I get what you’re saying but the forgetful customer is explicitly what they said they want, which is dumb any way you look at it. Many times you’re forced into signing up for subscription, or coerced under the guise of a free trial. Now this wouldn’t be as bad if they came back and were like, “hey we see you haven’t used our service in a while, do you still need it?” rather than just leeching money from the user. The system is designed to purposely allow the user to make these errors and that’s wrong any way you want to shape it.

“If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”

I heard this before and it is becoming more true each day.

I worked at Amazon and the head of Ring said their best customers were people who bought a subscription and then put the camera in a drawer and forgot about it. They don’t even want to provide you a service. They want you to absentmindedly give them money every month because you forgot to cancel.

You should. The next time you want to use it, it’ll probably do some bullshit. Better to be rid of it now than be coerced into giving HP money in the future. If you need a printer, replace it with whatever Brother laser printer is on sale at the moment.

Fucking PHONES had more RAM. It was so fucking stupid. And despite their arguments, it was proven time and time again 8GB was not enough.

I think you’re confusing Thunderbolt with the lightning cable. Hell, even basic USB-C is faster than lightning cable.

False. I was issued that mouse at a previous workplace and it pissed me off so much I brought in my own mouse. And my experience was that when the mouse was fully dead it needed to charge a long time to be usable again.

If it just simply let you use it while it was plugged in there’d be absolutely no issue. It’s a dumb design.

It’s so fucking stupid. If you can sign up with a click, you should be able to cancel with a click. There’s no justifiable argument against that other than corporate greed.

I do remember one of my most satisfying cancelation calls though. I just kept saying, “No.” Just “no”. No added explanation. No added reasoning. It frustrated the retention employee so much. They were like “but WHY?” They couldn’t try to convince me not to quit since I didn’t give them any reasons for why I didn’t want it, just that I didn’t want it.

Oh shit… core memory unlocked. I forgot I used to do this. I forgot there was a time you would do this otherwise everything just had the same icon.

Ah you speak the truth. Fixed.

Tesla engineers managers treating it like software. “Ship it and we can patch it in production.”

I remember a while back Microsoft did an market research thing and found that of their brands, “Xbox” had positive consumer feedback while many of their other product names weren’t nearly as favorable.

So what did they do? Did they try to understand what Xbox did differently to leverage that strategy elsewhere? Did they promote the Xbox marketing team to give them a wider purview?

No. They just renamed Zune Music to Xbox Music and Games for Windows to Xbox for Windows. THAT’LL FIX IT!

Yeah, you make some good points. But I’m also wondering if it isn’t the advertising companies themselves who are perpetuating the idea that all this super aggressive advertising works to sell more advertising. After all, they tout targeted ads as some new must-have evolution but as far as I am aware targeted ads haven’t been shown to be any more effective than contextual ads. And maybe not everyone has the luxury to actively avoid purchasing products that annoy them with ads. But I definitely agree that it’s never worth the sacrifice.

I can see it working when you otherwise have NO brand recognition whatsoever, but seeing ads for, say, TikTok on YouTube every 30 seconds isn’t going to convince me to get a TikTok. I’m never going to be “gee I wonder what short form video content provider I should subscribe to” and even if that somehow miraculously DID happen, I’m going to research my decision and not just arbitrarily make a decision based on a notion I might have heard about a product one time months/years ago. Maybe if I didn’t have a computer in my pocket at all times where I could get unbiased reviews on demand that would work but definitely not in modern times. But apparently I’m in the minority.

Okay, I have to wonder… what is the point of shoving ads down user’s throats all the time? Ads make me NOT want to purchase something. If I see ads for a product it just makes me hate that product. If a product pushes ads I hate that too.

Nah, seems to be an episode of The Boys with a mute character who uses sign language. So she signs i"I hate you" in a scene and it gets subtitled. But it doesn’t use the normal CC code as it’s a special case. And the code is buggy so it’s really easy for the subtitle to not clear off the screen and since it isn’t the normal subtitle/CC system it can’t be controlled that way. Fun times!