What companies will you never give another dollar to?
What happened that put them on your blacklist?
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.
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.
What are some good alternatives to each Adobe product?
Someone on here mentioned Affinity for the Photoshop/design world
Nitro & PDFxchange for the PDF side?
Nitro is shaping up to be a good alternative for enterprise needs. Not sure about the rest. They seem to have a strangle hold on the creative suite in the enterprise.
Also Inkscape for Illustrator
I switched to PDFgear for my PDF editing needs, free and open source.
Does a decent job, although I miss being able to have PDF opened in tabs instead of individual windows.
Am I crazy? I cannot find that open source for PDFgear. Yes it’s free, but they need to have some income if they can offer an AI integration. What’s the catch?
I love you. Best I could do was cancel my $20 / month. I’ll match you in about 4000 years.
It’s not about matching, it’s about preventing Adobe from getting money. :P
I would chargeback that shit so fast.
sadly, the bank would probably side with adobe, as the contract is quite clear
If you complain enough, adobe will let you cancel for free. But they are also on my blacklist, for making me work to cancel a service for free. Absolutely ridiculous.
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
I will pirate Adobe’s products without any lapse in judgement on my part, I assure you
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.
Man, that was a very thorough write up! I was familiar with the DND shit but not the Magic stuff. Was a sad read, but glad to know about it.
Glad it was informative! Back when the D&D situation was all happening in realtime, I was so addicted to any and all news about it. I watched all there was to see about it on YouTube constantly. (And there was a lot.)
I’ve never played Magic, but especially given how soon after the D&D debacle it went down, it felt like a continuation of the same story. So I watched a lot about that as well.
They accidentally sent a notable player (dont remember if they were a content creator or something) an unreleased card. Pinkyboys showed up at his house and harassed him to return it.
Mine is Sony. First the rootkit scandal, then the removal of Other OS from PS3s after featuring it as a selling point in the marketing. Totally deceptive and I won’t give them my money.
I got a whole $7 from that Other OS lawsuit.
I stopped buying them for exactly the same reasons. They were my go-to home electronics brand before that. Tv’s, amps, stereos, cassette players, cds, dvds, presents to friends and family… always since the 80’s… ps3 came and then i stopped 100%. Haven’t bought another product from them since.
and they’re still at it
I’ve been boycotting Sony since even before their rootkit nonsense. It’s because literally every single Sony product I’ve ever owned has broken within three months of taking them out of the box. Walkmans, Discmans, a DVD player, PlayStations 1 & 2. Thankfully most of them were things I received as a gift, so I wasn’t always out of pocket, but I just don’t see any point in spending money on some garbage product that’s going to break if you stare at it too hard.
Yeah, Sony isn’t a favorite of mine either. They’ve always had this Trumpian sense of arrogance and narcissism in the video game industry that’s never failed to annoy me. It was kind of fun to watch them flail a bit with the PS3, which lost them a lot of ground against the Xbox 360 due to its mammoth price. Felt like the early 90s console wars all over again.
My linkbuds case died exactly one year after I bought them. No assistance from sony. Cant buy the case separately. 180 euros for one year of earbuds. Fuck sony.
Not to mention demanding accoutn owners be responsible for hundreds to thousands of dollars of fraudulent purchases made when their account gets hacked and stolen, Often telling them they cant have their account until they pay off all the hackers debt.
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.
This only real boycotts I’ve got honestly is Reddit and X. Spez handled it about as well as Elon does his business. They’re both awful humans.
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Ha! This isn’t a wish list post.
This list aligns pretty well with mine… It’s easier and more satisfying than you expect to boycott companies like amazon.
Are you sure? A fair chunk of the internet is run through AWS making avoiding them much harder.
That’s a good point. We can start with what we control by not buying crap from them directly.
True. And while I try to, I’m not gonna stop watching twitch because amazon owns it. I won’t however donate through bits but only through direct donations.
Full boycott is difficult for a lot of shitty companies. But I limit it as mich as possible.
Where do you source clothing?
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I’m still buying a lot of my clothes second hand but the nice stuff I’ll go out of my budget for.
Fast fashion isn’t even considered clothing for some peaple. XD Just put your jeans, your t-shirt and your sneakers and go to work, the modern slave outfit.
I try as much as I can but I find it hard to avoid any car manufacturer and Amazon. I’m trying my best to not go to Amazon and rather to Ebay or microcenter if I can though. As for fast fashion, I am planning to go thrifting or to goodwill.
Nestle and it’s many derivatives. Water stealing, baby starving, child slavers.
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
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.
I wish we could throw the Adobe executives into the sun. They have the worst anti-consumer business model ever for the most bloated, unusable software.
To this day, Adobe CS5 is probably the best all-encompassing software package they’ve ever released. CS6 added a few things, but was buggy AF. Then CC came out and it’s been in eternal-beta since. So many lost files and sometimes even OS-destroying updates.
Google Play Music still stands as the best commercial music app I’ve used, I miss it, and whatever marketing person got them to change the glorious branding of Play Music, Play Movies, and Play Store for YouTube music, Google TV and Play Store should be fired with extreme prejudice.
The number of Google apps that have been killed astounds.
Apple. They make some decent stuff but it has repeatedly become more expensive to own and maintain because repair is nearly impossible. And because of the monopoly they are building it is guaranteed to get much worse.
Additionally everything they do has a ripple effect across the industry. The average flagship phone is now over $1000. The average phone doesn’t have a headphone jack or micro SD expansion, or replaceable battery, and are all impossible to repair. Computers impossible to upgrade. Extra ram and SSD capacity being prohibitively expensive (8gb of ddr5 is 40$, apple charges 200$, similar scheme with their proprietary SSD’s)
It’s apparent that with Apple’s continued success the rest of all of our electronics have continued to get worse and predatory to squeeze more money out of us.
We reap what we sow and if we sow a company that is hellbent on enshittifiying all of our everyday devices and gouge us for our money, we aren’t going to have any other companies left (or at least those that won’t participate in this practice)
I work in computer repair and I have witnessed first hand how hostile aAple is to the consumer. Serialized components that are impossible to replace, to perforated cables that tear more easily during disassembly. It is dumbfounding that a company with such little respect for their customers is so successful.
Louis, what mobile device brands are repairable and secure?
There are a lot of brands that aren’t AS anti repair as apple and have devices that are fairly simple to fix, like Nokia and IMO Sony. There is the fair phone that does market itself as repairable but they lost my trust by removing the headphone jack and selling their own wireless earbuds.
Nestle. They’re our closest living example of an evil corporation run by a cartoon supervillain.
They’re holding hands and skipping their way to hell with Monsanto
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My mother regularly goes to Hobby Lobby because its the only craft shop nearby. God I wish she’d just buy her shit online. Probably get better quality too.
I didn’t have a ready answer to this post, but yeah, already banned:
- Chic Fil-A
- Hobby Lobby
- Papa Johns
Add:
- Jimmy John’s
Local coffee shop.
My wife designed some ads and logos for them then they stuffed her when she asked for payment.
My wife is a creative. It’s insane how many people are totally comfortable with stiffing designers
Because it’s not “real” work. You gotta get paid up front and put a limit on changes. You’re either good, or you’re not. Let the market sort it out, but don’t work for free.
The best thing you can do is bill by the hour, give a quote and get half of your quote up front. It works for pretty much anywhere customers suddenly disappear after the job is started.
A local coffee shop in my hometown is known for having an owner who SA’d a woman and hires only teenage girls. Fuck that place and person
Wells Fargo.
The short version is, they forced me to close my savings/checking account due to $32 in insufficient funds that was reported to Chex Systems by my former bank, and told me that I could reopen them once the report was cleared.
I got the report cleared with proof that it was due to a third party (AOL - who admitted it and got the report removed) that made unauthorized charges to an account I had closed.
When I went back to get my accounts reopened, the manager spoke me like I was the scum of the earth for ever having been reported, even though it wasn’t my fault and I had proof. She told me that I couldn’t open an account at Wells Fargo for 7 years, and said I could come back after that and open accounts.
As if I would ever go near Wells Fargo again after treating me like that over a $32 report that I had proven wasn’t my fault.
Wells Fargo can eat shit after all the scandals they’ve been through. I’m credit union for life now
Same. My first bank account tin collage was through Wells Fargo. I got burned by all the ridiculous fees. Closed it down and never went back. This was in 2003.
My AC went out in August in Texas. I opened a line of credit through the HVAC company, which was ultimately through Wells Fargo.
When I got the first bill I set it up for auto pay through my checking account and let it pay the same amount over 18 months.
Well about 12 months later I’m trying to buy a new house and just as I’m about to close I get a note from the bank they were going to deny my loan because I failed to pay a bill to Wells Fargo for 9 months.
I called them to figure out what the hell was going on. My bill was due on the 15th of every month. My auto pay was set to pay on the 15th. One week the 15th was a Sunday, so my bank sent the payment on the 13th. They processed that like an extra payment under the same period and for the next 9 months considered every payment I had as late.
I tell them to fix it, and they say they can but it will take 2-3 weeks to process. I’m supposed to close on a house the next morning. They tell me if I just make a payment of $279 right then they could clear it so I could close on my house. I seriously felt like I was being shaken down and there wasn’t anything I could do other than pay them. So fuck Wells Fargo!
HP
No explanation needed buddy
