What companies will you never give another dollar to?
What happened that put them on your blacklist?
My top company that I will never give another dollar to is Adobe, as they forced me into a 1 year “contract” with a $200 cancellation fee after forgetting to cancel their one month discounted trial in time.
Other companies for myself include Dell, HP, and Canadian Tire.
Obligatory “fuck Adobe”. My proudest moment last year was cutting our company’s Acrobat licenses by 70% and taking about a million bucks out of their greedy little pockets.
Nitro Pro is great anyway. It does the job.
What are some good alternatives to each Adobe product?
Someone on here mentioned Affinity for the Photoshop/design world
Nitro & PDFxchange for the PDF side?
I switched to PDFgear for my PDF editing needs, free and open source.
Does a decent job, although I miss being able to have PDF opened in tabs instead of individual windows.
I love you. Best I could do was cancel my $20 / month. I’ll match you in about 4000 years.
Oh man it was so long ago.
I think the final straw was trying to buy tire rims. Went online and it says it was in stock and my local store, went to it and they said it was out of stock despite the website saying it was. Sent me to the next store over 20 minutes away saying they had some, went there and they told me that they didn’t have any either despite the internal system saying they did.
Wasted an hour and a bunch of gas trying to get those rims. Not a huge deal but if a company can’t tell what they have and when they have it and prefer to waste my time I don’t care to give them my business.
Plus they only stock like 3 items per store for every flyer deal, hoping you’ll buy shit just because you’re there already. Same with Walmart which is also on my blacklist.
I used to work at a company that provided tech support for a few Canadian Tires. They don’t hire nearly enough staff. They try to make up for it with high amounts of automation. Frequently people will come and steal from them because there aren’t enough staff to stop that. This causes the inventory system to think there is more stock than there is. Because the reduced staff, they don’t frequently manually check their stock so it can be quite some time before it becomes aparent.
the adobe cancellation fee is the most evil and greedy shit i’ve ever witnessed in software. they SCALE it so you pay the exact amount you would have paid if you just remained subscribed for the full year, except when you pay that money through a cancellation you immediately lose your license to run their software. they literally make you pay the remaining subscription period while taking away your access to the fucking product
Here’s one nobody has mentioned yet. Hasbro. Owner of Wizards of the Coast which recently tried to massively fuck over D&D players and sent hired mercinaries (literally Pinkertons) after one of their Magic: The Gathering players for something that totally wasn’t the player’s fault.
So, D&D first. WotC back in 2001 realized something. There are a few books that they sell a ton of copies of and make a lot of money off of. (The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, etc.) And then there are a ton more books that take a lot of effort to make but that they don’t sell many copies of so they don’t really make much money on them, but they still have to be made in order to ensure that the more profitable books sell. (These are mostly the published adentures.)
They figured that it would be in their best interest to incentivize third parties to write a lot of these published adventures so that WotC itself could focus more on the core books. So they licensed a lot of their core content under a license (The “Open Gaming License version 1.0a” or “OGL 1.0a”) that allowed third parties to use it in their own modules and sell those modules. It created a vibrant ecosystem of publishers.
The OGL 1.0a was intended as a perpetual license. They promised third party publishers that the wording of the license didn’t allow WotC themselves – creators of the OGL 1.0a – to revoke the license. (This was on an official FAQ on WotC’s site.) So you’d be able to sell your module that included verbiage and elements from official D&D materials forever.
Well, in 2022, they changed their tune. They created an “OGL 1.1” (which was not “open” the way the 1.0a was) and started pressuring publishers they partnered with to accept the new license. It basically allowed them to rip off any third party content and include it in official WotC stuff without paying the third party publisher and also ban the publisher from using the material they wrote. It also put ridiculous restrictions on virtual tabletop software (software for playing D&D remotely.) Now, that’s not so catastrophic because they couldn’t revoke the OGL 1.0a and publishers were under no obligation to accept the OGL 1.1, right?
Well, they came up with a legal argument why the language of the OGL 1.0a that they’d been telling everyone couldn’t be revoked on existing works actually was something they could revoke. Basically, if they convinced a court they could do that, every third-party D&D module that relied on the OGL 1.0a would have to accept the OGL 1.1 terms that would let WotC rip off their work or stop sales immediately.
There was massive backlash from the community. D&D players were remarkably unified in their response. And the CEO of WotC was really tone deaf and dismissive and soured WotC’s relationship with the D&D community even further. Enough subscriptions to D&D Beyond (an online service owned by WotC) that shareholders started asking tough questions at shareholder meetings.
So, finally, WotC hired a slick PR firm to smooth things out. And, honestly, I have to admit they did good. They ended up leaving the OGL 1.0a in place (unrevoked it, sorta). But also, WotC had already said “actually, we can revoke it” and nobody trusted the OGL 1.0a any more. So WotC also dual-licensing the same OGL-1.0a-licensed content also under a Creative Commons license that is (more certain to be) unrevokable and is more open than the OGL 1.0a. The upcoming version of D&D will be OGL 1.1 only, but players and third party publishers are pretty unified on the idea of refusing to migrate to the new version and the current version is safer from the evil clutches of WotC than it was before this whole fiasco went down.
Now, the consensus among the D&D players is that WotC isn’t the bad guys so much as Hasbro, WotC’s parent company. When WotC backpeddeled and did the dual licensing thing, I decided to end my boycott of Hasbro. (I was actually DM’ing a D&D campaign at the time.) I looked forward to buying more D&D books. To seeing the latest Transformers movie and the D&D movie. Stuff like that.
And then, very shortly after that all went down, there was the other fiasco started by WotC.
I’m a little less familiar with this one, but some player of Magic: The Gathering purchased packs of MTG cards from a small reseller and the reseller fucked up. The reseller, not knowing the difference, gave the customer packs of a not yet released but similarly-named line of cards that weren’t supposed to be available to customers at all yet.
The customer made an unboxing video of these not-yet-officially-released cards and stuck it on YouTube. And that’s when shit hit the fan. WotC could have DM’d the customer on YouTube and asked if the customer could take down the video and exchange the cards for the ones he’d actually purchased, but instead they sent the actual, literal Pinkertons (a private security/mercinary company known for union busting and lots of illegal quasi-military/quasi-police actions against innocent people) to go harass the customer’s neighbors and intimidate (like while sporting assault rifles and body armor and camo – on the customer’s front porch) and bully the customer.
Now, my understanding is that the customer did nothing legally wrong. The fuck up was the reseller’s. The customer was under no legal obligation to return the cards or take down the video or otherwise cooperate in any way. The customer also said in later videos about the whole situation and the visit he got from the Pinkertons that they would totally have fully cooperated if they’d have just contacted him and asked.
As soon as I heard about WotC sending the Pinkertons after a customer, I recommitted to boycotting Hasbro and I intend never to end that boycott. I really didn’t expect something far worse to follow right on the heels of the OGL 1.1 fiasco.
Man, that was a very thorough write up! I was familiar with the DND shit but not the Magic stuff. Was a sad read, but glad to know about it.
Mine is Sony. First the rootkit scandal, then the removal of Other OS from PS3s after featuring it as a selling point in the marketing. Totally deceptive and I won’t give them my money.
I stopped buying them for exactly the same reasons. They were my go-to home electronics brand before that. Tv’s, amps, stereos, cassette players, cds, dvds, presents to friends and family… always since the 80’s… ps3 came and then i stopped 100%. Haven’t bought another product from them since.
and they’re still at it
I’ve been boycotting Sony since even before their rootkit nonsense. It’s because literally every single Sony product I’ve ever owned has broken within three months of taking them out of the box. Walkmans, Discmans, a DVD player, PlayStations 1 & 2. Thankfully most of them were things I received as a gift, so I wasn’t always out of pocket, but I just don’t see any point in spending money on some garbage product that’s going to break if you stare at it too hard.
Yeah, Sony isn’t a favorite of mine either. They’ve always had this Trumpian sense of arrogance and narcissism in the video game industry that’s never failed to annoy me. It was kind of fun to watch them flail a bit with the PS3, which lost them a lot of ground against the Xbox 360 due to its mammoth price. Felt like the early 90s console wars all over again.
Reddit because of the API pricing change change
Unity because of the charge per game install thing
This list aligns pretty well with mine… It’s easier and more satisfying than you expect to boycott companies like amazon.
Are you sure? A fair chunk of the internet is run through AWS making avoiding them much harder.
