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?
Completely agree on both points. I actually use a Samsung phone, and it’s been nothing but a privacy nightmare. I’m planning to switch as soon as I’ve saved up enough to afford it.
Yeah, Amazon is a mess. I personally avoid anything even tangentially related to them. I’ve noticed that they tend to be lower quality with worse privacy than the alternatives, and their only benefit is price. Even then, Audible is a ripoff on a massive scale.
The thing is, from a customer perspective, Audible is such a great deal. It’s too good a deal, really. They desperately throw out free or cheap months to people who are trying to quit (offers to get them to stay), or who have quit quite some time ago (offers trying to convince them to return). That’s a great deal for customers.
The problem is that they’re such a massive ripoff to authors. They have some extremely anticompetitive policies that make it difficult to put your audiobooks anywhere else if you want to also be on Audible. And I think they are really harsh towards authors if a reader takes advantage of Audible’s very over-generous returns policy. (No-questions-asked return merely if you say you didn’t like a book, even if you listened to the entire thing.)
If I may ask, what are you switching to? cause in terms of privacy (without sacrificing usability and other important factors) the phone market looks like a hot pile of garbage. Well I guess FairPhones exist and they’re about as good as you can get but still runs android.
Not entirely sure yet. I do know that whatever I get, I’ll be installing Linux on it instead of android. I might try out one of those de-googled android copies, but I’m not sure.
I’ve got my eye on the rugged survival phone market though. They seem to have different priorities than everyone else, and it seems to really improve the quality of the phones. I haven’t yet found anything that exactly matches my personal requirements though, and most of them are unpopular enough that Linux support is unlikely to ever happen.
Overall, I’ll probobly have to settle for something less than optimal.
Ok so this still sacrifices usability for me