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 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.
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.
Which Adobe product doesn’t have a good FOSS replacement?
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.
And you haven’t even reached Nestlé yet…
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gamefam
Apple. Not the most evil, for certain, but they have the highest percentage of high level business choices that piss me off. Just so antithetical to my philosophy and consumer preferences. All closed, all hyper controlled, low customization, anti-repairable.
Do it their way or go fuck yourself. Something break? Fuck you, it’s your fault, buy another one. Want to play games on their very capable hardware? Grow up, no compatibility. Want to make their OS work on other machines? How dare you. Thief.
I would say Apple isn’t as severe as something like Meta or “X” but the amount of influence apple has over the industry is insane. There’s a reason why so many laptops are losing ports “because the MacBook has it” or why smartphones are stagnating and when they “innovate” they’re just removing more features like the SD card reader all simply because “Apple did it”. Hell, Windows has been trying to be like Mac OS for years from its flat minimal design to its oversimplification of its design to trying to make their own “eco system”. Apple’s influence can even extend beyond tech with their flat minimalist, corporate design being applied to every industry and building and design ever to be conceived in 2023. Everyone is trying to be Apple from Tech companies to fast food joints. Truly if we measure their influence and the power they carry moving entire industries to do various things. They are one of the most powerful company in silicon valley. Everything we hate about modern tech and how restrictive it is can be sourced all the way back to Apple.
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I have a brand new Apple product with both a headphone jack and an SD card reader.
To be fair it only has HDMI and not a VGA connector, and there’s no floppy disk drive or serial port.
Everyone loves to hate.
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This is all very true within the US and in regards to companies that do a lot of business within the US. Globally though, they’re not nearly as big or influential.
Oracle. They have the midas touch of enshittification
Just naming a company isn’t particularly useful. Some context would be great, so others can hate the company too. 🫠
They just own everything. Literally everything.
They are an asset management company not a tech company though.
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.
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.
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A movement necessarily doesn’t have to be a bad movement or bad propaganda.
I’m pretty sure Twitter has always been a walled garden.
Meta, they have a huge reach to a lot of ignorant people and they seem actively disdainful of user privacy.
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.
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
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Meta.
Amazon I’d advocate for the nationalization of, at least of AWS. Meta caused a genocide and just needs to go. There’s nothing they can provide that another company can’t. Yeah WhatsApp is entrenched in much of the world, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
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
Google easily, because they control so much of information inflow, the potential to do harm is much much greater
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.
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
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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.
