What service do you dislike using but keep using anyway? | Hacker News Reader

What service do you dislike using but keep using anyway?

16 pointsctack42 comments

Why do you dislike it and why do you keep using it and not an alternative? What would make you switch to a new service or alternative in a heartbeat?

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Facebook because of its hypocrisy and censorship but all the contacts are there and some even insist on it. I hate Facebook so much. The rose colored glasses or gtfo policy.

I also hate Steam for this reason where you can't voice your opinion or you'll get banned. I've reached a 1 year ban now just for speaking my mind. Valve and its double standards or rather anti consumer mods have absolute power and Valve won't do anything about it, even if the mod banned someone by mistake.

And finally my bank. They decided to up the price from 3€/month to 8€ in 18 months. Without any additional benefits to me. That and since PSD2 I can't check my account anymore via FinTS 3.0 api without providing a OTP for each single action.

And now really finally the state mafia and their corrupt regime, esp the EU that sits on top of it stealing our money and creating insider laws and regulations.

Oh yeah Google Adsense... don't get me started

I agree w Facebook issue.

Never voiced an opinion in Steam. Not sure why I would unless I hated a game I bought.

Bank ... oh how I hate them! I use credit unions. This might help you find a credit union in your country: https://www.woccu.org/our_network/membership

As for the EU issue, is that why the UK left?

Who does not hate Google Adsense?

Re your bank, take a look at Bunq.

Paypal i think. Why I dislike? My biggest issue is that PayPal is enough like a bank that they have your money in an account, but not enough like a bank that they have to play by banking rules. They can arbitrarily freeze your funds and you have little recourse but to wait until they decide what they want to do.

Why not switch? I still can't decide.

JIRA. A Jira ticket is way too overloaded. It’s a story, an epic, a support ticket, a bug, an engineering design, a unit of estimation and work allocation, a source code commit tracking number and much more.

This overloading is painful.

Competing with JIRA is hard though as companies have it and it’s embedded and it is good enough.

Something more engineering centric would make me switch but maybe not my boss or the team would be convinced to do a migration with other more pressing concerns.

A more elegant tool that drives JIRA in the background as a kind of no sql DB might be a way forward.

This is why I switched to Infinity, it’s much more organized with old folders structure and it’s never messy.

YouTube.

Dislike because: ads.

Keep using it because: there are tons of videos.

Why not an alternative/why I don't pay: YouTube is not that relevant in my life.

If they remove the free tier, I would just stop watching YouTube videos.

In the meantime, if you want to stop giving some brain time to advertisers, uBlock Origin on desktop and NewPipe on Android will make sure you never see any ads on youtube.

If you use ublock origin the ads are amazingly gone tho

Amazon:

Dislike because of fake reviews and products. I stopped using them and mainly rely on its book reviews as 2nd source for recommendations + validation.

Solution might be to regulate and punish the abusers, not profit from them- a more trustworthy brand, not an abusive 3rd party online retailer could do the trick.

Google search. The combination results Of a search including videos and sites is unsurpassed for guides and diy. As long as Google owns YouTube no other search engine will get closer.

I used to read the frontpage and popular constantly. Now I feel like I'm fully off it and only use it to consult with niche groups that don't have dedicated forums.

Reddit went from a fine slashdot/digg remake to no better than facebook. I know reddit has always been a groupthink upvote downvote machine, but it's never been as bad as it is now. What would've gotten you a controversial back in 2013 is now just met with instant downvotes because it's slightly pro right wing.

+1. It's actually very disturbing to me just how much of an echo chamber it has become.

Not only are slightly conservative ideas met with vitriol -- even the most ass-backwards, ridiculous ideas are showered in praise if they tow the liberal ideological line.

I suspect what we're seeing is a huge dumbing down of the platform by people who don't use it to think or be challenged. They want their garbage memes. What's upvoted is quite indicative, along with the fact that any attempt by moderators to curate content is met with outrage.

We have HN to combat this- it is somehow anti-Reddit in its guidelines.

What I worry is how the pandemic and awareness of misinformation could move people from that toxic demographic to here- but I trust in HN moderators and community to regulate this :)

HN is an echo chamber too... it's inevitable in any community, online or not.

Agreed, nothing is perfect and all humans are biased. But at least the community is educated and diversified enough to avoid common blind spots.

This is precisely why I'm here. I hope HN always keeps it's simple format. It keeps a lot of the people who want a image based non-information heavy aggregator out. I come here to learn about cool or new techie things or discuss certain career topics in IT. I don't come here because I want to see the memeeconomy or some stupid "fake-news" article that is full of political garbage meant to make people upset.

I haven't observed this yet. At least in the comment sections I've participated in so far, there has been a healthy amount of disagreement. And it nearly always stays civil.

I've noticed with NYT being on here constantly and me or others being downvoted for disagreeing with the NYT.

Yes the memes. I forgot to state that as well. What used to be like 25% memes on the frontpage now is like 90% memes. It's a crappy 9gag now.

Same here, lately I go there just to look at watches and motorcycles.

eBay --can't stand their website usability-wise, the way they totally ignore user feedback and their usurious fee structure. Unfortunately it's about the only site for selling your unwanted stuff that gets any kind of decent traffic.

PayPal --for similar reasons

Google. Privacy. Search results are the best.

Why don't you use StartPage instead? It searches using Google, but it's private

Gave it a try, even with no tracking the ads at the top of the page are still annoying. And this comes with a results speed decrease.

I've never noticed ads on StartPage. But then I use an adblocker.

Not currently a service but it’s begging me to let it be: Airmail (mac). It pops up an ad for its new version with a subscription payment model and dims every window except the foreground window several times a day*. It’s annoying but I haven’t found a way to make it stop and just let me keep using the old version I already paid for. I imagine it’s how people felt with similar shenanigans when Adobe went subscription.

Maybe it calls home so just blocking a domain with /etc/hosts is enough

Thought about that but just writing the comment finally motivated me to just give another client a try. So I’m trying out Spark, which seems decent enough. The only thing I think I’ll miss is the ability to compose email with Markdown in-app, but I don’t use it very often and if I want it I can use a zillion other MD renderers.

AirBNB (and I give them so much money) - just awful web/mobile experience, unreliable review system, poor support, but in many places it's the only option for medium-term (2-4 months) accommodation browsing and booking online. I actively look for and prefer alternatives whenever available.

I completely stopped using it for short term bookings solely due to how buggy and tedious the UX is.

iphone

dislike because of: Any sort of synching to my PC is made as difficult as possible, i imagine so that I will feel the need to break down and buy a mac.

I would switch to android if imessage was cross platform. have seriously considered using mac stadium to use message forwarding in order to keep the damn blue bubbles.

What feature(s) of iMessage are so valuable to prevent you from switching?

Hacker News. It's a huge time sink but keeps drawing me in.

Verizon Fios. Their customer service is terrible, my Internet is frequently out, some channels are pixelated. Monopoly in my area.

Fios had the most service outages than the other five ISPs I have used. However, their customer service has always been very good and getting a hold of a human customer representative is very easy. Currently I have Comcast and their customer service is horrendous.

starting strength app is really bad but i keep on using it because i already have all my lifts recorded there, and i think it's easier to use than a spreadsheet and don't really want to check if all other lifts recording apps are just as bad

What do you think is really bad about it? I’m curious because I’ve regularly used it and it does exactly what I’ve needed without any friction.

it's really buggy. off the top of my head:

-logs me out randomly every few months for no good reason

-the button for sending my data to my email didn't ever work

-sometimes i wouldn't be able to close the keyboard and keep using the app no matter which part of the screen i tried to touch, i had to close it and open it

-recently it forgot which plates i have and it's showing me something like 25 + 20 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 1.25 + 1.25 + 1.25 + 1.25 (=60) for a 60+60+20 lift, when it previously would show 25+20+15

-it once showed me a unparseable json error. probably the server was down or something. it would have been really cryptic for a non-programmer

i thought it was terrible for everyone. are you on android? i'm using iOS

American medicine. Brick-and-mortar shopping. US highway system. US tax system.

FAAG (No N because I like Netflix)

quip very slow electron app

Society. Mostly because the alternative would be something like being a hermit in the forest.

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