This post is somewhat inspired by a recent post in this same community called “Is anyone else having trouble giving up Reddit due to content?”
I imagine “Reddit” will be a common answer. (And it’s one of my answers.)
Another of my answers is “Hasbro.” First Wizards of the Coast (a Hasbro subsidiary) tried to revoke an irrevokable license and screw over basically all 3rd-party publishers of D&D content, then they sent literal mercinaries to threaten one of their customers over an order mixup that wasn’t even the customer’s fault. D&D: Honor Among Thieves and the latest Transformers look really good, but those are within the scope of my boycott, so I won’t be seeing those any time soon.
Third, Microsoft. (Apple too, but then I’ve never bought any Apple devices in my life, so it hardly qualifies as a boycott.) Just because of their penchant for using devices I own against me in every way they can imagine. And for really predatory business practices.
One boycott that I’ve ended was a boycott of Nintendo. I was pissed that they started marketing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (though it didn’t have a name at the time) before the WiiU came out, prompting me to be an early adopter of the WiiU, and then when they actually released BotW, they dual-released it on WiiU and Switch. I slightly eased my boycott when the unpatchable Fusee Gilee vulnerability for the first batch of Switches was discovered. I wanted to get one of the ones I could hack and run homebrew on before they came out with a model that lacked the vulnerability.
I don’t buy Nestle products.
If I can help it, I try to support local businesses over Walmart, Target, Amazon, or any other near monopolistic retail chain.
Chick-fil-A, and Hobby Lobby. Owners have been vehemently antiqueer and antichoice, and have funded such organizations and politicians through their business.
Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft. Both have been accused of large scale sexual misconduct, and neither company has completely dealt with the issue.
Twitter and Reddit. It’s not just that I hate the direction both sites are heading, but I want to fully back and support the open source alternatives that have grown during the migrations of both sites. Besides, Musk has made it to where I can’t even lurk on Twitter if I wanted to.
JonTron. He’s living proof that as long as you’re funny, people will forgive and forget anything. (Look up his history with racism and antivax for those in the latter camp, cause I’m tired of answering the “what he do” question)
The Harry Potter franchise. This one hurt the most because I had just starting to get into the Harry Potter series as the pandemic hit, and I was halfway through Prisoner of Azkaban when Rowling started her campaign against trans people. I Also used respect Rowling a lot because she’s a master at world building, and I had gotten into reading Harry Potter cause I wanted to take inspiration from it for my own work.
Ruroni Kenshin, and Nobuhiro Watsuki’s other works. I can get why people would forgive JonTron and Rowling to an extent, but defending Nobuhiro’s pedophilia is a bridge way tf too far for me.
Meat, as it’s carbon footprint is just too high.
And is a major cause of deforestation, biodiversity decline, antibiotic resistance, water pollution and water overuse, … And of course animal cruelty and abuse.
Kurzgesagt has a fantastic video on the matter, and the video has great peer-reviewed sources right in the description for whoever would need them.
https://youtu.be/F1Hq8eVOMHs?si=GLo73jt6gaA433Ii
I’ve heavily reduced my meat consumption after seing this video. I basically never eat meat in the meals I make only for myself. It’s not like I never eat meat, but since getting a bit more informed, I try to respect the occasional meat instead of expecting it several times a day.
Blizzard. After the Blitzchung incident I uninstalled every one of their games and haven’t played anything Blizzard since.
Once the merger is complete with Microsoft I’ll probably start playing them again.
Good old ethical Microsoft.
I am appreciative of the irony.
Although my rationale is that Microsoft is less likely to sell out western democracy.
Except they are selling out, their ad revenue, telemetry, cloud services, development and support, all dominated by outsourcing at any cost on the race to the bottom
I won’t defend Microsoft but aside from open source software, which software company is NOT engaged in those practices?
Open source is the business model. Majority of systems and soon enough applications agnostic of platform.
Reddit - API fiasco, antagonistic, and predictable
Facebook - it’s crap
Instagram - popularity contest
WhatsApp - unnecessary
Snapchat - unnecessary
TikTok - Chinese spyware
Microsoft - bloat and privacy
Adobe - expensive and slow
Twitter/X - crap
Elon Musk news - annoying
Oil change places - rip off & untrustworthy
Tire places except for Costco - rip off
Toyota dealerships - shady and deceptive
Apple - expensive and limiting
Netflix - crap
Hulu - crap
Wendy’s - crap
KFC - crap
Bottled water - expensive and wasteful
Sodas - terrible for health
Papa Johns - treats employees like shit, crap politics, expensive
Panda Express - generic, local places are better
Pollo Tropical - generic, local places are better
Checking & savings banks - credit unions are much better for their customers
American cars - crap
BMW - for dickheads and too expensive
HOAs - waste of money, too controlling
Autism Speaks - more harmful than good
Susan G Komen - selfish litigators
Better Help - pays their clinicians shit, so you’re getting bottom of the barrel therapy
Any state that voted for Trump. Especially if they did it twice
I won’t travel to the US anymore save for New York state. We used to do great road trips through the US, but now that their anti LGBT and women politics and attack on drag queens have become so violent, I just won’t go there.
Any products that support Koch Industries. Horrible people.
Koch Industries is pretty much the main reason why I boycott the entire United States of America. They are the absolute pinnacle of evil in this world. Spectacular evil scum that company is.
Inkjet printers are pretty much a scam, and HP is particularly shameless about it. I do not buy anything from HP.
Dell sold me a lemon laptop and it took 6 months for them trying to fix it before I demanded a complete replacement, and they replaced it with a different model with fewer features. I wouldn’t buy a Dell if civilization depended on it.
I’m avoiding pretty much any large video game studio. Kinda baffles me that anyone anywhere does business with Activision/Blizzard, EA, Bethesda and the like. They treat their creative staff like shit, they treat their customers like shit. Looking down my list of games bought in the last 10 years, I’m not sure if Unknown Worlds Entertainment (developers of Subnautica) or Coffee Stain Studios (Goat Simulator; Satisfactory) are the largest studio I buy from. Valve themselves don’t count per “in the last 10 years.”
I avoid Microsoft as much as I can. They’re just straight-up bad people and have been since before I was born.
If you are unaware gaining on Linux for most games super easy these days nice and quick for handling getting windows put of your life
I have been a Linux gamer for a shade under 10 years now.
I used to boycott ATI before AMD bought them, because the driver support on Linux was so bad. I got a laptop with a GPU they didn’t support until almost a couple years later, and then as soon as it worked, they dropped support because it was too old.
Now they have the open source driver and better GPU support than Nvidia.
To be fair, ATI windows drivers were dogshit as well.
I’m boycotting everything from Nestlé, which can get difficult since that evil octopus of a company has so many goddamn tentacles!
As for boycotts I’ve ended, I used to boycott the Lotus brand of toilet paper and paper towels because they were made by a Koch Industries subsidiary but then they sold the brand off to a socially and environmentally conscious Swedish company so I started buying them again.
The gas station down on the corner. When I first moved here, I went there all the time because it was convenient. Gas, bread, soda, you name it, I would swing through there and pick it up. I stopped every single work morning and got coffee on the way to work. I started bringing my own insulated cup, so they charged me less. Then it was bought by a new owner, and he wanted to charge me more. Okay, it was still cheaper than if I used their cup and more convenient than making it at home - they provide the coffee, sweetener, creamer, and there’s no clean up on my part. One day I went in with a new cup that was the same capacity as the old cup. A different shape, but it held the same number of ounces. The owner said, “that cup’s bigger, I charge you more.” I tried to argue, but he didn’t budge, and he charged me the same amount as a large coffee in their cup. Now, I’m not stupid, I’ve worked in retail before, I know the largest cost to a cup of coffee is the cup, but I paid it, walked out the door, and never set foot in there again. That’s been eleven years ago, and I don’t plan to go back. I hope the few cents he greedily wanted over coffee was worth all the other lost sales.
This is the level of pettiness I aspire to
I love that you’ve kept it up for so long!
My mother could carry a grudge like no one I’ve ever known, so I get it honest.
Reddit obviously. Pretty much any corpo controlled social media in general though. Deleted my FB account about 5-6 years ago and never looked back. Deleted my barely used Twitter account after muskrat took over.
Blizzard. Haven’t played a Blizzard game since 2012 ish. I was deployed and would play WoW in my downtime until a major update came out and completely broke me, blizzard was no help in the multiple tickets that I submitted. Tried every fix I could find on the internet at the time. I asked them if they could send me an install disc, I’d even pay for it. Hard no from blizzard. It was clear they didn’t care about a long time player like me. That was it for them. Now over the years we have seen all of the scandals and games rampant with microtransactions. I’ll never play another one of their games unless I pirate the shit out of it.
I’m becoming increasingly intolerant to all of the tech price increases so I’ve been ramping up my self hosting capabilities. I just need time which is a hard commodity to come by for me anymore. This is really the only thing preventing me from cancelling Netflix right now because Netflix is easy for my kid to access across devices.
I have wanted to cancel Amazon for months now, but that’s a battle I’ve lost to the wife. She gets everything on there. I’ve tried the argument that we can just order stuff when we have a cart over $25 for the free shipping. I’ve mentioned about how many late shipments we’ve got over the last few months. 2 day shipping has become a straight lie at this point. We don’t watch Amazon prime video at all.
BP. For their incrediblely bad environment and safety record
Nestle for their baby formula shenanigans
Goya and at&t for their trump support
Nestle for monopolization of water reserves all over the world. Nestle for using child labor for their chocolate.
Thanks for boycotting Nestle, i’m really grateful to anyone else who does so.
BP Executive: “Sure we massively wounded the planet with our criminal negligence - but doesn’t everyone love baseball? How about we get two more strikes?”
nestle. man fuck nestle
Apple - while their products are undeniably good quality on both HW and SW sides, I hate their business practices, overpriced products (monitor stand for $1k ?!?!?!?!), and being anti right to repair.
Epic Games - partially owned by Tencent (a money hungry Chinese company), PC exclusivity deals, anti consumerism
Elon Musk - nuff said
Andrej Babiš - a Czech politician who used to be in the communist party back in the day (and denies it), a millionaire, a liar, a thief, and in general piece of shit. I will never buy any products made by companies owned by him (sure, they are not “his” per-se, because they can’t legally be, but I am sure he still profits from them through money laundering).
Tik Tok - app by the Chinese, with tracking and information gathering throughout, and an ultimate time sink. Stupid trends start there, and it does absolutely nothing for the humanity.
