarding group: They wanted us to be beta testers for a new internal training tool they had developed. On the surface, it was just a basic online course map with tests for each course, but god it was so, so much worse than that, and that was because of those damned tests. I don’t know who the fuck developed those tests, but I can’t even say it was someone who was learning programming on the fly, because that shit had to have been intentionally malicious. Questions that weren’t in the material, questions where the “correct” answer was clearly wrong, questions where the correct answer was hidden by the HTML tags. We brought that last one up to the corpo representative who was in charge of guiding us through this nonsense and her reaponse was, I shit you not, “what’s an ‘HTML tag’?” Comical doesn’t even begin to describe the level of IBM’s technical dysfunction.
X. I can’t think of a tech company that’s done more harm this year.
You say that as if destroying Twitter was a bad thing.
For some cases, yes it was bad. Plenty of organizations used Twitter as a micro blog to keep interested parties up to date… Like a short concise RSS. That’s what I primarily used Twitter for, for years, and that was Twitter at its best.
Twitter once was an online townhall where people can start any movement or use it to spread their movement to wide masses. These days it’s just some shitty tool for propaganda.
I’m pretty sure Twitter has always been a walled garden.
Spread movement to wide masses == propaganda
A movement necessarily doesn’t have to be a bad movement or bad propaganda.
YOU’RE
deleted by creator
palantir are pretty fucking evil, but you’re unlikely to have heard of them unless you’re social justice minded or have worked in tech.
Thiel is a vampire, in the metaphorical sociological sense and the literal one. Fucking creep.
Why is palantir bad ? Do you have some sources ?
They market themselves as a “big data” company, what they actually do is use “big data” in a way not unlike what Philip K Dick predicted in minority report. Instead of clarvoiant tank people it’s extremely racist algorithms though.
They have been involved in a bunch of racist “crime preventing” pre policing stuff. I believe at the moment they’re mostly used to round up migrants in the usa for whatever the fuck their border farce does over there.
Meta, they have a huge reach to a lot of ignorant people and they seem actively disdainful of user privacy.
Reddit did something pretty shitty this year and is the reason many of us are here.
Blizzard Activision if we are counting gaming companies with their sexual harassment controversies which have led to suicide (also the cosby suite), their shitty monetization schemes, and the utter ruination of most of their popular IPs
Aye. It’s the reason I’m here. And I’m glad of it. Sadly i was too lazy before, but they forced me now.
Also aye to blizzard. Nasty buggers.
Whichever contributes the most to anti-competitive corporate culture. Most problems at the end-user level can be solved by having sufficient competition (and some labor problems, too).
Unfortunately, there are plenty to choose from.
There’s Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, and extinguish” strategy. Comcast’s creation of artificial legal barriers to competition by lobbying state and local lawmakers. And then there’s Amazon doing it by sheer hard power to put competitors under (plus all their anti-union crap).
All of FAANG
Now it’s MAANG
How about MANGA
Actually MAANA since Google is now Alphabet.
its MAANAON since oracle and nextstar media group
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/y5W60VwDkas?si=J9Vt-_V3z5oXGfB6
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Any company that engages in vendor lock-in, abuses copyright of creators through generative AI for profit, tracks users for profit/advertising, or censors content and people on their platform that suggest alternative platforms.
Microsoft takes all 3 points. It has created a very terrible operating system that gets preinstalled on most PCs through unfair competition, makes it harder and harder to customize it, has created GitHub Copilot that infringes copyright for GPL-licensed software and adds mandatory telemetry and Microsoft account. Additionally, Constructively criticizing Microsoft products publicly is dangerous.
EDIT: removed Medium link
For me it’s a tie between Oracle, Atlassian, and Microsoft.
All three of them have built their business models around intentional poor design = money for extra services. They could make their software easier and more functional, but they intentionally don’t so because it would hurt their profits. That kind of greed is inexcusable to me.
Confluence is one of the shittiest things I have ever had to work on.
It especially sucks if your company migrated from a working but “unsupported” wiki system to Confluence, importing all the pages and breaking all the links in the process.
and it’s too slow
I’d add SAP to this list
SAP is horrendous. Never want to touch that software again.
Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Microsoft, OpenAI are top of my list simply due to being aware of them.
though I’m sure most large tech corps have blood on their hands in some way or another, doing “well” under capitalism demands exploitation.
Facebook is the one that took as its goal to insert itself as a middleman into all human social interaction.
