Look around you and ask yourself: is this the type of futuristic life that you thought you’d have? For some of us, that answer is a definite ‘no’ because it strays too far from the idealized things we’ve seen in our favorite sci-fi movies and shows. In real life, there’s too much friction, bad design, and annoyance compared to technological awesomeness. In short, some tech corporations are less than friendly toward their valued customers in their pursuit of profit and never-ending growth.
User u/cutypatotie sparked an interesting discussion on r/AskReddit after asking everyone to share their opinions about the biggest tech scams that have been widely accepted. We’ve collected the most interesting insights to share with you, from how God-awful subscriptions can be to the scourge that is planned obsolescence.
#1
Non-replaceable batteries.
Image credits: whittlingcanbefatal
#2
“We have changed our terms of service. Click here to accept and continue using our services.”IamShellingFord:
Forced arbitration and changing the terms of service after the product has been bought
when i bought my device, i had an understanding of what i was buying. it makes my skin crawl knowing that companies can change that after i paid for something and i can't hold them accountable for that.
it's like i bought a pizza with some toppings.
after i buy it with the terms being i can eat the toppings as well, they take away the toppings from the rest of the pizza as soon as I've had a couple of slices.
feels absolutely disgusting to me.
Image credits: sunnyspiders
#3
Trapping customers with subscriptions.
Image credits: YJeezy
In an ideal world, most companies wouldn’t just go for the biggest profit and maximum growth. They’d also prioritize the user experience, ethical business practices, and providing the best quality products and services that they can realistically create (not just get away with).
However, we do not live in an ideal world. While profit-seeking isn’t good or bad in and of itself (it’s how businesses survive and thrive), it can lead to some serious problems if it’s always placed ahead of the customers’ wants and needs.
#4
Physical banks fees on everything digitally executed.You want to move your money : transaction fees
You want to keep your money : account management fees
You want to withdraw your money : fees again
Seriously, everything works on its own with technology, no human intervention 99% of the time. Banks already make money from loan interests while giving us back s****y return interest to borrow our money to go make millions of profits.
Having to pay for basics and automated operations is a ripp off.
Image credits: alebrann
#5
Hippity hoppity your data is now my property… or something along those lines.
Image credits: Both-Equipment1473
#6
Printer cartridges.
Image credits: mica280amg
You build a loyal following by having a dependable, quality brand. On the flip side, if you make your customers’ lives more difficult and expensive, eventually, you’re going to push some of them away. And that’s relatively easy to do if any of your competitors offer cheaper, user-friendly alternatives.
When there’s enough competition, the customer (theoretically) comes out on top. There is a caveat, however. If certain user-unfriendly but profitable practices (e.g., showing advertisements even when someone’s a subscriber) become widespread trends, then it might be very difficult to do anything different from your competitors.
#7
Subscription with ads. Ads was only widely accepted because “we had to maintain our work somehow”. Ads ruined the internet.Then subscription came along, fine a paid version to get rid of those pesky adverts.
But hey ho, let’s get more money from both sides.
Also, premium content.
All content use the same platform.
They are forced to do extra work to separate content in the delivery and choose which content is premium.
It’s a scam on top of their subscription scam.
Image credits: ImTalkingGibberish
#8
Planned obsolescence. Companies need that profit margin, and they will use very underhanded methods to make sure your appliances/electronics will get replaced by their new models when they come out.
Image credits: Zorothegallade
#9
Intentionally downgrading older models of just about anything so you’re forced to upgrade.
Image credits: mango_coke
From our personal perspective, some of the worst things that the modern internet has introduced include weird subscriptions to newsletters we never signed up for, spam and scam emails, and YouTube’s recent policy of bombarding us with ads. To be perfectly frank with you, it’s exhausting, and it makes you want to step away from the screen (which, ironically, can be a good thing for everyone’s physical and mental health).
But from a more objective point of view, something that hurts users and the environment is planned obsolescence. When you think about how short various tech products’ lifespans are, it really boggles your mind. Sure, you don’t have to upgrade your smartphone every two or three years, but there is a noticeable drop in battery life and a rise in lag the longer you use the device. Having to charge our phones every day is not the bright and brilliant future we imagined!
#10
Having to buy the same game multiple times to play it on a different platform.
Image credits: meruta
#11
Paying for storage on iPhones.
Image credits: MelissaGulbin
#12
Accepting cookies.Just to continue on a site they’ll say accept or reject cookies. It’s easier for everyone to just accept. However, we’re selling our data to a host of companies who package it sell it to advertisers
Image credits: feric89
What are your biggest frustrations with tech products and services, dear Pandas? What tech business practices would you change if you had the power to do so? What companies do you think are more user-friendly than their competitors? Tell us what you think in the comments.
#13
Extended warranties for electronics, which are rarely worth the cost given the low chance of a malfunction that would fall under the warranty terms, and often overlap with the manufacturer’s warranty.
Image credits: Aggressive_Gas3275
#14
Having to subscribe to your car. Yes that's right, you're buying a brand new car for 75grand. and they make you pay for extras on a monthly basis instead of just having a base model and a premium model, it's just 1 model and you pay for the extra s**t.AND PEOPLE JUST ACCEPT THIS!! They think that coz they're saving money on fuel they're okay with spending it on the subscription!
Image credits: HaroerHaktak
#15
A new iPhone being released every year and Apple convincing people it has a ton of improvements.
Image credits: sam020586
#16
I can't believe I don't see this in here, but the fact that most tech companies use their end users as testers is wild. Tons of the time you get something released that like, half works, and the end users or customers are used to find and fix bugs. It's everywhere man.
Image credits: ssv-serenity
#17
Data caps, literally not a technical reason for it. Throttling may make sense if they get overloaded but caps are literally just money grabs.
Image credits: t00sl0w
#18
Various smart phone apps that reward users with little perks like McD’s deals, or fuel apps saving you 18¢ per gallon, etc but are really tracking your location, spending habits, hobbies, general details about you.Built in cameras and mics on smart phones, ring and alexa that are covertly recording you.
Image credits: canned_spaghetti85
#19
Crypto. Magic internet money with a community of people all just trying to get other people stuck holding the bag.
Image credits: Currywurst_Is_Life
#20
You don't actually own anything, you just own a license to view/listen/play it... and it can be revoked/edited at any time without consequence.
Image credits: SqueezyCheez85
#21
Unsubscribe button not being honored. Tactics include:1. It takes 15 days to unsubscribe but 1 min to subscribe.
2. Sometimes link does not exists at all.
3. Sometimes it takes you to a non existent page.
4. Sometimes it asks you to login but you never had an account.
5. Sometimes they will randomly send emails even after unsubscribing , especially around holiday season. Like out of the blue they will email, I think they got a new incompetent marketing guy.
6. Them not realizing that they product they sell is not something I buy or need on a regular basis. Eg: indochino , how frequently do you think I buy a new suit.
7. The whole marketing email is an image and not an html. Clicking on it just opens the image or takes you to home page (mostly sites from India )
8. Somehow referencing the canspam act and sending it to their privacy email stops all the emails suddenly. But the. Point 5 happens.
Image credits: kindrudekid
#22
“Free” services like Google and Meta, they say it’s free but it’s not, you’re paying with your privacy.It’s like if they put free-to-use toilets in an airport but they put those toilets right in the middle of the floor in the waiting areas with no stalls or walls, you just gotta sit there and take your s**t with everyone watching.
#23
Selling our data. It’s even so bad that our phones that use GPS track where we are and send our driving habits and check-ins to companies. Facebook sells our data as well. Who we’re friends with, height, weight, medical info we post, etc.Everything about us is sold. The only way to avoid that is to basically NEVER be online. For anything. VPNs are a joke and don’t do s**t. If they did what they advertise, we would have a lot more tech crime.
Remember: If you do not pay for it, you are the product. Not the customer.
#24
Ads after subscription.#25
Selling AI "art" programs as alternatives to hiring creative professionals. And now there are these bs posts I see from people taking **commissions** to type words into a text to image generator for you. Come on, seriously, can this whole AI art thing collapse so that we can turn these bots toward calculating taxes or some s**t?#26
People preaching learning programming is the golden ticket to a lucrative career.While it's true that programming skills can open doors in various industries. These people are heavily promoting their coding courses and bootcamps. The reality is that the market is oversaturated.#27
"I accept your 1000 page privacy policy and terms of service"#28
Cable TV packages that include hundreds of channels most people never watch but have to pay for. It forces consumers to overspend on content they don't want just to get access to a few channels they do.#29
Convenient fees when paying with credit cards. Like what, want me to send a physical check that you have to go cash then?
Image credits: d0nutd0n
#30
AI = Certainly artificial but lacking a great deal of intelligence.munificent:
Training generative AI on copyrighted material laboriously produced by artists and then using the result to put those same artists out of work.
Image credits: Hefty-Station1704
#31
Ticket surcharges, Uber flex fees, etc.Basically everything that has enabled greedy people to further reach into your pocket.
Image credits: Suck_Me_Dry666
#32
Everything needs an app. Especially physical devices. I don't want your cheap buggy app to use my thermostat, scale, battery, lock, or light bulb. Ship one if you want, but devices should conform to standards-based, documented protocols so I can control them however I want. I also don't want to install an app just to do something that works just fine on a website. Also requiring Internet connectivity is cr*ppy design. I don't want basic functionality depending on your servers being up (and requiring accounts and giving you unknown data). My whatever should not stop working because you decided to stop spending money on the servers. This is bad with software but egregious with hardware and unacceptable with household devices (my water heater should never depend on outside servers). I've been in tech a long time. While greed and control and access to sellable data drives lots of things, there is also an attitude surviving from the 90s and 00s that the lifespan of anything is a few years. This attitude infects product design even in fields where lifespans are decades and replacement costs are high as we add compute to everything (which can be a great thing). USB was successful not because it had one (ish) plug, but because it standardized the protocols devices used. All mice speak one protocol, so anything that knows it (hci class) can handle any mouse. Zwave and ZigBee tried to do this for household stuff, but instead we got vendor proprietary, Internet connected, phone-home, WiFi devices. Rant done.
Image credits: darthsata
#33
Trapping customers in eco systems. Having non upgradeable hardware. Only have a limited time with security updates. All focused on optimising long term profits.
Image credits: DonutsOnTheWall
#34
Commercial VPNs.Sure, there are valid uses for these like circumventing geoblocking but the majority of use cases they advertise (privacy, encryption, security) are utter b******t.
You’re basically trading your ISP (that is bound by data protection laws in most countries) for some shady company located on the Cayman Islands.
Your VPN provider can monitor your entire traffic and is in a perfect position to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on you, especially if you use the providers software.
It’s basically like being on public wifi all the time, just that you’re paying to do so.
Image credits: leoklaus
#35
Pretty much the whole AAA video games industry:- Releasing bugged games
- Making games with DLC in mind or cutting content to sell it to you
- Endless sequels, no more risks, creativity or originality
- Microtransactions, gambling and subscriptions
- Online single player games
- You don‘t own games anymore and can‘t sell them
- Quality of hardware (especially controllers) has gone done significantly
I don‘t know if it‘s accepted but people really have no other choice but to take it.
Image credits: Iwasateenagecirclrjk
#36
The way expansions packs work with games now, or at least a lot I play. It seems like it used to be that an expansion meant essentially almost a new game with lots of unique material, but now I feel lucky if any singe one is noticeable at all. Not to mention day one releases.#37
Automatic non refundable renewals ->>>My kiddo bought an annual sub from “awesome tuts” and it auto renewed for $144. The guy would not give me a refund even though I contacted him within 24 hrs of renewal. Had to go back and forth a dozen times, and then write a letter to the CC vendor to get a refund.
#38
Replacing physical controls and digital displays with in built tablets in cars. I can no longer safely operate the climate control, media player or any of my other car systems without having to physically stare at a massive f*****g touchscreen with s****y touch response and laggy ui that gets worse with every patch.#39
I work in a very niche area of tech and the biggest scam is people who work in tech but are not tech people.I'm specifically talking about people who show up as "CEO" or "Founder" on LinkedIn and try to sell me some AI-driven, Zero Trust, Buzzword Salad product.
The field is so full of them that the non-technical decision makers are having trouble sussing them out, so they put a non-technical or faux-technical CIO or CTO in charge and he hires more non-technical people because he himself is too untechnical to sus them out. Before long your IT, cybersecurity, and information systems management departments are loaded with people who have no technical expertise.
**Example:** My company buys smaller companies and in one case we bought a small $20mil operation. Their IT department was one very technical systems admin and then about 20 people who were really good at Excel. They had the entire corporate network run by daisy-chaining routers together all operating with no VLANs or traffic segregation or security; There was no firewall, just plugging in a router to the modem; They didn't bother with any Wi-Fi security, just people connecting to the network, so guests, personal cell phones, whatever were all directly tied into the corporate network. I explained that this was a problem to my management (who doesn't know tech but trusts me to know it) and to the new subsidiary. Their CTO was **furious** at me for telling him how to do his job and fully believed he was still in charge of their tech. He had a "CIO" who worked for him and she spent roughly $20k a month on "services" that she bought from vendors to support their network. Most of the stuff she bought didn't even make sense in the context of their organization. Stuff like spending tens of thousands on a cloud product and Terraform to deploy their IaC when they had three VMs on AWS. She spent every day being wined and dined by vendors and then threw them breadcrumbs to keep visiting her and filling her schedule.
#40
MS Windows.It's an operating system. Get out of my way, stay out of my way, and know your place. Stop being a greedy attention whore with your ads and endless updates and beta testing in the marketplace BECAUSE WE CAN, and your obsession with, "I am too worthy of attention from you every damn month! And hey, you need to give me a new computer every few years because I'm high maintenance."
And why the hell do I need a third-party driver update app? Because you don't update the drivers with your updates. Never have, never will.
Most of us wouldn't tolerate that sort of self-centered behavior in a human. Why do we put up with it from Microsoft?
I remember the old joke that if Windows were a car, you'd have to frequently shut off the engine, run around the car twice, then start the engine again to keep it running. That joke is at least 30 years old, and it still applies.
#41
Here’s a new product! (Uber! DoorDash! Amazon!) It’s so cheap and easy!One year later: Sorry! We had to raise prices! Sorry, you have to pay for a membership now! Sorry, we had to make the app really confusing so you’re not really sure what you’re buying! Sorry, you have to wade through 1 million ads to find what you’re looking for!
Sorry, not sorry!
#42
No SD card slot in cell phones. This straight pisses me off. I don't want your b******t cloud storage or whatever. I want my own storage in my own hands, k thanks.#43
Apple/Google taking a 30% cut of the entire mobile software market for doing little more than hosting files.#44
Digital media in general. Yeah, I get why people would go in on it, convenience and the like, but for all the money we spend on it, we don't own a goddamned thing. Companies can go tits up, breakups, mergers, licenses can expire, digital storefronts are shuttered, etc. At any point the game/movie/song/TV show/whatever, that you PAID FOR, can be rendered unusable and unobtainable with zero notice and fewer ways to get it back.It's been especially big in video game circles with various digital storefronts being shut down (the Nintendo 3DS and Wii-U stores *just* got the axe), announced to be shut down (the Xbox 360 store is set to go bye-bye this year), or held up only by way of extreme backlash (people raised unholy hell when Sony announced they were going to kill the PS3 store)... and there will be NO way get those games back unless you set sail for the Buccaneer Bay.
As the saying goes, if buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.
#45
Subscription Traps: Makes signing up easy but canceling difficult, often hiding the cancellation process.#46
Selling phones without chargers. Deprecating features to cross sell counter products.
Image credits: milkymist00
#47
Calling something “Full Self Driving” and releasing it years before it’s ready all while it blows through stop signs and violates speed limits without care.#48
Apple. The entire company. The entire product range. The whole thing is a scam from top to bottom. Paying double what the stuff is worth for a subpar operating system and the privilege of being locked into their ecosystem and their predatory app store. Their anti-competitive business practices are disgraceful and I hope the SEC/DOJ burns them to the ground. What they did to the USB-C ports on the new iPhone is a new and special level of s****y. Seriously people, stop buying Apple's overpriced and poorly made garbage.#49
Cloud computing.Progressed something like this:
0) Buy a server, put it in your room. Have a website
1. Rent a server, put it in your room. Have a website.
2. Rent a server that is part of a server farm. Have a website.
3. Buy a cloud contract. Your cloud service rents a server that is part of a server farm. Have a website.
While servers are getting less expensive as storage and processors get better and cooling and energy systems get more efficient. Somehow the cloud needs more and more fees to provide the same server. All the while you get less and less freedom to configure your server how you want.
There are some small benefits like guaranteed support, but the price does not warrant it.
Edit: After getting a lot of comments I realized I did not use the right terminology and grouped other things together. I guess what I meant is that for many customers who were using a service which sold them remote servers and other access "moving to the cloud" meant making themselves reliant on a contract with a decoupling of the price of the contract from the actual price of the physical hardware that hosts the services.
Like you used to drive a taxi, but now you are picked up and dropped of blindfolded and earmuffed. Sure, you still know you are at your destination and how long it took, you can still feel the seats, you can smell the air, but you have no idea if you are driving a car, a bus or something else. There is no real issue with it; until the price goes up.
#50
Tenuous link but BMW's subscription service.The options are already in the car but you have to pay a monthly fee to unlock them.
#51
McAfee - who in the hell actually needs it?#52
Needing wifi to play single player videogames. Yeah like 5 people are complaining about it but ain't no one doing any meaning protests to stop it.Unfinished products being sold for full price, everyone hates it but guess we all consume. Like I can guartee you that Rockstar will rush the f**k out GTA 6 and it will be leaked with everyone saying "It's bad" "Literally impossible to play" and yet everyone's gonna buy it.
Image credits: firefly139
#53
Spam emails and calls/texts being free for scammers to take advantage of.#54
Text message charges by mobile carriers, especially when considering the negligible cost of transmitting SMS data compared to the fees charged.#55
Kubernetes.I'm sure that it's a godsend if you have a massive farm of thousands of servers. But for 99% of companies it's a kludge of a system, with cryptic configuration files that allocate bizarre arbitrary identification numbers to components of the system, and those identification numbers are not even consistent from one configuration file to another.
Services start and crash for no clear reason, and the people who cheerlead for it... it's like a sect, try to say "I do not think that a solution designed by and for Google's massive server farms is going to be optimal for a company with just 6 servers" and you'll get shouted down.
