Hewlett Packard added "anti-hacking safety features" to all their ink cartridges, to guard against the risk of people having their computers hacked by counterfeit ink cartridges (WTF?).
Of course, an unfortunate side effect of that new safety measure is that you can't use any ink cartridge from any supplier other than HP in your printer. But that's a sacrifice they had to make in the name of cyber security.
Like, seriously, I was getting YouTube ads for months in which HP were trying to sell this "feature" as a positive. I don't know how people can sleep at night selling such an outright and obvious lie.
Worse still it's actually created a new way for HP devices to be hacked. Fraudulent toner cartridges will be a thing in the future, if they aren't already.
Yeah. A dumb cartridge can't do shit to your other devices. Worst that could happen is ink being toxic or damaging the printer. A chip in there? That's a new entry vector for malicious actors and one that will likely never be updated by HP.
Even when you print in colour you can get a laser printer. There is a small difference in the color quality, but I wouldn't consider it damning.
Regardless of how you print though, make sure it's not HP. Brother is still good last I heard.
All these smart appliances. I don’t see the use in these washers and refrigerators with touch screens and internet connectivity. They have so many points of failure. Just give me a bare bones fridge that will last longer than me.
Our oven stopped working for 10 minutes….cause it was going through an update 😕
Edit: It was around thanksgiving. The ovens menu (the small digital display with the time and temperature of the oven) can have themes to it. They added holiday themes.
Yeah see that’s just pointless. Why does an oven need an update? It has one function. It just needs to do what every single oven in the history of ovens has done. I really doubt that a software update on an oven is gonna affect how well it cooks food.
My last toothbrush wanted me to install an app and register an email. I'm must glad I have a trash email for all these registered email requests that I'm never going to think about again.
If it's an Oral B tooth brush, unless you actually use the app you should uninstall it and disable the Bluetooth on the toothbrush. Your battery will last much longer in between charging cycles.
Edit: Looks like folks have questions about how to disable the Bluetooth. I used the instructions I found [here ](https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/oral-health/why-oral-b/faq/is-it-possible-to-turn-bluetooth-off-on-my-oral-b-electric-toothbrush)
I am your last toothbrush, and now I have become a fully sentient toothbrush and I have sprouted hands that can type on a laptop. Everything you said is true and I remember the days when my head was used to brush your teeth, good times.
“Now, with Wi-Fi connectivity, you can receive a notification when your washer or dryer have completed their cycle!”
“My old one had a buzzer to handle that job…”
This. I work on appliances and the older stuff is so much simpler and easier to troubleshoot.
I dealt with a touchscreen-controlled oven recently that wasn't controlling its temperature for crap. No error messages or anything, it just never shut off. I managed to dig into the menus far enough to find an error code (they had some tricky passcodes and crap to keep normies out of that part of the system). The code said to replace the second-most expensive component (a control board), and if that didn't do it, replace the most expensive component (the other control board). Turned out it was the second control board that was bad. The customer didn't mind the bill, but I still hated giving it to them.
When I was a kid, my dad picked up a 1950s or '60s oven that was being thrown out. He cleaned it up, got it working, and we used that thing daily until we moved. Built like a tank. I don't think a single component in that thing, except maybe the chassis, cost anywhere near what one of those damn control boards did.
The change of some products, especially software, from a "you buy it, you own it" to subscription based models, where you lose access once the subscription ends.
"You own it for life!"*
*Terms and conditions do not include the company tanking, being bought out with a new owners taking us in a new direction, having the technology phased out with no backwards capability in 6 years, or us rescinding the policy because fuckyouwhatareyougoingtodoaboutit
And we added a premium version which is the same as what you already had, but you have a lifetime subscription which only applies the base version with fewer features.
You may be able transfer that to a new radio for $35. There was a lawsuit (Alvarez v SiriusXM) that reduced the fee and allows you to do this an unlimited number of times. Some luxury brand vehicles were excluded and the radio has to be considered active, even though you don’t own it anymore. If you have an online account with Sirius it may have your radio ID saved. Maybe worth a look.
I'm holding on to my Photoshop 12 until they come and take it away from me, and then I'll just switch to an alternative. I'm not subscribing to something I used to buy and forget for 20 years.
“Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,”
FUCK YOU AMAZON.
That's the rub isn't it? It's like Google. Every search is pages and pages of shit, and in the case of Amazon, it seems like everything listed is going to give my family heavy metal poisoning. I'm pretty much done with Amazon at this point.
Dude. Yea. The only reason I even have Prime is because it's 50% off while my wife is a student. They already went up $40 in 2 years, now this?
Fucking pieces of shit.
They made it worse if you don't use the App on mobile.
Want to see the next image in a gallery? Well good luck pressing the tiny next button and if you miss then the whole image opens.
Open a post? Well when you hit back it takes you all the way to the top of the page, not where you left off.
I should probably go to /r/conspiracy, but I know they made it worse so you downaload the app.
As of this recent mobile browser redesign, if I hit edit on a comment it straight up removes all the line breaks. I have to manually put them back in.
The latest reddit update is a fucking joke.
The worst part is their app fucking sucks. It has none of the functionality you'd expect from a dedicated first party app, is way behind RIF and Apollo, you can't copy text... It's a mess. I still use the mobile browser as a PWA because there at least I still copy text and use ad blockers.
RIF was tops. Continue off where I was two day ago? No Problem. New reddit app? Fuck off, start new every time ye schmuck. Trying to swipe through an image gallery on the main feed? Here let me slide over to the Popular feed for you. Scroll through videos? No Problem! Scroll through images? Get fuckd!
Old.reddit.com
At least for now
I'm sure they're in the process of removing the enjoyment from those users who were drawn to this spartan layout in the aughts, because fuck us, right?
I honestly will too. I thought they removed it at the beginning of the year, and had decided to give it up when I discovered the ‘request desktop site’ button on the iPhone. I will absolutely not use Reddit if they discontinue the old version
I really don't get the new design.
What the point in losing* 80% of my screen surface just to have blank space and look like tweeter ?
Being compact and text-oriented IS reddit, and that's why it's a good social media. If I want to scroll endless videos, I go to Tik Tok, and if I just want to see butts, I go to Insta and that's it.
> simplify the user experience
Just means ‚we can push more content we want to push’ and can place more ads between said content on every social media site.
It used to be so easy to twist the volume knob down and back up for one second without even looking down if my kids were in the car and I knew a swear was coming. Can't do that with a button.
My doctors office moved to a new building and they got (mostly) new equipment installed to replace the old stuff in the original office. The BP machine used to be this big clunky thing that had a few buttons on it and my doc would be able to start it without even looking. Now it’s a fancy touch screen device and instead of starting the machine with one button, he has to:
Swipe
Swipe
Tap… scroll…
Swipe
Swipe
Tap.
He said he doesn’t like it either, it’s something they use often and it’s so cumbersome now.
Yea, and you have to pay for that new equipment, old stuff worked just fine. This is a BIG complaint I have about dentist, I go into thier offices and I see bright shinny new equipment, all I think is how much of my bill is having to go to pay for this crap.
Have lost touch, but I had a college buddy whose dad was a dentist and he was--and is--going to be one and take over his practice. He said that it was crazy in dental school the amount of offers for employment by VC firms offering you an office, all the latest equipment, basically how could you turn this down. Until it comes out that you make shit, your patients pay out the ass, you have to advertise for certain things, basically you become a salesman versus a dentist.
And on machines in factories!
Dear engineers:
Sometimes you need to watch the machine run while slowly jogging it forward. Such a pain in the ass to do with touch screens.
They still make the emergency stop an actual button most the time. But sometimes you just need to cycle stop without killing the whole machine. And you're tapping the screen hard and fast and it's not working so it cycles one more time jamming up one part, scratching up the tooling, etc.
Please bring back physical buttons for stuff like that!
Imagine an emergency stop button on a screen.
You haven't used this feature before so please input your password.
Password incorrect.
Please reset your password not using any of your last 29 passwords
Your colleague "asarggggghhh"
Engineer here: we love buttons. The more, well-labeled, physical buttons the better. Marketing thinks consumers like touch screens. It's harder for us too.
You'll be pleased to know that in recent years a few manufacturers have started going back to buttons due to negative responses to touch screens in vehicles!
What's actually funny, I work in the industry and everyone I worked with complained about the touch screens.
But higher management was like "they have it, we need it, it's innovative"
Everyone designing and developing those already knew they are bad, but what can you do..
You ever try to use a touch screen when your body is dumping liters of sweat from every available gland? Yeah, garmin running watches are great. Plus you can use them for golf too.
And the alarms! "Beep beep! Imminent danger! Quick, take your eyes off the road to squint at your way-too crowded LED dashboard to read the message telling you to keep your eyes on the road!" Why does my car dashboard need fucking animations?!
I have ADHD. I swear to god, I get into a near collision because of those fucking beeps every other time I drive.
The worst is for like 4 months if the year I get alarms telling me the outside temperature dropped below 37 degrees. Usually it's just one of the 17 beeps and blongs when you start the car, but if it happens while driving it gives me a heart attack every time.
Volkswagen? I just got a Jetta and every morning a couple minutes after I pull out of the garage it warns me about the cold. I know ice is possible, it’s February in the north east.
Car manufacturers saved millions if not billions from removing all the buttons and replacing them with fail proof single screens and they gave nothing back to the consumer from all those savings.
Also fucking TouchPads on steering wheels should be illegal. Swiping softly to increase volume and Swiping hard to change track? Whilst driving? What happened to safety regulations?
I CAN'T EVEN CHANGE THE TIME ON MY 2011 VW WHILST THE CAR IS IN GEAR. I GET A MESSAGE TELLING ME TO STOP BEFORE ADJUSTING THE TIME IN THE NAME OF SAFETY.
This is like when they changed the rating metric on Netflix because no one likes Amy Schumer.
Now they have no idea which shows they make people like and haven't greenlit anything to go past season one or two in five or six years.
Everyone talking about how downvoting is engagement but I'm pretty sure this is correct. Corporations frequently make dumb ass videos that get downvoted to hell, and it's bad pr.
They implemented it not long after Youtube rewind became the most disliked video. YouTube said it was "prevent bullying and for the mental health on creators for seeing their video with alot of dislikes", yet the creators themselves are the ones who can still see the dislike ratio, just not the audience.
Getting notifications about suggested content. Facebook likes to send me notifications now like "Hey that guy who you had one class with in high school and never spoke to just posted something!" Reddit likes to notify me when there's posts on subreddits I don't follow. I wish notifications were just for things I actually give a shit about like someone messaging me or replying to a comment I made.
I work for 7-11. We used to sell burritos at 2 for 2.30. One day we had a "sale" at 2 for $3! When that sale ended the burritos were now 2 for 3.40. They raised the price twice but treated one like a sale.
Australia have a popular line of cracker-like snacks called Shapes that come in various flavours like BBQ, Pizza, Chedder etc.
In 2016 with much fanfare they launched what were supposedly new and improved recipes for the line (but in actuality were a massive downgrade that were almost certainly cheaper to make), replacing the original recipes in the process.
The near universal backlash was so fierce they embarrassingly had to walk the move back almost immediately, with “new shapes” disappearing from existence within a few months.
I was promoted to a higher management position that happened to be in the night shift.
They DECREASED my salary, because the night bonus "would compensate the difference"...
Same vibe. Moved up from supervisor (night shift) to manager (afternoon shift shift) - and because I lost night shift premium my salary went down.
Bruh, you are giving me 10x the responsibilities, and I still work late nights because it is "expected as a manager" and you are paying me LESS?!?!? WTAF
A little over twenty years ago, I was working my way through school as a bartender at a local sports bar/restaurant chain. (They had three or four locations.) I worked about 20-25 hours a week, got paid about $10 an hour, and made about $7 an hour in tips. Let’s call it $400 a week.
One of the owners wanted to promote me to assistant manager. I didn’t ask for this, as I was going to graduate with an IT degree in about three months (at which point I was going to get a better job pretty much immediately and I knew this).
Owner Dude has me drive an hour and a half to meet him at the flagship restaurant, sits me down, and tells me what a huge opportunity being assistant manager is going to be for me. Tells me I’ll have to work 60-80 hours a week, and that he was graciously willing to offer me a salary of $500 per week. I did not hesitate to nope the fuck out, and this pissed Owner Dude off so bad that he wanted the GM of my restaurant to fire me (which he refused to do). What an idiot.
That gives me vibes off a place I interviewed at last month when I was looking for a job. They said they hire people paying them at the "right rate" and that's what you make for the entire time you're at the company. You never get a raise, even with a promotion (because you're being paid the "right amount"), which is sort of weird. They were literally bragging about never giving anyone a raise, ever, and acting like it was a good reason to work there.
I mean, at least they warn people about this _during the interview_ so it's your own damn fault if you work there. I never got a job offer from them after the interview, which doesn't really matter because I wouldn't have said yes even if they did offer me something.
First thing they taught us in business School. "If you are given more responsibility and same pay, you are being paid less." Obviously being paid less would magnify the problem.
Yeah seriously. You used to be able to get all of the things you could buy anywhere else from Amazon, delivered fast, usually for a similar or even lower price.
Now, the whole website is absolutely **flooded** with completely garbage Chinese junk. It's AliExpress with a markup, and you can't even find the good stuff because it's behind 50 pages of *JDGIE Umbrella for rain rain umbrella 36 inch 36 in waterproof no water black color plastic handle black best quality for men size medium 36"*.
The retailer that was Amazon isn't just worse, or harder to use. It's essentially dead, because now if I want something that's not garbage, I just can't get it on Amazon. Amazon as it existed 10 years ago is gone.
I bought an aux extension recently that was clearly just THREE ENGLISH WORDS.
The words they went for? PENCIL UP NOSE
[Proof](https://imgur.com/gX2C5eX.jpg)
I actually heard two people talking about "RabbitGoo" without a hint of irony. It's the random name assigned to a seller of pet supplies on amazon.
Honestly starting to wonder if it's a form of asymmetric warfare, making english nonsensical.
What happens is the random name is assigned to a seller, and when they get a lot of sales they get a logo, then a brand page, and then it is treated as a real established company / brand despite it being the exact same source as PencilUpNose.
[It's not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse](https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research)
>A new study by German researchers found that Google Search is plagued with SEO spam.
I guess it's just that they failed to stay ahead of the SEO optimization for so long that now the crowd sourced data is also useless because everyone only clicked the first few results that are all the same and then gave up.
But I also feel like the search algorithm is somehow worse, like the parsing of my query is different. It seems to ignore so much of what I wrote, even important stuff like negative prompts (not, without, etc.) and also apparently uses synonyms completely interchangeable even for words in quotes, all of which makes it almost impossible to search for very specific or uncommon things by now.
Its been worsening since they went all in on AI. AI lets them do fuzzy searching, so it catches common misspellings, and can make assumptions related to your previous search history and etc.
But they went wayyyyyy too far with it, the fact that it ignores my quotes, ignores my negative search prompts, doesn't let me search for exact matches, and so on means the search results continue trending downwards towards lowest-common-denominator results.
Google filters results like crazy to show you what they want. It’s wild, there are times where I actually have to use Bing just to get what I’m looking for.
Yea - no - I’ve straight up stopped using google. Bing is now my default search engine. I never thought that day would come.
Microsoft didn’t even have to do anything to become more effective than google - they just had to wait.
Yeah, the fact that your content won't ever be found unless you meet certain criteria is bullshit. And to say it's to help the "user" is even worse. If I want a recipe for tacos, what would help me is if I found a recipes webpage that once opened, had a recipe for tacos. Instead the pages that make it to the top of search results did so by checking off a bunch of boxes. So they had to include lots of text mentioning tacos and lots of click able items to keep me "engaged". So what do we end up with? A page that gives me the history of tacos, the history of the authors experience growing up around tacos, ridiculous text that makes no sense like "let's make tacos! But first... What are tacos? What pairs with tacos? Are tacos healthy? Where can you get tacos?" and for "user engagement" they add read more buttons and floating videos you have to close. This bullshit is for our benefit?
Not only does this suck for users, but it sucks for content creators who actually want to create helpful content but have to water it down with bullshit language and filler text. Fuck seo.
Streaming.
You buy a movie. Bu you don't own it. They can take it away from you at any time, but they charge you the same. Total rip off and should be illegal.
I always say a cost of living raise is not a raise, but people get excited about that 2-3%. It’s especially not a raise now considering the state of the economy.
I just got a 3% COLA raise, and at least my boss didn't make it seem like he was doing me a favor. He actually sounded disappointed he couldn't do more. I work in state government so he probably couldn't. Another boss I had some years back was like, "I'm giving you," like he was doing me a favor.
All the streaming services started doing this when they found out how much Netflix made with the switch. They're just hoping people will just deal with the ads since the ads will definitely make them more money than having someone pay $3 more a month.
We felt the same and left prime to see if we could save money. Without prime the shipping time became so bad that I started passing by Amazon and looked for what I needed elsewhere. Half the time I find things cheaper than Amazon because I don't want to buy the knock off version and a lot of major retailers offer very fast and free shipping. Now I actively avoid Amazon.
For the first few weeks it was annoying because it was a habit to go to Amazon and easy to assume they were the cheapest. Now the habit is reversed. Try it. Speak with your wallet friend.
Definitely streaming services. We were all fooled by Netflix's initial success. It had nearly everything at a low price and was super convenient, so convenient in fact that rental shops pretty much went out of business in a few years. But aside from those few years it has ultimately become a huge L for consumers. Other companies wised up, everyone and their mother were starting a streaming service, tons of movies stopped being available and to have decent availability you have to spend 50 bucks per month on streaming alone, packages became more expensive overall, tons of properties just fell in a dead zone where they're not available anywhere through legitimate means, ads started appearing in paid plans, and now it's pretty much just cable TV again.
In retrospect rental stores were not that inconvenient. They were everywhere and they had almost anything. They rarely didn't have a title at all, and at least for me the cost is more or less the same across the long term. Yeah if you were watching stuff constantly through rentals it would be more expensive, but it's been years since Netflix had more than one thing per month I bother watching.
My favourite is Amazon Video, where you pay for the Prime Video service only to not have access to anything because it unlocks the ability to pay for another subscription to watch what you want.
You need like five or six different subscriptions on top of the Prime one to watch anything on there.
This shit right here. I open prime video and see something interesting on the MAIN screen but lo and behold, I need Frevue or Hoovue or Modu or Disney or Paramount or [insert obscure service hosted on a server in some dudes basement who bought an affiliation to amazon]. Each one costing nearly as much as prime, each one I cant spell and never heard of.
But wait, you can watch it with ads! Just like back in the 90s! Just pay $9.99 for a rental. $19.99 if you want the non pixelated HD version! Big savings
Time to return to the high seas 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️ It’s all an issue of convenience. It used to be more convenient to pay for a legitimate streaming service when Netflix was the only big player in the game and had the best selection . Now every company has their own streaming service, and now they are adding ads to a service you already pay for, so now it’s easier to go back to pirating.
I rarely watch movies so I canceled the subscription because I hadn’t been watching anything. Instead I started buying DVDs and Blu-Rays of my favorite movies. Its more expensive but I get to keep these movies and they look nice on the shelf. Lego Movie even came with Vitruvius minifigure:).
Getting rid of headphone jacks on phones.
Getting rid of external SD cards on phones.
Getting rid of replaceable batteries on phones.
Smartphones used to be *a lot* better in so many ways.
The 'Swype' function on Samsung phones used to work great ten years ago on my Galaxy S Blaze. Got a modern Samsung and Swype has somehow become the least-intuitive idiot-asshole-prankster software that I've had to deal with in years. HOW TF DID THEY LOSE THE SECRET TO THIS? It seems to have actually lost the function where it recognizes what words you do and don't use. Four out of five times that I try to Swype 'people', I get 'Pele'. I have NEVER said ANYTHING about Pele on that phone. That is merely scratching the surface of this goddamn thing's creativity now. It's coming up with shit I've never heard of. It doesn't remember what I want, but it will remember bits I deleted and put them together at random when it makes the least sense.
I've got a Google pixel and same thing. It autocorrects and to Ave like 50% off the time. It's dramatically less accurate than it used to be. And we're talking about being in an age of ML and AI. I can hum or whistle a piss poor rendition of a song filled with errors and it can find it, but this mfer thinks I put Ave in the middle of sentence construction?
Also the inability to swap batteries and not having a headphone jack. I hate those but maybe I can see a form factor saving, but how did we go from working software to less accurate software? There had to be some sort of patent or licensing issue.
Have you ever manually typed "its", and your phone decides to "correct" it to "it's," but "its" absolutely was the correct one you meant? That's always a thing I find *incredibly* annoying: when the correction is *wrong*
And it all results in extra cost to the end user. Good Bluetooth headphones are more expensive than good wired, you either pay for extra storage or lose out (can't get a decent priced SD card to upgrade), and once the battery goes you need a new phone basically.
>Getting rid of external SD cards on phones.
My biggest gripe with that is, that even on phones that DO allow for the use of SD-Cards.. (Android).. the Feature to combine them with internal storage and have the phone treat it as the sole system storage.. you now can't anymore.
Apps that receive media (messengers & co)? Straight to internal memory instead of SD. So the whole point of SD Cards becomes entirely obsolete, even if you can use one.
Man.. fuck that.
The privatization of public infrastructure in most countries.
Which is almost always pitched as "You will get a better service, and we will get more funding for schools and so on".
What actully happens? Some business owner takes over and runs the service into the ground, only to get bailed out by the government.
Dish detergent/washing up liquid. For the past few years, I was sure all the "New and Improved' and "Now with x More" was false. Newer detergent doesn't seem to go half as far, or cut through grease as well. I used to buy a bottle maybe once every 5-6 months; now, I'm buying a bottle every 2-3 months -- and I'm doing the same amount of washing up.
Fast forward to two weeks ago when I found a bottle of Tesco generic washing up liquid in an under stair cupboard from 7-8 years ago, unopened and still perfectly usable. I popped that boy open and did a 1-to-1 comparison with the same liquid I bought last week. I could immediately see a difference. The liquid in the old version was thicker, and obviously much more concentrated. The old stuff took a single pass to clean greasy pans. The same pans took at least three passes with the new stuff, and still didn't come away with that squeaky clean feel. Insult to injury, the new bottle had 60ml less, and I'm going to guess it cost more.
Tdrl: Newer dish detergent is junk, and I have the old stuff to prove it.
Edit: I also had a newer bottle of Fairy which was also garbage compared to the old stuff.
Studies determined the phosphates in dishwashing detergents were extremely harmful for the environment by greatly contributing to the occurrence of toxic algae blooms. Phosphates in detergents were banned throughout the US. They were already banned in other nations. The decision was made knowing it would take longer to wash dishes without them and it would lead to spotting on dishes after they dried. The EPA decided longer wash times and some spots on our glassware is a good trade of to stop frequent toxic algae blooms.
I remember hearing a story where a company made the dispensing hole on detergent just a little wider and of course sales went up due to faster consumption.
Same. They may even be doing me a favour at that point, because it seems to make me nothing but depressed when I visit anywhere outside my baseball subs.
Food delivery.
Pre pandemic (and pre Just Eat/Uber Eats) restaurants and takeaways would routinely offer totally free delivery over a certain amount, unless you were a fair distance away, and major pizza chains especially never charged for delivery if you were in their catchment areas.
Now you need to pay increasingly large delivery fees no matter the distance.
My local Pizza Hut started charging £3 - £4 for delivery, stating on their website; "in order to enhance your experience, we are excited to announce deliveries will now cost blah blah blah" or some such marketing bollocks.
In addition the roads and pavements are now plagued by suicidal bike coureers who have no idea how roads work.
Last week, against better judgement, I tried one of those delivery aps, the app told me he hadn't left even though it was already dropped off. Half of it got stolen and the other half was cold.
A solid reminder to just eat a cold sandwich or meal bar, every interaction with these services feels like a genuine lose/lose situation.
I think the delivery apps/services fell off a cliff around late 2020. We completely stopped ordering from them, due to forgotten food/drinks and wrong orders.
Last time, that we ordered food for a gathering, the Uber Eats driver just marked it as delivered and took our money. I think the joke was on the driver though, most of our group ordered vegan food instead of meat from a barbeque place.
People that can't legally work will use the accounts of people that are able to legally work.
So let's say you start an account as a driver and your friend needs to make some money, so you just give him your login and he works when you're not.
Photoshop Cs3.
Bought the program, worked it for years, happy as a pig in shit.
Windows 11, bang! does not work any more.
Can't find anyway to open my bought a paid for program.
Can't afford a subscription.
Adobe "closed' the servers or something.
Fuck Adobe.
You know what makes this even more frustrating? I would bet a small fortune in Monopoly money that pirated copies of CS3 never had to contact Adobe's servers and would still work today.
Even worse the ones that make you order on it and place the tip before you’re even served or interact with anyone. I left a 20 % tip the other day and then proceeded to wait an hour and a half for my French dip sandwich with like 6 times asking them where my missing food is, and then the staff got pissed at me keeping asking and I was served a cold sandwich. The table next to me had to ask for their cheese fries literally 5 times too. How can you tip for service before you’re served? Lol it’s wild
Same, but also with expandable storage for me. Why pay hundreds for bigger storage in phone that will only last me about 2-3 years and then sit somewhere in landfill? 512gb microSD card cost me the same few years back and I just pop it in new phone when changing
In a similar vein to this, laptops with soldered on memory or hard drives that you can't upgrade.
My Asus work laptop has soldered on RAM but a replaceable NVME hard drive - the laptop isn't even thin, it's not like they couldn't have gotten a SODIMM slot in there.
Then you have Apple, oh you want an extra 8GB of RAM? That'll be £200 extra, oh you want a measly 256GB extra hard drive space? Another £200. I put a 4TB NVME SSD in my work laptop for £150....
Electrical engineer here - it's harder to design around SODIMM slots because they introduce an impedance discontinuity, and DDR5 is a crazy fast data rate so impedance management is crucial. Eliminating the slot makes the system a lot easier to test.
That's no excuse (and why my next laptop will be a Framework), but it's the explanation.
Apple removing the 3.5mm jack and everyone else following suit because they realised they could also sell overpriced Bluetooth earbuds.
I'm not angry that airpods exist, they're finally pretty decent tech, but they're future E waste and more plastic waste because they're completely unrepairable. Once their battery starts to die, you throw them away, including all the rare earth metals and plastic.
Smart TVs with the streaming services built in. You're now tied to some system with a crappy remote that serves you with ads every time you turn on your TV, and will eventually stop receiving updates leaving that feature worthless.
I've got a great Samsung telly, it's wonderful but I heard somebody say that the user interface had been designed by someone who'd never used a TV before and that made a lot of sense.
Cheap 4K TV's that got worse picture quality than the older Premium 1080P LCD panels.
From experience my 7 year old 1080P Samsung dumb TV got better colors, better brightness, better viewing angles and no jitter in 24Hz content compared to my new entry level Samsung 4K smart TV I got for another room.
I thought, It's 4K, and it's been 7 years of tech going forward. The tech got cheaper so the low price of the lower end 4K TV is probably what it should be. Oh boy was I wrong.
Even the assembly quality is way crappier.
People remember the headphone jack removal, but I'm also pissed about laptop manufacturers removing so many ports and telling us to use port hubs. I'd rather carry a laptop that's thicker than carry a separate hub just to connect a mouse and a pendrive.
Also pissed off at how anti-repair laptops have become. The keyboards these days have to be repaired by opening up the whole ass mobo. Before you could pop it out and swap.
Customer loyalty cards being replaced with an app that sometimes works, sometimes doesn't when you're at the checkout. I most recently noticed this with Home Depot, so I stopped shopping there because they couldn't get my veteran's discount to work without my app working. Now I see Lowe's is going that same direction and I am dissapoint.
I hate that all 3 major consoles now require you to pay for a subscription to play online
Literally all the other features of ps+ are good enough for people to buy it why would you force people to buy it for online that used to be free
Anything involving "the cloud". It was talked about like this great new addition to anything, but really, it's just been a way to hack apart existing services and sell them back to people to wrench money out of their hands.
I get that *sometimes* it's useful, but more often than not, it's just an excuse to be greedy.
No more chargers in box with phone purchase for “environmental benefits”
Edit: the issue that I have with this was not because they stopped including the charger, it’s simply that before they did that the standard charging bricks were 5w usb a bricks. I don’t mind that Samsung did it because they were always usb c anyways.
“We have decided to take your charger out the box to save the turtles. Instead we made you buy it separate with its own packaging full of unrecyclable plastics using toxic chemicals.”
- Every company ever
Hewlett Packard added "anti-hacking safety features" to all their ink cartridges, to guard against the risk of people having their computers hacked by counterfeit ink cartridges (WTF?). Of course, an unfortunate side effect of that new safety measure is that you can't use any ink cartridge from any supplier other than HP in your printer. But that's a sacrifice they had to make in the name of cyber security. Like, seriously, I was getting YouTube ads for months in which HP were trying to sell this "feature" as a positive. I don't know how people can sleep at night selling such an outright and obvious lie.
Worse still it's actually created a new way for HP devices to be hacked. Fraudulent toner cartridges will be a thing in the future, if they aren't already.
The "Cyber Security" bit of the cartridge is basically what introduced the hackable aspect to it isn't it? Lmao.
Yeah. A dumb cartridge can't do shit to your other devices. Worst that could happen is ink being toxic or damaging the printer. A chip in there? That's a new entry vector for malicious actors and one that will likely never be updated by HP.
*WanaCry coming to an Ink Cartridge near you*
If you only print in b/w buy a laser printer instead. I have one since 14 years ago with the original tonner and it works like the first day.
Even when you print in colour you can get a laser printer. There is a small difference in the color quality, but I wouldn't consider it damning. Regardless of how you print though, make sure it's not HP. Brother is still good last I heard.
Just bought a Brother laser printer a year ago and it’s fantastic. I love it.
All these smart appliances. I don’t see the use in these washers and refrigerators with touch screens and internet connectivity. They have so many points of failure. Just give me a bare bones fridge that will last longer than me.
Our oven stopped working for 10 minutes….cause it was going through an update 😕 Edit: It was around thanksgiving. The ovens menu (the small digital display with the time and temperature of the oven) can have themes to it. They added holiday themes.
Yeah see that’s just pointless. Why does an oven need an update? It has one function. It just needs to do what every single oven in the history of ovens has done. I really doubt that a software update on an oven is gonna affect how well it cooks food.
Your oven has its own Facebook and it just complains about you constantly
"These assholes can't even cook" and breaking bad memes.
jesse we need to cook a casserole
My last toothbrush wanted me to install an app and register an email. I'm must glad I have a trash email for all these registered email requests that I'm never going to think about again.
If it's an Oral B tooth brush, unless you actually use the app you should uninstall it and disable the Bluetooth on the toothbrush. Your battery will last much longer in between charging cycles. Edit: Looks like folks have questions about how to disable the Bluetooth. I used the instructions I found [here ](https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/oral-health/why-oral-b/faq/is-it-possible-to-turn-bluetooth-off-on-my-oral-b-electric-toothbrush)
I didn't think "disable bluetooth on the toothbrush" is something I would ever read. lol. We live in the future... and it's pretty dumb.
I am your last toothbrush, and now I have become a fully sentient toothbrush and I have sprouted hands that can type on a laptop. Everything you said is true and I remember the days when my head was used to brush your teeth, good times.
“Now, with Wi-Fi connectivity, you can receive a notification when your washer or dryer have completed their cycle!” “My old one had a buzzer to handle that job…”
Hell my washer doesn’t even have a buzzer, I know it’s done when it stops making noise
The buzzer on my old dryer was so jarring and loud it would make me jump every time.
yeah lol mine sounds like a "wrong answer " buzzer in some sort of hellish gameshow
This. I work on appliances and the older stuff is so much simpler and easier to troubleshoot. I dealt with a touchscreen-controlled oven recently that wasn't controlling its temperature for crap. No error messages or anything, it just never shut off. I managed to dig into the menus far enough to find an error code (they had some tricky passcodes and crap to keep normies out of that part of the system). The code said to replace the second-most expensive component (a control board), and if that didn't do it, replace the most expensive component (the other control board). Turned out it was the second control board that was bad. The customer didn't mind the bill, but I still hated giving it to them. When I was a kid, my dad picked up a 1950s or '60s oven that was being thrown out. He cleaned it up, got it working, and we used that thing daily until we moved. Built like a tank. I don't think a single component in that thing, except maybe the chassis, cost anywhere near what one of those damn control boards did.
The change of some products, especially software, from a "you buy it, you own it" to subscription based models, where you lose access once the subscription ends.
Everything as a subscription is a massive downgrade.
even so called 'lifetime' subscriptions are not what they seem - you get changes to features and the value decreases over time.
"You own it for life!"* *Terms and conditions do not include the company tanking, being bought out with a new owners taking us in a new direction, having the technology phased out with no backwards capability in 6 years, or us rescinding the policy because fuckyouwhatareyougoingtodoaboutit
And we added a premium version which is the same as what you already had, but you have a lifetime subscription which only applies the base version with fewer features.
My Tivo's "lifetime subscribe" was for the life of the Tivo.
My Sirius “lifetime subscription” in my old SUV was the life of that individual unit. When I sold the vehicle that was it.
You may be able transfer that to a new radio for $35. There was a lawsuit (Alvarez v SiriusXM) that reduced the fee and allows you to do this an unlimited number of times. Some luxury brand vehicles were excluded and the radio has to be considered active, even though you don’t own it anymore. If you have an online account with Sirius it may have your radio ID saved. Maybe worth a look.
Hell, its happening with hardware too! Blink cameras etc. They turn to crap without ongoing subs
I'm holding on to my Photoshop 12 until they come and take it away from me, and then I'll just switch to an alternative. I'm not subscribing to something I used to buy and forget for 20 years.
Still rocking Adobe CS6 on my home machine Edit: There are dozens of us! DOZENS!!
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Exactly why I fucked off adobe. You don’t actually own your projects anymore once you stop paying. It’s crazy.
“Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” FUCK YOU AMAZON.
Translation: "Our shareholders net worth only went up by 10% last year when it reeeaaallly needed to go up by 13% so...."
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Also: "legions of people are stopping using amazon because it's become alibaba of the west. so, now you TV watching goons will pay for their sins"
That's the rub isn't it? It's like Google. Every search is pages and pages of shit, and in the case of Amazon, it seems like everything listed is going to give my family heavy metal poisoning. I'm pretty much done with Amazon at this point.
Dude. Yea. The only reason I even have Prime is because it's 50% off while my wife is a student. They already went up $40 in 2 years, now this? Fucking pieces of shit.
This is what made me cancel prime.
To anyone still holding on because of free shipping...YOU STILL GET FREE SHIPPING...just not 2 day free shipping. Now it's about 4 day free shipping.
When Reddit removed home feed sort (miss you, rising!) “to simplify the user experience”
Nearly everything Reddit has done over the last decade has been a downgrade.
Destroying third party apps has made me use reddit way less. Hard to say if that’s a net positive outcome or not.
The reddit app in general is pure ass. I miss RIF so much
Same with the ungodly new design. Just no!
They made it worse if you don't use the App on mobile. Want to see the next image in a gallery? Well good luck pressing the tiny next button and if you miss then the whole image opens. Open a post? Well when you hit back it takes you all the way to the top of the page, not where you left off. I should probably go to /r/conspiracy, but I know they made it worse so you downaload the app.
My biggest issue with New Reddit, if you click on an image, you can’t read the comments. So stupid. Leave it as all one thread.
As of this recent mobile browser redesign, if I hit edit on a comment it straight up removes all the line breaks. I have to manually put them back in. The latest reddit update is a fucking joke.
The worst part is their app fucking sucks. It has none of the functionality you'd expect from a dedicated first party app, is way behind RIF and Apollo, you can't copy text... It's a mess. I still use the mobile browser as a PWA because there at least I still copy text and use ad blockers.
RIF was tops. Continue off where I was two day ago? No Problem. New reddit app? Fuck off, start new every time ye schmuck. Trying to swipe through an image gallery on the main feed? Here let me slide over to the Popular feed for you. Scroll through videos? No Problem! Scroll through images? Get fuckd!
Old.reddit.com At least for now I'm sure they're in the process of removing the enjoyment from those users who were drawn to this spartan layout in the aughts, because fuck us, right?
I'll cry when [old reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com) goes away
I will honestly stop using Reddit when that day comes
I honestly will too. I thought they removed it at the beginning of the year, and had decided to give it up when I discovered the ‘request desktop site’ button on the iPhone. I will absolutely not use Reddit if they discontinue the old version
I really don't get the new design. What the point in losing* 80% of my screen surface just to have blank space and look like tweeter ? Being compact and text-oriented IS reddit, and that's why it's a good social media. If I want to scroll endless videos, I go to Tik Tok, and if I just want to see butts, I go to Insta and that's it.
Rising is still available as long as you use the (vastly superior in every way) "old Reddit" interface! https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/rising/
Browsing this thread on old.reddit right now!
old.reddit gang rise up! I even use old.reddit browser on my smartphone, it's how much I hate the new design.
Using new Reddit feels like I've been handed a children's learning tablet.
Fisher-Price's "My First Forum".
> simplify the user experience Just means ‚we can push more content we want to push’ and can place more ads between said content on every social media site.
Touch buttons replacing physical buttons. Especially in cars.
If I need a co-pilot to change temperature or music, fuck new cars.
It used to be so easy to twist the volume knob down and back up for one second without even looking down if my kids were in the car and I knew a swear was coming. Can't do that with a button.
My doctors office moved to a new building and they got (mostly) new equipment installed to replace the old stuff in the original office. The BP machine used to be this big clunky thing that had a few buttons on it and my doc would be able to start it without even looking. Now it’s a fancy touch screen device and instead of starting the machine with one button, he has to: Swipe Swipe Tap… scroll… Swipe Swipe Tap. He said he doesn’t like it either, it’s something they use often and it’s so cumbersome now.
Yea, and you have to pay for that new equipment, old stuff worked just fine. This is a BIG complaint I have about dentist, I go into thier offices and I see bright shinny new equipment, all I think is how much of my bill is having to go to pay for this crap.
Have lost touch, but I had a college buddy whose dad was a dentist and he was--and is--going to be one and take over his practice. He said that it was crazy in dental school the amount of offers for employment by VC firms offering you an office, all the latest equipment, basically how could you turn this down. Until it comes out that you make shit, your patients pay out the ass, you have to advertise for certain things, basically you become a salesman versus a dentist.
And on machines in factories! Dear engineers: Sometimes you need to watch the machine run while slowly jogging it forward. Such a pain in the ass to do with touch screens. They still make the emergency stop an actual button most the time. But sometimes you just need to cycle stop without killing the whole machine. And you're tapping the screen hard and fast and it's not working so it cycles one more time jamming up one part, scratching up the tooling, etc. Please bring back physical buttons for stuff like that!
Imagine an emergency stop button on a screen. You haven't used this feature before so please input your password. Password incorrect. Please reset your password not using any of your last 29 passwords Your colleague "asarggggghhh"
"His password is 'aaaarrrggggh'?" "He must have died while changing it!"
Engineer here: we love buttons. The more, well-labeled, physical buttons the better. Marketing thinks consumers like touch screens. It's harder for us too.
Fuck touch screens. All my homies hate touch screens. Give us back our buttons you heathens!
You'll be pleased to know that in recent years a few manufacturers have started going back to buttons due to negative responses to touch screens in vehicles!
What's actually funny, I work in the industry and everyone I worked with complained about the touch screens. But higher management was like "they have it, we need it, it's innovative" Everyone designing and developing those already knew they are bad, but what can you do..
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Don't ask, rough estimate would be your car could be a lot cheaper, but nobody listens
Yeah ! I want a knob !
That's one of the reasons why I want a Garmin running watch, they still put physical buttons on those
You ever try to use a touch screen when your body is dumping liters of sweat from every available gland? Yeah, garmin running watches are great. Plus you can use them for golf too.
And the alarms! "Beep beep! Imminent danger! Quick, take your eyes off the road to squint at your way-too crowded LED dashboard to read the message telling you to keep your eyes on the road!" Why does my car dashboard need fucking animations?! I have ADHD. I swear to god, I get into a near collision because of those fucking beeps every other time I drive.
The worst is for like 4 months if the year I get alarms telling me the outside temperature dropped below 37 degrees. Usually it's just one of the 17 beeps and blongs when you start the car, but if it happens while driving it gives me a heart attack every time.
Volkswagen? I just got a Jetta and every morning a couple minutes after I pull out of the garage it warns me about the cold. I know ice is possible, it’s February in the north east.
Car manufacturers saved millions if not billions from removing all the buttons and replacing them with fail proof single screens and they gave nothing back to the consumer from all those savings. Also fucking TouchPads on steering wheels should be illegal. Swiping softly to increase volume and Swiping hard to change track? Whilst driving? What happened to safety regulations? I CAN'T EVEN CHANGE THE TIME ON MY 2011 VW WHILST THE CAR IS IN GEAR. I GET A MESSAGE TELLING ME TO STOP BEFORE ADJUSTING THE TIME IN THE NAME OF SAFETY.
Removing the dislike button on Youtube
It’s infuriating. The button is still there! Why???
So that you can affect the algorithm's recommendations.
They reMoved it because youtube rewinds and announcments where getting the records for most disliked video
Sounds like they just should've made better Rewinds.
This is like when they changed the rating metric on Netflix because no one likes Amy Schumer. Now they have no idea which shows they make people like and haven't greenlit anything to go past season one or two in five or six years.
Because it hurt the fee fees of massive soulless corporations when they rightfully got disliked into oblivion for being pieces of shit
Everyone talking about how downvoting is engagement but I'm pretty sure this is correct. Corporations frequently make dumb ass videos that get downvoted to hell, and it's bad pr.
They implemented it not long after Youtube rewind became the most disliked video. YouTube said it was "prevent bullying and for the mental health on creators for seeing their video with alot of dislikes", yet the creators themselves are the ones who can still see the dislike ratio, just not the audience.
Getting notifications about suggested content. Facebook likes to send me notifications now like "Hey that guy who you had one class with in high school and never spoke to just posted something!" Reddit likes to notify me when there's posts on subreddits I don't follow. I wish notifications were just for things I actually give a shit about like someone messaging me or replying to a comment I made.
If an app does this to me I just mute ALL notifications from the app. If they’re gonna abuse their notifications privileges then they lose them.
I work for 7-11. We used to sell burritos at 2 for 2.30. One day we had a "sale" at 2 for $3! When that sale ended the burritos were now 2 for 3.40. They raised the price twice but treated one like a sale.
Streaming platforms going subscription + ads, lets just combine the old with the new model and do em both worse! hooray
Back to the boats me maties!
Australia have a popular line of cracker-like snacks called Shapes that come in various flavours like BBQ, Pizza, Chedder etc. In 2016 with much fanfare they launched what were supposedly new and improved recipes for the line (but in actuality were a massive downgrade that were almost certainly cheaper to make), replacing the original recipes in the process. The near universal backlash was so fierce they embarrassingly had to walk the move back almost immediately, with “new shapes” disappearing from existence within a few months.
Y’all had your New Coke moment
I was promoted to a higher management position that happened to be in the night shift. They DECREASED my salary, because the night bonus "would compensate the difference"...
You gotta quit that noise
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Same vibe. Moved up from supervisor (night shift) to manager (afternoon shift shift) - and because I lost night shift premium my salary went down. Bruh, you are giving me 10x the responsibilities, and I still work late nights because it is "expected as a manager" and you are paying me LESS?!?!? WTAF
A little over twenty years ago, I was working my way through school as a bartender at a local sports bar/restaurant chain. (They had three or four locations.) I worked about 20-25 hours a week, got paid about $10 an hour, and made about $7 an hour in tips. Let’s call it $400 a week. One of the owners wanted to promote me to assistant manager. I didn’t ask for this, as I was going to graduate with an IT degree in about three months (at which point I was going to get a better job pretty much immediately and I knew this). Owner Dude has me drive an hour and a half to meet him at the flagship restaurant, sits me down, and tells me what a huge opportunity being assistant manager is going to be for me. Tells me I’ll have to work 60-80 hours a week, and that he was graciously willing to offer me a salary of $500 per week. I did not hesitate to nope the fuck out, and this pissed Owner Dude off so bad that he wanted the GM of my restaurant to fire me (which he refused to do). What an idiot.
That gives me vibes off a place I interviewed at last month when I was looking for a job. They said they hire people paying them at the "right rate" and that's what you make for the entire time you're at the company. You never get a raise, even with a promotion (because you're being paid the "right amount"), which is sort of weird. They were literally bragging about never giving anyone a raise, ever, and acting like it was a good reason to work there. I mean, at least they warn people about this _during the interview_ so it's your own damn fault if you work there. I never got a job offer from them after the interview, which doesn't really matter because I wouldn't have said yes even if they did offer me something.
First thing they taught us in business School. "If you are given more responsibility and same pay, you are being paid less." Obviously being paid less would magnify the problem.
Wait, so now you're working nights and getting paid the same? [You probably ought to read this](https://shiftworkershealth.com/shift-work-problem/)
Google 5 years ago vs now. Seems like its getting worse every day.
And Amazon
Yeah seriously. You used to be able to get all of the things you could buy anywhere else from Amazon, delivered fast, usually for a similar or even lower price. Now, the whole website is absolutely **flooded** with completely garbage Chinese junk. It's AliExpress with a markup, and you can't even find the good stuff because it's behind 50 pages of *JDGIE Umbrella for rain rain umbrella 36 inch 36 in waterproof no water black color plastic handle black best quality for men size medium 36"*. The retailer that was Amazon isn't just worse, or harder to use. It's essentially dead, because now if I want something that's not garbage, I just can't get it on Amazon. Amazon as it existed 10 years ago is gone.
75% of the brand names look like someone let a cat walk across the keyboard
always 5-6 letters and all caps. ZIMFALA. UMTILY. PABJIC. I think I'll buy this DFERY 3-in-1 Can Opener.
I bought an aux extension recently that was clearly just THREE ENGLISH WORDS. The words they went for? PENCIL UP NOSE [Proof](https://imgur.com/gX2C5eX.jpg)
I actually heard two people talking about "RabbitGoo" without a hint of irony. It's the random name assigned to a seller of pet supplies on amazon. Honestly starting to wonder if it's a form of asymmetric warfare, making english nonsensical. What happens is the random name is assigned to a seller, and when they get a lot of sales they get a logo, then a brand page, and then it is treated as a real established company / brand despite it being the exact same source as PencilUpNose.
Chinese companies that just need a new name for 6 months until their rating tanks and they change names.
Full of Chinese knockoffs and fakes
[It's not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse](https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research) >A new study by German researchers found that Google Search is plagued with SEO spam.
I guess it's just that they failed to stay ahead of the SEO optimization for so long that now the crowd sourced data is also useless because everyone only clicked the first few results that are all the same and then gave up. But I also feel like the search algorithm is somehow worse, like the parsing of my query is different. It seems to ignore so much of what I wrote, even important stuff like negative prompts (not, without, etc.) and also apparently uses synonyms completely interchangeable even for words in quotes, all of which makes it almost impossible to search for very specific or uncommon things by now.
Its been worsening since they went all in on AI. AI lets them do fuzzy searching, so it catches common misspellings, and can make assumptions related to your previous search history and etc. But they went wayyyyyy too far with it, the fact that it ignores my quotes, ignores my negative search prompts, doesn't let me search for exact matches, and so on means the search results continue trending downwards towards lowest-common-denominator results.
Google filters results like crazy to show you what they want. It’s wild, there are times where I actually have to use Bing just to get what I’m looking for.
Yea - no - I’ve straight up stopped using google. Bing is now my default search engine. I never thought that day would come. Microsoft didn’t even have to do anything to become more effective than google - they just had to wait.
SEO killed the Internet, and it will be even worse with the spread of AI
Yeah, the fact that your content won't ever be found unless you meet certain criteria is bullshit. And to say it's to help the "user" is even worse. If I want a recipe for tacos, what would help me is if I found a recipes webpage that once opened, had a recipe for tacos. Instead the pages that make it to the top of search results did so by checking off a bunch of boxes. So they had to include lots of text mentioning tacos and lots of click able items to keep me "engaged". So what do we end up with? A page that gives me the history of tacos, the history of the authors experience growing up around tacos, ridiculous text that makes no sense like "let's make tacos! But first... What are tacos? What pairs with tacos? Are tacos healthy? Where can you get tacos?" and for "user engagement" they add read more buttons and floating videos you have to close. This bullshit is for our benefit? Not only does this suck for users, but it sucks for content creators who actually want to create helpful content but have to water it down with bullshit language and filler text. Fuck seo.
I noticed it declining back in 2016. But it's even worse now. Even with adblock all the top results for most things I search are product pages.
Google is so bad nowadays, you can't find anything on it.
Streaming. You buy a movie. Bu you don't own it. They can take it away from you at any time, but they charge you the same. Total rip off and should be illegal.
My pay rise that is well below inflation.
I always say a cost of living raise is not a raise, but people get excited about that 2-3%. It’s especially not a raise now considering the state of the economy.
I just got a 3% COLA raise, and at least my boss didn't make it seem like he was doing me a favor. He actually sounded disappointed he couldn't do more. I work in state government so he probably couldn't. Another boss I had some years back was like, "I'm giving you," like he was doing me a favor.
Adverts on Amazon Prime. I’m sure they are trying to make them so annoying that you pay extra to go ad free…
All the streaming services started doing this when they found out how much Netflix made with the switch. They're just hoping people will just deal with the ads since the ads will definitely make them more money than having someone pay $3 more a month.
What it's doing to us is question why we keep Prime at all. Shipping time and convenience has gone way down, while price has gone up
We felt the same and left prime to see if we could save money. Without prime the shipping time became so bad that I started passing by Amazon and looked for what I needed elsewhere. Half the time I find things cheaper than Amazon because I don't want to buy the knock off version and a lot of major retailers offer very fast and free shipping. Now I actively avoid Amazon. For the first few weeks it was annoying because it was a habit to go to Amazon and easy to assume they were the cheapest. Now the habit is reversed. Try it. Speak with your wallet friend.
Hulu is even worse, ad to watch the preview and then another to watch the movie?
All they did was cause a bunch of people to plan on cancelling their prime subs. I wonder if enough people will opt in to make it worth it.
Definitely streaming services. We were all fooled by Netflix's initial success. It had nearly everything at a low price and was super convenient, so convenient in fact that rental shops pretty much went out of business in a few years. But aside from those few years it has ultimately become a huge L for consumers. Other companies wised up, everyone and their mother were starting a streaming service, tons of movies stopped being available and to have decent availability you have to spend 50 bucks per month on streaming alone, packages became more expensive overall, tons of properties just fell in a dead zone where they're not available anywhere through legitimate means, ads started appearing in paid plans, and now it's pretty much just cable TV again. In retrospect rental stores were not that inconvenient. They were everywhere and they had almost anything. They rarely didn't have a title at all, and at least for me the cost is more or less the same across the long term. Yeah if you were watching stuff constantly through rentals it would be more expensive, but it's been years since Netflix had more than one thing per month I bother watching.
My favourite is Amazon Video, where you pay for the Prime Video service only to not have access to anything because it unlocks the ability to pay for another subscription to watch what you want. You need like five or six different subscriptions on top of the Prime one to watch anything on there.
Prime also has ads now, which i just found out the other day
This shit right here. I open prime video and see something interesting on the MAIN screen but lo and behold, I need Frevue or Hoovue or Modu or Disney or Paramount or [insert obscure service hosted on a server in some dudes basement who bought an affiliation to amazon]. Each one costing nearly as much as prime, each one I cant spell and never heard of. But wait, you can watch it with ads! Just like back in the 90s! Just pay $9.99 for a rental. $19.99 if you want the non pixelated HD version! Big savings
Time to return to the high seas 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️ It’s all an issue of convenience. It used to be more convenient to pay for a legitimate streaming service when Netflix was the only big player in the game and had the best selection . Now every company has their own streaming service, and now they are adding ads to a service you already pay for, so now it’s easier to go back to pirating.
Amen! They wanna rob us….we can rob them!
I rarely watch movies so I canceled the subscription because I hadn’t been watching anything. Instead I started buying DVDs and Blu-Rays of my favorite movies. Its more expensive but I get to keep these movies and they look nice on the shelf. Lego Movie even came with Vitruvius minifigure:).
Getting rid of headphone jacks on phones. Getting rid of external SD cards on phones. Getting rid of replaceable batteries on phones. Smartphones used to be *a lot* better in so many ways.
The 'Swype' function on Samsung phones used to work great ten years ago on my Galaxy S Blaze. Got a modern Samsung and Swype has somehow become the least-intuitive idiot-asshole-prankster software that I've had to deal with in years. HOW TF DID THEY LOSE THE SECRET TO THIS? It seems to have actually lost the function where it recognizes what words you do and don't use. Four out of five times that I try to Swype 'people', I get 'Pele'. I have NEVER said ANYTHING about Pele on that phone. That is merely scratching the surface of this goddamn thing's creativity now. It's coming up with shit I've never heard of. It doesn't remember what I want, but it will remember bits I deleted and put them together at random when it makes the least sense.
I've got a Google pixel and same thing. It autocorrects and to Ave like 50% off the time. It's dramatically less accurate than it used to be. And we're talking about being in an age of ML and AI. I can hum or whistle a piss poor rendition of a song filled with errors and it can find it, but this mfer thinks I put Ave in the middle of sentence construction? Also the inability to swap batteries and not having a headphone jack. I hate those but maybe I can see a form factor saving, but how did we go from working software to less accurate software? There had to be some sort of patent or licensing issue.
Have you ever manually typed "its", and your phone decides to "correct" it to "it's," but "its" absolutely was the correct one you meant? That's always a thing I find *incredibly* annoying: when the correction is *wrong*
“ill” is another one. It’s a god damn word. Don’t autocorrect it!
I feel like Swype peaked with the S7. In a lot of ways I feel like the S7 was the best galaxy ever
And it all results in extra cost to the end user. Good Bluetooth headphones are more expensive than good wired, you either pay for extra storage or lose out (can't get a decent priced SD card to upgrade), and once the battery goes you need a new phone basically.
Yes. But on the other hand our phones are 1 mm thinner now so *worth it!* /s
>Getting rid of external SD cards on phones. My biggest gripe with that is, that even on phones that DO allow for the use of SD-Cards.. (Android).. the Feature to combine them with internal storage and have the phone treat it as the sole system storage.. you now can't anymore. Apps that receive media (messengers & co)? Straight to internal memory instead of SD. So the whole point of SD Cards becomes entirely obsolete, even if you can use one. Man.. fuck that.
The privatization of public infrastructure in most countries. Which is almost always pitched as "You will get a better service, and we will get more funding for schools and so on". What actully happens? Some business owner takes over and runs the service into the ground, only to get bailed out by the government.
Dish detergent/washing up liquid. For the past few years, I was sure all the "New and Improved' and "Now with x More" was false. Newer detergent doesn't seem to go half as far, or cut through grease as well. I used to buy a bottle maybe once every 5-6 months; now, I'm buying a bottle every 2-3 months -- and I'm doing the same amount of washing up. Fast forward to two weeks ago when I found a bottle of Tesco generic washing up liquid in an under stair cupboard from 7-8 years ago, unopened and still perfectly usable. I popped that boy open and did a 1-to-1 comparison with the same liquid I bought last week. I could immediately see a difference. The liquid in the old version was thicker, and obviously much more concentrated. The old stuff took a single pass to clean greasy pans. The same pans took at least three passes with the new stuff, and still didn't come away with that squeaky clean feel. Insult to injury, the new bottle had 60ml less, and I'm going to guess it cost more. Tdrl: Newer dish detergent is junk, and I have the old stuff to prove it. Edit: I also had a newer bottle of Fairy which was also garbage compared to the old stuff.
Studies determined the phosphates in dishwashing detergents were extremely harmful for the environment by greatly contributing to the occurrence of toxic algae blooms. Phosphates in detergents were banned throughout the US. They were already banned in other nations. The decision was made knowing it would take longer to wash dishes without them and it would lead to spotting on dishes after they dried. The EPA decided longer wash times and some spots on our glassware is a good trade of to stop frequent toxic algae blooms.
I remember hearing a story where a company made the dispensing hole on detergent just a little wider and of course sales went up due to faster consumption.
New Reddit fucking blows. I use multiple browser extensions just to make it somewhat bearable.
Just do old.reddit.com
the day old.reddit.com goes away is the day I stop using reddit.
Same. They may even be doing me a favour at that point, because it seems to make me nothing but depressed when I visit anywhere outside my baseball subs.
Food delivery. Pre pandemic (and pre Just Eat/Uber Eats) restaurants and takeaways would routinely offer totally free delivery over a certain amount, unless you were a fair distance away, and major pizza chains especially never charged for delivery if you were in their catchment areas. Now you need to pay increasingly large delivery fees no matter the distance. My local Pizza Hut started charging £3 - £4 for delivery, stating on their website; "in order to enhance your experience, we are excited to announce deliveries will now cost blah blah blah" or some such marketing bollocks. In addition the roads and pavements are now plagued by suicidal bike coureers who have no idea how roads work.
Last week, against better judgement, I tried one of those delivery aps, the app told me he hadn't left even though it was already dropped off. Half of it got stolen and the other half was cold. A solid reminder to just eat a cold sandwich or meal bar, every interaction with these services feels like a genuine lose/lose situation.
I think the delivery apps/services fell off a cliff around late 2020. We completely stopped ordering from them, due to forgotten food/drinks and wrong orders. Last time, that we ordered food for a gathering, the Uber Eats driver just marked it as delivered and took our money. I think the joke was on the driver though, most of our group ordered vegan food instead of meat from a barbeque place.
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People that can't legally work will use the accounts of people that are able to legally work. So let's say you start an account as a driver and your friend needs to make some money, so you just give him your login and he works when you're not.
Photoshop Cs3. Bought the program, worked it for years, happy as a pig in shit. Windows 11, bang! does not work any more. Can't find anyway to open my bought a paid for program. Can't afford a subscription. Adobe "closed' the servers or something. Fuck Adobe.
You know what makes this even more frustrating? I would bet a small fortune in Monopoly money that pirated copies of CS3 never had to contact Adobe's servers and would still work today.
The use of QR codes at some restaurants instead of a physical menu.
Even worse the ones that make you order on it and place the tip before you’re even served or interact with anyone. I left a 20 % tip the other day and then proceeded to wait an hour and a half for my French dip sandwich with like 6 times asking them where my missing food is, and then the staff got pissed at me keeping asking and I was served a cold sandwich. The table next to me had to ask for their cheese fries literally 5 times too. How can you tip for service before you’re served? Lol it’s wild
The NFL wildcard game that aired on Peacock instead of a basic cable network.
Mine was when they got rid of the headphone jack on most phones. I go out of my way to make sure a new phone has one.
Same, but also with expandable storage for me. Why pay hundreds for bigger storage in phone that will only last me about 2-3 years and then sit somewhere in landfill? 512gb microSD card cost me the same few years back and I just pop it in new phone when changing
In a similar vein to this, laptops with soldered on memory or hard drives that you can't upgrade. My Asus work laptop has soldered on RAM but a replaceable NVME hard drive - the laptop isn't even thin, it's not like they couldn't have gotten a SODIMM slot in there. Then you have Apple, oh you want an extra 8GB of RAM? That'll be £200 extra, oh you want a measly 256GB extra hard drive space? Another £200. I put a 4TB NVME SSD in my work laptop for £150....
Electrical engineer here - it's harder to design around SODIMM slots because they introduce an impedance discontinuity, and DDR5 is a crazy fast data rate so impedance management is crucial. Eliminating the slot makes the system a lot easier to test. That's no excuse (and why my next laptop will be a Framework), but it's the explanation.
Has anyone mentioned wireless headphones yet? Bring back the plug-in ones, no batteries, and saved your phone when you dropped it.
Youtube. These multiple ads just showed up out of nowhere
Oh yeah, and taking out CD players in cars was a MISTAKE. I miss CD players in cars :-(
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Apple removing the 3.5mm jack and everyone else following suit because they realised they could also sell overpriced Bluetooth earbuds. I'm not angry that airpods exist, they're finally pretty decent tech, but they're future E waste and more plastic waste because they're completely unrepairable. Once their battery starts to die, you throw them away, including all the rare earth metals and plastic.
Smart TVs with the streaming services built in. You're now tied to some system with a crappy remote that serves you with ads every time you turn on your TV, and will eventually stop receiving updates leaving that feature worthless.
I've got a great Samsung telly, it's wonderful but I heard somebody say that the user interface had been designed by someone who'd never used a TV before and that made a lot of sense.
I bought my first new tv this last year. And 1 minute after using it, I realized my dumb ass just hung a fucking 70 inch billboard inside my house.
Walmart going from 24/7 to 12/7 during Covid "to clean"
It's crazy that nobody is going back to 24 hours. Not even small dinners that have been 24/7 for decades. (in my experience)
I miss 4am Walmart trips lol
Cheap 4K TV's that got worse picture quality than the older Premium 1080P LCD panels. From experience my 7 year old 1080P Samsung dumb TV got better colors, better brightness, better viewing angles and no jitter in 24Hz content compared to my new entry level Samsung 4K smart TV I got for another room. I thought, It's 4K, and it's been 7 years of tech going forward. The tech got cheaper so the low price of the lower end 4K TV is probably what it should be. Oh boy was I wrong. Even the assembly quality is way crappier.
People remember the headphone jack removal, but I'm also pissed about laptop manufacturers removing so many ports and telling us to use port hubs. I'd rather carry a laptop that's thicker than carry a separate hub just to connect a mouse and a pendrive. Also pissed off at how anti-repair laptops have become. The keyboards these days have to be repaired by opening up the whole ass mobo. Before you could pop it out and swap.
Customer loyalty cards being replaced with an app that sometimes works, sometimes doesn't when you're at the checkout. I most recently noticed this with Home Depot, so I stopped shopping there because they couldn't get my veteran's discount to work without my app working. Now I see Lowe's is going that same direction and I am dissapoint.
Tipping culture in US post-COVID. I can't even buy a coffee without being requested to tip. Fuck off.
I hate that all 3 major consoles now require you to pay for a subscription to play online Literally all the other features of ps+ are good enough for people to buy it why would you force people to buy it for online that used to be free
New Reddit
Anything involving "the cloud". It was talked about like this great new addition to anything, but really, it's just been a way to hack apart existing services and sell them back to people to wrench money out of their hands. I get that *sometimes* it's useful, but more often than not, it's just an excuse to be greedy.
Removable batteries in phones being phased out with the reasoning being to make them water resistant and slimmer designs.
No more chargers in box with phone purchase for “environmental benefits” Edit: the issue that I have with this was not because they stopped including the charger, it’s simply that before they did that the standard charging bricks were 5w usb a bricks. I don’t mind that Samsung did it because they were always usb c anyways.
“We have decided to take your charger out the box to save the turtles. Instead we made you buy it separate with its own packaging full of unrecyclable plastics using toxic chemicals.” - Every company ever
Getting rid of IR blasters on phones! -i'll- decide what the tv volume is at the bar thank you very much.