What brands do you avoid at all cost? I don’t keep up with the news all that much, and many of the reasons to avoid something don’t make it there anyway. So I’m asking here to make a big list of things to avoid. It could be anything from bad security practices to really frustrating packaging. Working as a cashier myself, I definitely know there are plenty of brands I avoid purely on the basis that their product is a pain to stock.
On the flip side, what’s the alternative? If you avoid Pepsi, for example, what do you turn to instead?
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I try to avoid all the brands that still work in russia because I don’t want to fund the terrorist state
I avoid anything from Israel, Russia or China as much as I can, also anything related to Elon Musk
I bet it’s hard to avoid Chinese products
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As greedy as you think they might have been, without them, a lot of smaller bands would have just washed up. People work really hard to make music, shouldn’t they get paid for it?
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Streaming services didn’t exist when this court case happened. Many artists were already suing Napster, but weren’t famous enough to get publicity. Someone released an unfinished edit of “I disappear” which is what triggered Metallica to get involved. Dr Dre also jumped into the suit but I’ve never heard anyone talk about boycotting his music or the music he produced.
Nestle, Microsoft, Reddit, Roku, Meta, X, Google (as much as possible). I would boycott so many of them if it was possible, but I particularly avoid those because I especially hate them.
LG, Nestlé, Coke-Cola, Amazon, TikTok, Temu, any big brand bank, ASUS, Johnson Outdoors brands (jetboil, scuba pro)
Edit:forgot Tyson foods and Hormel. Their fucking over chicken farmers.
Why ASUS? I used to have one of their routers but aside from that I don’t know much about them.
Samsung; just a lot of general very anti-consumer behaviour.
LG; a “do not sell my data” option on a TV that’s turned off as standard? No, thanks.
ASUS; has become pretty unreliable in my experience and their RMA shenanigans haven’t helped.
Apple; overpriced and anti-consumer, I wouldn’t mind getting a MacBook as a gift or something, though…
HP; cheap garbage that’s obsolete the moment you buy it and becomes e-waste after the warranty has expired. Their business line is marginally better but there are far better options out there.
Huawei; see above.
Nestlé; do I really have to explain? They’re pretty much the worst company to ever exist.
Spotify; endless price-hikes to enable the CEO to buy more soccer teams and firearm manufacturer shares, pay artists almost nothing per stream, disabled their car thing after two years, lied about Spotify Hi-Fi…
Oh you can add so much more on Apples entry. For a fun read, I suggest doing a web search for ‘Apple anti-suicide nets’. Apple and nestlé are among the top of my list for companies I morally cannot support due to human exploitation.
I’d like to know the alternatives, especially for Samsung, I still think it is the best smart phone company
This might be a bit controversial, as Google is obviously also known for their fair share of not so good stuff but I really like their Pixel line of devices. Especially for that stock android experience (doesn’t Samsung even pre-install TikTok nowadays?). Sony phones are also pretty decent from my experience.
As for laptops, the business lines of both Dell (Latitude & Precision) and Lenovo (ThinkPad) are pretty solid. Especially Dell’s support is just amazing, I deal with them regularly at work and they’ve been really great.
As for ASUS; I haven’t had to buy a mainboard in a while but I heard some good things about Gigabyte.
Tidal is a pretty good alternative to Spotify; I think they pay artists the most per stream out of all music streaming services, they offer true Hi-Fi quality for the same price Spotify charges for their base tier and they even upgraded all Hi-Fi members to Hi-Fi Plus for free recently.
Nestlé is a big enough campany that you just have to live with not buying their products I guess… Although there are pretty good alternatives for stuff like frozen pizza (Dr. Oetker is pretty good if that’s available where you live) and chocolate (Tony’s Chocolonely ftw).
I was asking only about the technology stuff actually so huge thanks, mom likes Nestlé’s milk for some reason, me not, their products are always of higher price even water.
I keep hearing good things about the pixel, but the problem is that Google doesn’t make that much phones, while Samsung has devices for every price (As, Js, Ss, …etc) and even if you’re screwed it’s not like Wiko (traume intensifies). I don’t hate TikTok specifically but yeah I hate bloatware on my devices, I used to have even Youtube and Chrome uninstalled back when I had a smart phone (J4+ was my brother’s choice for me)Budget phones aren’t really worth it when you can get a flagship from 3 years ago (with most likely better specs) for about the same price IMO. Sure, updates are a problem but if you’re willing to tinker around a bit it’s doable.
Motorola for phones. Does everything you need with a near AOSP android. Affordable too. good official support, and good community support with lineageos
Same. Samsung phones are so damn easy to flash
Google Pixels are even easier to flash, and they have full Verified Boot support even when running a custom OS
HiSense - they make appliances and they’re junk
All bottled water - no one needs them and it’s plastic that’s here forever
Temu - disposable shit
Bath and Body Works - the creators of microbeads (plastic) hand soap
Teflon - poisoned my town’s water
Chick-fil-A - evangelist food, no thanks
All bottled water - no one needs them and it’s plastic that’s here forever
Depends on where you live. It’s a bit ignorant to say “no one needs them”. Also sometimes you have no choice, like maybe in an airport.
Yes yes, exceptions.
I live in one of the worst cities regarding lead in the drinking water though, thanks to old pipes, but a waterfilter solved all this.
Ugh god… Tech brands, off the top of my head:
- Asus (Scammers)
- Lenovo (Fuck lenovobios, bad hardware quality past 2010 or so)
- Sager (Scammed me by selling a laptop with too high power draw that resulted in crashes)
- Microsoft (Mega spyware corp, bad software, worst OS on the planet)
- Apple (Likely spyware corp, Bad locked down devices, anti right to repair, overpriced)
- Google (Biggest Baddest spyware company, monopoly on many platforms)
- Nvidia (Extremely hostile to open source, will likely never work on OpenBSD unless Nvidia seriously changes their stance; even then there’s so much bad faith at this point I wouldn’t trust them)
- Meta/Facebook (Mega spyware corp, zuck is a lizard)
- Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams)
- All major phone manufacturers (Android sucks, iOS sucks harder)
- Pine64 (Charging circuit is software controlled for some insane reason, supports Manjaro)
- All major smart TVs (spyware, always-on microphones, locked down OS with ad-ridden clients)
Okay companies:
- Valve (Still hosts a shitty DRM platform, but it’s the best one; only listing because the Steam Deck is awesome)
- Framework (Pro user repair, good hardware, no complaints; look forward to RISC-V board)
Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams)
Cars less reliable than ICE, despite having a fraction of the parts. Absolutely proprietary and probably going to start enshittifying over the air at some point. Still some degree of expense-adding hype.
Pine64 is not one I expected to see dissed on Lemmy. I can’t say I’m impressed with the one I bought, though, and it has some kind of electrical issue that would be a pain to fix. It’s too bad, I love the concept of OS phone hardware.
Pine64 is definitely tenuously on the list, I simply can’t recommend a device thats status as a bomb depends on what kernel you put on it (and theo forbid an attacker manages to get access to the circuit).
Let me give you a complaint for Framework: apparently they were having a hard time releasing bios updates in a timely manner (as in, they were over a year late iirc) which pissed a lot of people off.a
Framework sounds great in theory, but it’s hard to justify nearly double the cost compared to a Lenovo T-series.
So, uh, how do you live in modern society?
Framework laptop with OpenBSD for prod, Steam Deck for gaming, Pinephone with pmOS for phone stuff (even though I put Pine64 on the bad list, if I could buy again I would have tried the Fairphone or other pmOS compatible device instead); self host everything possible (mail, git (got), gitweb (gotweb), http, ipsec vpn) on a cheap VPS running OpenBSD. It’s comfy.
Why openBSD though?
Good documentation, good in-house servers, correctness, secure defaults.
Fair enough, what’s software/hardware support like in general?
https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html
All the x86 hardware I’ve tried at least boots. Suspend/other acpi stuff can be a problem, as well as wireless card support. Intel devices are the best supported at the moment by iw*(4) drivers.
A colleague of mine bought a framework and is always complaining about it. Says he wish he’d got a thinkpad again.
must miss the clit
We call it the nipple, but I know what you mean.
Honestly… Google Play… someone re-gifted my son a $20 Google Play card a few years ago, and I tried to buy something for him and realised the card was about 2weeks out of date, and after about 10 back and forwards with support, they wouldn’t honour it… a trillion dollar company. I get it, but their cold indifference just seemed mean
I thought it was illegal basically everywhere to have gift cards go out of date? Scumbags.
They didn’t become a trillion dollar company by being nice. No mega Corp earns their billions by being an honorable company
Cemusa, they buy all the fucking cement in my country which is corrupt and has no ability to tarrif it or anything then sell it back to us at extremely high prices so my country, which is the Saudi Arabia of cement, is filled with half built buildings because no one can afford fucking cement. Fuck American corporations
For sure: fuck them, but this sounds more like a government corruption issue, laws should be in place to prevent businesses doing scummy monopolistic shit like this.
We are right next to the United States and they operate their military on the border and own all the politicians and businesses in Mexico. This is like telling an abusive wife it is her fault for not standing up for herself.
Isn’t it owned by Cemex which is a Mexican company?
All of the Cemex board members are American institutional investors. Cemex operates as a mafia here for the profit of American oligarchs. Cemusa was the old name of a parent company which was folded into Cemex, I’m old.
TikTok and Kaspersky.
Why Kaspersky?
Security software from a Russian company. It was recently banned in the US due to its national security concerns.
Oh you really haven’t heard??
Nestle.
Most fashion clothing brands.
The additional expenditure rarely maps to better quality.
And if they make watches too, don’t buy those. They are always the cheapest watches with a name stamped on.
Same here regarding fashion brands, except for Duluth Trading for clothing and Ariat and Hoka for shoes. When working out in the elements and walking on concrete all day, I find the extra expense for those brands are worth it for me.
Yeah, pretty much anything luxury. I make a point to buy knockoffs if I need the same class of product, because I know I’m paying a premium for intangible marketing bullshit otherwise.
Less than half of them are legit. You want to buy $15 pants 10 times or buy $70 pants once. Budget says $70 is a luxury. So we keep at it. It’s expensive to be poor.
No, I meant “luxury brands”. Buying something slightly better quality but not flashy doesn’t count. Nobody is impressed I’m wearing GAP instead of Walmart.
Amazon
Coca cola
Google , except android.
Nestlé
Google , except android
May GrapheneOS change that
Tesla, Red Bull, Believe Music, Microsoft, Samsung, so many more I can’t think of right now
