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One thing that really gets me in this vein is when hardware I already own gets worse due to forced updates. For example, I own a PS4 (bought it when they came out). And at the beginning, the "video" section of the UI was great. Just a simple list of all video streaming apps you had installed, pick one and go.
At some point, they overhauled the UI to make it advertising-centric. Now, when you go to the video section of the UI, most of the screen is dedicated to ads "helpfully" telling you about some new show you can go watch. You have to go past those to get to a little strip of icons for "featured" apps, so you can just go into whatever app and watch your content. This strip is also a form of advertising, in that it forces the big name apps (whether you even have them installed or not) to be in the list, prioritized over any apps that haven't gotten Sony's favor (probably haven't paid them enough money). It doesn't matter if you don't have Apple TV installed and never used it, it will always be towards the beginning of that list. And because the screen has space permanently taken up by the "featured" apps, it means that some smaller apps you use simply may not have the space to appear. The old style "just show me all the apps I have" listing is still there, but you have to dig through one or two screens of UI to get to it.
To me, it is completely outrageous that Sony would do this. It should arguably be illegal. As a consumer, I try to make informed decisions and only buy products that have a good experience for me, the user. But what am I supposed to do when corporations can ruin a product I bought after the fact? I don't have a way to determine if some mega corp will decide to screw over its users for profits years down the line. This sort of thing robs me of the one power I had in the marketplace, and it really upsets me.
I have a lot of disagreements with Richard Stallman. I think he's an ideological zealot who is too insistent on purity to an ideal that doesn't actually benefit 99% of users, and I think he has an overinflated sense of the importance of his contributions to open source. Nevertheless, when some shit goes down like what Sony pulled with my PS4, I can't help but sigh and go "fuck... Stallman was right."
+1 to this. I had a similar experience with the PS3 when an "update" added anti-piracy software that made my perfectly-working cloud library impossible to use. It didn't disable playback, it just muted the sound and put up a banner every few minutes if it did not detect the CD in the drive. Absolutely enraging.
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I remember having a similar reaction when microsoft started slathering ads all over the xbox home screen.
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