Asklemmy

Nobody mentioned Adobe yet. They’re absolutely the worst. They offer creative products behind a 70$ / month paywall and they hold a monopoly in their field. Only need their software sporadically? Sorry, no plan for you.

They haven’t significantly updated some of their software in like 20 years. I currently have the displeasure of using After Effects again and apart from not even supporting system dark mode on macOS or even fullscreen mode, there are all kinds of weird small bugs that you just get used to when using the software for a while.

Fuck Adobe.

Microsoft - erosion of any motivation to understand your PC so they can put whatever they want in their updates and you won't know until you dig through the logs

Facebook - erosion of any critical thinking by rewarding echo chambers and groupthink. Just look at their Metaverse shite.

Amazon - erosion of labour standards and publishing anti-union propaganda to prevent workers from realising they're being abused. Also, instituting anti-competitive measures and strongarming third party sellers.

OpenAI (insert any LLM/generative model company) - erosion of the creative process thus allowing people with zero artistic expression to plagiarise other artists' work

EA (or any AAA studio but also Nintendo) - erosion of consumer rights to own the products they buy and preventing any effort to preserve their games AND THEN complaining about piracy.

Dear lord, it is so exhausting to list these out.

Just naming a company isn't particularly useful. Some context would be great, so others can hate the company too. 🫠

Oracle. They have the midas touch of enshittification

X. I can’t think of a tech company that’s done more harm this year.

Apple. Not the most evil, for certain, but they have the highest percentage of high level business choices that piss me off. Just so antithetical to my philosophy and consumer preferences. All closed, all hyper controlled, low customization, anti-repairable.

Do it their way or go fuck yourself. Something break? Fuck you, it's your fault, buy another one. Want to play games on their very capable hardware? Grow up, no compatibility. Want to make their OS work on other machines? How dare you. Thief.

YOU’RE

palantir are pretty fucking evil, but you're unlikely to have heard of them unless you're social justice minded or have worked in tech.

Thiel is a vampire, in the metaphorical sociological sense and the literal one. Fucking creep.

Meta, they have a huge reach to a lot of ignorant people and they seem actively disdainful of user privacy.

Reddit did something pretty shitty this year and is the reason many of us are here.

Blizzard Activision if we are counting gaming companies with their sexual harassment controversies which have led to suicide (also the cosby suite), their shitty monetization schemes, and the utter ruination of most of their popular IPs

Id argue Blackrock is a finance company that uses tech rather than being a tech company. But the differences these days are pretty negligible. In my mind a tech company provides tech to end users (google fb etc). Maybe a fintech? But even then in my mind thats more like a start up “modern tech” bank rather than a classical bank.

Meta, XFormerlyKnownAsTwitter, Google are all pretty bad for society these days

Meta.

Amazon I'd advocate for the nationalization of, at least of AWS. Meta caused a genocide and just needs to go. There's nothing they can provide that another company can't. Yeah WhatsApp is entrenched in much of the world, but it doesn't have to stay that way.

Whichever contributes the most to anti-competitive corporate culture. Most problems at the end-user level can be solved by having sufficient competition (and some labor problems, too).

Unfortunately, there are plenty to choose from.

There's Microsoft's "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. Comcast's creation of artificial legal barriers to competition by lobbying state and local lawmakers. And then there's Amazon doing it by sheer hard power to put competitors under (plus all their anti-union crap).

Any company that engages in vendor lock-in, abuses copyright of creators through generative AI for profit, tracks users for profit/advertising, or censors content and people on their platform that suggest alternative platforms.

Microsoft takes all 3 points. It has created a very terrible operating system that gets preinstalled on most PCs through unfair competition, makes it harder and harder to customize it, has created GitHub Copilot that infringes copyright for GPL-licensed software and adds mandatory telemetry and Microsoft account. Additionally, Constructively criticizing Microsoft products publicly is dangerous.

EDIT: removed Medium link

All of FAANG

Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Microsoft, OpenAI are top of my list simply due to being aware of them.

though I'm sure most large tech corps have blood on their hands in some way or another, doing "well" under capitalism demands exploitation.

For me it's a tie between Oracle, Atlassian, and Microsoft.

All three of them have built their business models around intentional poor design = money for extra services. They could make their software easier and more functional, but they intentionally don't so because it would hurt their profits. That kind of greed is inexcusable to me.

Facebook is the one that took as its goal to insert itself as a middleman into all human social interaction.

Google easily, because they control so much of information inflow, the potential to do harm is much much greater

If we're limited to just tech companies, it's gotta be Amazon. Their unfair business practices and horrible work conditions make them one of the most deplorable companies on the planet

There are a lot of evil tech companies, but NSO is the worst I can think of.