This question was inspired by my hatred of Temporal Anti-Aliasing which, in many games nowadays, is poorly used as a performance bandaid. On lower resolutions it will smudge and blur the image and certain bad cases of TAA will cause visible ghosting.
Yet in spite of all this, certain games won’t let you turn it off or have hair/fur/foliage look like dogshit without it so sometimes I still use it.
Single use plastics 🤮
Human interaction.
My vote goes to Google, to whom I am tightly married. It’s ecosystem and interconnectivity between apps as well as devices is unbeatable. It’s super reliant.
It’s the one entity that can wreck my online and offline presence. I mean, I use android and Google to login everywhere. If Mr. Google so decrees, my phone could wipe and google account be gone tomorrow. Same applies to Apple and Microsoft, but I don’t use their systems as much. The poison I picked is Google and I hate it.
I feel like I don’t use that many Google services (mostly because I’m not convinced they won’t shut down), but the ones I do use are the ones that would really suck to lose access to. I realized this a few months ago and have at least been working on moving my email away from Gmail to my own domain since that is the critical one that could screw everything up.
I moved to protonmail years ago for this reason, but then my friend gave me a free paid YouTube account so I created a new Gmail account and found a new love for heavy metal. Since then the algorithm has learnt my tastes so well I would be devastated to lose my account, but I made a pact with myself that if my friend ever decided to ditch her account that I wouldn’t pay for my own. So I’m totally at the mercy of her whims, and she doesn’t even know!
Sent from my pixel 6
In the last months I tried to cut as many Google services as I could. I use the Proton suite now, it’s nice.
Unfortunately I still heavily rely on them for Android phone and TVs… Not to mention YouTube, which is yet to have a good competitor.
I doubt we’ll ever see competition to Youtube. It has reached the point where they will basically have to be antitrusted like AT&T to see a competitor.
I don’t even know if YouTube will be around in 30 years, let alone not have competitors.
All gigantic businesses think they’re too big and entrenched and used every day to fail, until they do. Just look at Yahoo! as one example from recent memory.
So, we’ll see, I suppose!
In the end I am just a dummy on the internet speculating. For all I know climate change will be coming down from the top rope and take Google with it.
I mean…you’re probably right. But there’s a little part of me that thinks…they said the same thing about Facebook, that it wouldn’t last five years, that it would go the way of MySpace and something else would jump in, but… it’s been just a few months shy of 20 years now, and even though it’s not the juggernaut it used to be, it’s entrenched in a way I never expected.
And then there’s, like, GE, which is 130 years old…or Cigna, Remington, Citi, or Chase, which are older. Some others, like AT&T, do a little dance and come back…I dunno. Some companies just have staying power (in the case of Cigna, I think it might be a pact with some unholy abomination). And they’re all still dominating or at least leading their respective markets.
Even your example, Yahoo, while certainly not the cultural force it once was, is still around in a slightly different incarnation. Nothing ever really dies, it seems.
YouTube. I wish they made better decisions about how to run the platform,.
It being free is only barely enough incentive to use it. If they ever have effective anti-adblock and force users to watch five ads before every video, I’m gone. I will never give any money to a monopolistic company if I don’t have to.
They are making great decisions for their customers and stakeholders.
You might be interested in trying out the grayjay app
Capitalism
A car running on fossil fuel.
Well fossil fuel in general…
Google.
Reddit - I don’t post there any more, but sometimes I still end up there looking for answers and information.
BUT most of all:
LinkedIn - This platform is built to benefit companies, employers and managers, not the masses of people scrambling to use it to get noticed and build their careers. There are so many things that bug me about LinkedIn, but ONE is definitely that I have no real options NOT to use it (without suffering terrible economic penalties if I you know, don’t want to give them my data). I get resentful and anxious every time I look at it.
If you work in IT, LinkedIn is just another spam source.
I deleted my account the first time they were hacked. So much fluff and fake networking. Any employer that relies on that shit is a place I don’t want to be.
WhatsApp
Absolutely, it’s essentially required in Europe… but also, fuck Facebook.
I think WhatsApp is still fantastic. Just a matter of time till Facebook incorporates it fully in. That is what worries me.
I won’t deny it is working very well. It is the Facebook part for me too
Surprisingly hard for people to accept, if you don’t have it.
I really wish I could get out of using WhatsApp, but it’s all everyone ever uses.
And there just isn’t any good enough argument you can use to convince the average user from doing otherwise. Unless it literally makes the phone explode in your hands, people will not change.
Cars
Google, this fucking phone, the cesspool of fezbuk, the shittified streaming services I can’t manage to unsubscribe from…
money
Browsers. Firefox hasnt given me reason to doubt. Yet. And I find that odd. Still uses it. Because every other big browser have given me reasons.
Generally “free” stuff from big companies is giving me more and more the heebie-jeebies. Even if they have good reputation. But there’s NO WAY I could ever pay for everything I use. Nor donate to every deserving person who has given their free time to create and publish FOSS.
Mozilla really pushes Pocket through Firefox. I’ve gone through the about:config to get rid of it. Pocket gives me doubts.
They also push their VPN a lot. Every week or two I open Firefox and they send me to their VPN page on their website telling me to try it.
Like no. I’m not interested in paying for a rebranded mullvad.
I can understand your frustration, but they need to generate revenue somehow, and presently I think it’s the VPN, donations, and Google default search money.
At least the VPN aligns with their core values.
I was a huge fan of Read It Later, which became Pocket.
I absolutely fucking refuse to use what it has turned into.
Should look into the ladybug browser firefox while the only “decent” browser isn’t great nether and ladybug looks really promising
iPhone. I travel a lot and I had my bags lost three times. Well no more thanks to AirTags.
We don’t know where your bag is, come back tomorrow and try . I understand you overworked and underpaid but my bag right behind that wall. Oh look it was.
This is only thing reason why I keep using it. I am not going to be hater . For some people it is a great phone but gods on high the limits all over the place.
Here is app drawer. Great can I change Categories? Nope have fun if an app is wrong category. At least I can change what icon gets big? Nope.
The keyboard? Where is the bloody , or ? Button? On android I can have button that lets me pick any of those. But not here I have to go into an under keyboard. But you can have auto prediction on! Not once have it given me a question mark during this whole rant.
The spellcheck. This is probably me being dumb but god, how do I correct? It doesn’t seem to work if I click the word it doesn’t work if I use spacebar to guide it to end of a word. Only seems to work if I somehow managed to click at the end of the word.
The first party cable missing the basic thing pretty much every 3 party cable using to prevent the cable from breaking but no need to 3d print option for it.
The lockdown. Now this maybe obsidian but I will blame Apple. I love lockdown and I probably should not use it yada yada. But why can’t I just a bloody list of all apps and white lists what I want? No instead I have do a big song and dance with sync on obsidian for over 3 hour’s then just one day it works and shows up.
I’ve used ios quite a bit and have many, many complaints. But you just reminded me of one. My work has two ipads for us to use in the field. One is the biggest sized model, the other is a mini. The password has an exclamation point. For one iPad, the exclamation point is in the first page of symbols. The other is two pages back. Like what the fuck
Google is rolling out their own find device network soon™ with third party trackers that are rechargeable. They’re pushing it through play services too so every android phone in the world will be in the network too, so it’s a much more global network if you are traveling off the beaten path.
Google Workspace. I have several clients who insist on using it for unknown reasons. It creates unprofessional looking work products. And in some cases, it is just plain kludgy (slicers randomly shoot themselves over the Sheet, page numbers randomly renumber when the footer is updated, etc). The part that gets me the most is that it is similar in price to other productivity suites, but often our clients opt to buy Zoom and Slack on top of that - basically doubling the price.
I’m forced to use Google Workspace and I absolutely hate it. The document suite is so horrible when trying to do anything that isn’t a basic document or spreadsheet. Gmail sucks for long email threads and anything with attachments and the search is useless. Google Chat is a barebones piece of shit compared to Slack.
Luckily I’ve been able to get Microsoft Office for the things that require it, including Outlook using the GWSMO tool.
Illustrator. It’s industry standard for graphic design, but has the stability of a toddler on ice
I’ve built plugins for Illustrator and other adobe projects and their internal API is trash.
This is the company that re-deployed their entire history of support forums accumulated over decades, into a new forum software, without realizing they were breaking twenty years’ worth of links.
Those forum posts, which took the place of their nonexistent documentation, were the community’s collective work product and the company just said “fuck it” and broke every link and bookmark anyone ever had to any obscure topic about adobe tech.
Fucking… Wow. I personally never had any luck on their shite forums, but that’s terrible.
I wish Astute Graphics would just make their own vector design program, their plugins are what make illustrator tolerable
