My opinions
Internet: internet is BLOATED! I don't know exactly when webmasters decided it was a good idea to shove a fuckload of heavy JS scripts that screw up privacy and usability in EVERY webpage, but it seems to be the norm now. Most of the time there's simply no reason for that, specially when the page's main goal is to deliver articles, tutorials and other kinds of simple textual content.
Internet also became more bland, boring, and centered around commodification of personal data. It used to be a symbol of a new horizon, a tool that would finally free people from mental shackles, a place of knowledge and creativity, but as time passed it became clear that human social problems are too tough and pervasive to be solved by a mere tool.
Bloat: everything seems to be BLOATED! Every piece of goddamn modern technology we use seems to be bloated with unnecessary complexity and unwise use of resources.
Complexity is inevitable, but companies seems to be trying really hard to make things unnecessarily complex, less durable, less fixable, more resource intensive and more cumbersome.
Commodification of personal data: the worst monstrosity that has been vomited by corporations in the history of internet. It's bad for privacy, for civil rights, for human progress and for all of us.
Dark patterns: just another bullshit vomited by corporations as well. A neologism coined by the UX designer Harry Brignull, dark patterns (also called "deceptive design pattern" according to wikipedia) is a user interface created to trick users into doing things like buying overpriced products, sharing more information than they intend to, installing unwanted third-party software along with the main program etc.
Social media: the concept of social media by itself is not the issue, the main problems are:
Social media websites were reduced to behaviour induction machines. They collect your personal data, learn about you, customize content based on your taste and use it to slowly shape the way you think. They use your own data against you. Just read about the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
- It's designed to make you addicted to their platform and waste a lot of time that could be used in more fun, produtive or fulfilling activities.
It's being managed by greedy amoral pieces of shit who ironically promote the erosion of social relations with business policies and algorithms that reinforce and reward anti-social behaviour.
The arbitrary community guidelines and the obsession with family-friendly bullshit destroyed originality and creative power. Social media is not user-oriented, it's data-collection-oriented.
Injects constant doses of anxiety and fear in users.
Encourages doomscrolling and narcissism.
Bich tech social media is not designed to help people connect to each other in any meaningful way, they are designed to colonize your behaviour, reward political lunacy and ruin your mental health in the name of profit.
Leverage a small honest business using the aid of social media may not be an option either unless you're willing to abuse clickbaits and work like crazy to please their stupid algorithms. You'll be their hostages, and all the work you put into it can turn into dust if they decide to shutdown your channel.
It was such a sad experience to see many digital creators abandoning their websites and migrating to social media platforms that cut their balls and creative power. A faustian deal
Windows: became an unusable piece of garbage after the deprecation of windows 7. It wasn't extraordinary but was sane enough to use. Windows nowadays is just a spyware to mine personal data.
Except for security updates, Microsoft hasn't added anything really important to Windows since version 7, they just put a new interface on top of the old version with a bunch of crapware that consumes a lot of computing resources and turns the processor into an electric oven.
Some people say that if a digital product or service costs you no money then YOU are the product. Guess what, you have to pay for legal copies of Windows and still was transformed into a product by Microsoft. They put a digital leash on you and YOU PAID FOR IT.
We can safely assume that Windows now is exploitative trash, it turns your computer into a data mining machine for Microsoft, reducing their computer costs by making you "share" some of your PC's valuable parts and power to perform their tasks of interest while also getting your valuable private data to increase their profits.
Build businesses and reliable services using Microsoft products became an insanely bad choice, not only in the server side but in the client side as well.
Microsoft: one of the largest turd polishment tech companies in the world. The harder they try, the stinkier it gets. Microsoft have some kind of technological "reverse Midas touch" that turn good tech products into pieces of turd. Microsoft power lies solely in vendor lock-in, not in quality. Unfortunately lots of people still depend on their crapware to work and run their business software. Avoid it like the plague.
Google: "Don't be evil"...who the hell wants evil things nearby anyway? Any reasonable person wants goodness around, right? RIGHT?! Well, it seems that google realized that the "don't be evil" code of conduct wasn't good for business like their shareholders expected, so they throwed it away and did massive ammounts of corporate turd polishment using algorithms, marketing, and UX design.
Google haven't innovated for a while, and they adopted the same strategy as Microsoft: acquire and destroy projects to sideline the competion. They killed so many of it's own projects that someone made a virtual cemetery to keep a record of them all.
2025 update: google has lifted a ban on using AI for weapons development and surveillance. How can they square that with "don't be evil" and "democracy values" is beyond me. "Don't be evil" is trully dead now. Who would have guessed?
Youtube: the decline of youtube quality wasn't that surprising given the googlish mentality behind it.
Chaotic algorithms that make good channels lose viewers and subscribers, arbitrary community guidelines that encourages the creation of bland content, ads that lasts more than 2 fucking minutes...and now, to complete the icing on the googlish fecal cake, they're trying to fight adblocks with everything they got.
Android:
- Riddled with spyware and junkware. Googled Android is basically a Orwellian device that became more important than it should be because of apps that now are mandatory to access important services.
- Good luck finding and/or organizing non-image files in a system that lacks a folder-metaphor.
- Apps are programmed with...fucking java. A memory-hunger language being used to program a fucking mobile device. Now add that to the fact that app developers in general doesn't seems to care at all about software optimization. Some apps (specially pre-installed ones) and system tools are so bad coded that it makes the smartphones slow and unusable after a certain ammount of updates.
Nintendo: talented but overly litigious company that adamantly defend even the breadcrumbs that fall from their table. They don't provide viable means to play old NES/SNES games but sue websites for distributing game ROMs that otherwise would be pretty much dead, that's so ridiculous that I don't even define it as greed, just plain pettiness.
Blizzard: this company was a symbol of inovation and good quality electronic entertainment with games like Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft and WoW. It pains me to see the state of their stuff now. "Do you guys not have phones?" REALLY?!?!
Steam: I don't hate Steam, but I failed at every atempt of getting used to it, which leaves me out of the main walled garden of gaming. I'm in the wilderness of electronic entertainment I guess.