Unshittification: 3 tech companies that recently made my life… better

Enshittification is not the only option.

See full article...

 

[lancemartini]

It's so strange to me that companies are becoming so terrible at providing the things you pay for, and then they absolutely hound you to leave reviews for every minor transaction you have with them. Although they seem to often ask a specific question that doesn't allow you to tell them what they really need to hear. Things like, "How was the call quality on your recent tech support phone call?" Well it was fine, but the content of the call itself was awful. Thanks for not asking. What a bizarre world we've wound up in.

 

[lopidafy]

I don't know if it was intentional, but reading this left me with a distinct feeling of "OMG, stuff is so bad that even 'unbearable shit' feels like an improvement".

For the UA example: the improvement is that a USB dongle (that you have to buy??) is still an acceptable form of DRM if you need to move your device across machines. Dongles (usually on the parallel port) used to be the worst experience in the 90s, and was typically only a thing for expensive (1000s of $) commercial software. And you definitely didn't have to buy the dongle separately.

This, in fact fits perfectly the pattern of making life easier for people who pirate than for people who don't.

 

[hillspuck]

I know I'm just part of the choir at this point, but I can't help but think of all the Native Instruments customers that just didn't have enough spoons left to be able to fight with customer service over the theft, and just wrote it off as one more hit they have to take because the world sucks now.

I can't imagine waking up and thinking these are wins.

It also just reminds me of health insurance. Yeah, they denied my claims to begin with, but they were so nice when I simply wrote out a claim dispute and copied in the documentation I got from my doctor and my physical therapists. What great customer service!

 

[Ser Simian]

A few weeks (!) later, I received a note, completely out of the blue, from Native Instruments support. They had removed Noire from my account, they said, because the seller had committed some unspecified fraud, and Native Instruments had transferred my copy of Noire back to the original purchaser.

This is the issue of treating software as a physical good that can be stolen by simple transference. It should be illegal for a scenario like this to occur, unless Noire itself provides you with a cash payment for the amount of money you spent, because it is, in effect, theft or fraud on their part, considering they oversaw and certified this secondhand sale in the first place.

My perhaps too-charitable reading of that paragraph from the article was that the seller and the original purchaser are different people, i.e. the seller sold something that wasn't his to begin with, and the company restored it to the original owner once the fraud was detected. I suppose one could argue about relative liability, but it's not immediately obvious to me that the company is any less a victim of fraud than the second-hand purchaser. The scammer scammed them both.

Say you buy a car from an individual, and the title transfer etc. goes fine. Then a few weeks later the cops show up at your door and inform you that you didn't buy a car from Joe Schmoe, you actually bought it from his crackhead brother George, who had stolen Joe's identity (id, title, etc.) while Joe was in the hospital. But it's still Joe's car and has to be returned to him. No one would expect the state to reimburse you for what you paid for the car, even though they were involved in the transfer process. In short, just because you didn't know it was stolen when you bought it doesn't mean you should get to keep it.


(edit was to fix an accidentally premature post)

 

[apoclypse]

Uh Native Instruments is the poster child for enshitification. Decent customer service does not excuse them dropping support for software works just fine, lack of updates in their expensive hardware (Maschine Plus), over priced controllers that removed key features (Komplete Kontrol), abandonment if anything that is not a sample instrument. Completely enshitifiying Massive into Massive X.

Sorry but I am not with you in this article. Native Instruments sucks and its run by venture capitalists now.

 

[Don Reba]

Evernote has been getting worse and worse for years. Finally, in 2023 it was bought out by Europeans, who immediately fired all the US staff and raised prices. This was initially worrying, but the platform has been getting unshittified ever since. Now, the bugs are finally getting fixed, the UI has become way more responsive, and both more customizable and easier to use. There is much more communication from the developers, and the development process is much more transparent.

 

[Ploroxide]

Two of the examples are invasive DRM schemes that are slightly less invasive than they could be, and the third one is a company generously agreeing to accept the customer's money. It's AMAZING how low the customer service standards are in software.

EDIT: This was the article that annoyed me enough to post. Something about the above examples being regarded as "unusually good" really drives home the state of the modern software industry.

And yet, it’s the world we live in, so celebrate the wins you have instead of only complaining about it not being so much better than it is.

 

[graylshaped]

Sure all words are made up .. but they are made up to address a need in communication. However, "cromulent" was made up not to fulfill a need in communication, but as a nonsense word that would sound like a word you would actually use. But so many people liked saying this nonsense word that only later was it accepted as a real word, with a real meaning.

Isn’t language’s ability to evolve awesome?

 

[adespoton]

Two of the examples are invasive DRM schemes that are slightly less invasive than they could be, and the third one is a company generously agreeing to accept the customer's money. It's AMAZING how low the customer service standards are in software.

EDIT: This was the article that annoyed me enough to post. Something about the above examples being regarded as "unusually good" really drives home the state of the modern software industry.

Indeed. When I saw the names Nate was referencing, I thought (in the first two examples) Augh! Run away! In my 35+ years involved in digital audio, I've learned to ignore anything that depends on DRM, no matter how well it works or how good it sounds. There's a reason sites like macos9lives.com still exist -- DAWs that just work, even 30 years after they've been set up, still able to reproduce exactly the same sounds, with the ability to take your tracks from 1995, tweak them, and produce a new version way up here in 2025 (and again in 2055).

I'd go as far as to say that this shouldn't be termed "unshittification" or "deshittification" but instead "lessshitification". The first two situations still involve a requirement for the company who produced the goods to continue to exist for you to be able to use the products they make. And the last? Nothing beats going to junior league sports games. Ticket prices are reasonable, the games are entertaining and less predictable, and you avoid every single bit of what makes March Madness... madness.

Nate, something you'll find is that there's lots of forums and groups of musicians and audio techs out there who are real people who have decided for the most part to avoid commercial audio tools with DRM. Things are at the point now where, even if you want/need specific hardware to get something done or achieve an effect, the tinkerers out there can fab up a run of boards, point you to a library to 3D-print the hard components to mount the circuitry to, and point you to a GitHub repository where the software exists that runs on it. Like Magic.

The result is something that costs a bit more up-front than the DRM'd alternatives, but it's a single-time payment to the actual people who did the work, and repair/upgrade is infinite.

THIS is the kind of stuff that is now magically possible with today's technology. And the music you can make with it is awesome, and often totally original.

 

[Mr.Yuck]

Shout out to Fractal Audio Systems who constantly improves their already awesome product

 

[Aurich]

Indeed. When I saw the names Nate was referencing, I thought (in the first two examples) Augh! Run away! In my 35+ years involved in digital audio, I've learned to ignore anything that depends on DRM, no matter how well it works or how good it sounds. There's a reason sites like macos9lives.com still exist -- DAWs that just work, even 30 years after they've been set up, still able to reproduce exactly the same sounds, with the ability to take your tracks from 1995, tweak them, and produce a new version way up here in 2025 (and again in 2055).

I'd go as far as to say that this shouldn't be termed "unshittification" or "deshittification" but instead "lessshitification". The first two situations still involve a requirement for the company who produced the goods to continue to exist for you to be able to use the products they make. And the last? Nothing beats going to junior league sports games. Ticket prices are reasonable, the games are entertaining and less predictable, and you avoid every single bit of what makes March Madness... madness.

Nate, something you'll find is that there's lots of forums and groups of musicians and audio techs out there who are real people who have decided for the most part to avoid commercial audio tools with DRM. Things are at the point now where, even if you want/need specific hardware to get something done or achieve an effect, the tinkerers out there can fab up a run of boards, point you to a library to 3D-print the hard components to mount the circuitry to, and point you to a GitHub repository where the software exists that runs on it. Like Magic.

The result is something that costs a bit more up-front than the DRM'd alternatives, but it's a single-time payment to the actual people who did the work, and repair/upgrade is infinite.

THIS is the kind of stuff that is now magically possible with today's technology. And the music you can make with it is awesome, and often totally original.

There are so many options in music, both software and hardware, that it's honestly not hard to avoid crappy companies with minimal effort. You will sometimes pay more, to be fair, but not always.

The good ones honestly make better tools for the most part too, because they stay involved with the community and that kind of feedback loops improves things.

I think Nate had his heart in the right place for this story, in that we should make more of an effort to highlight good experiences. Discovery gets more and more difficult every day. Search sucks, social platforms suck, if you're not embedded in a community it's hard to get good info.

 

[jasonml]

Unshittification?​

Oh no... hardly. This is barely unshittification. These are companies that are doing the bare minimum in order to save themselves money or a lawsuit. If this is considered good, we've already lost the plot.

 

[adespoton]

There are so many options in music, both software and hardware, that it's honestly not hard to avoid crappy companies with minimal effort. You will sometimes pay more, to be fair, but not always.

The good ones honestly make better tools for the most part too, because they stay involved with the community and that kind of feedback loops improves things.

I think Nate had his heart in the right place for this story, in that we should make more of an effort to highlight good experiences. Discovery gets more and more difficult every day. Search sucks, social platforms suck, if you're not embedded in a community it's hard to get good info.

Totally agree. And the hard part these days is often finding those communities, as they for some reason don't show up well in searches and on social platforms.

So maybe, along with highlighting good experiences, we should be making more of an effort to link people into existing communities. That's a challenge, as I know a number of the groups I'm in have been pretty closed over the past 20 years due to abuse by newcomers when they've opened themselves up (people taking design plans etc. and spamming their own versions all over the internet, with people purchasing their stuff being directed to the group for "support", etc.)

But encouraging everyone to be their best self, whether they're a forum tinkerer, a mass marketer or the CEO of a multinational conglomerate, is definitely the way to go. So thanks, Nate, for sharing your own experiences!

 

[ZippyPeanut]

I'm glad my banjos do not require an internet connection.

They must be old banjos. I'm sure newer ones will require an always-online connection.

 

[uesc_marathon]

I know this sounds super aggressive, but this reads like a bootlicker piece. This should be barebones customer service, not standout performances.

"This should be barebones customer service, not standout performances" 100% describes the thesis of this article.

We live in an awful timeline.

 

[Galvanic]

We should just accept it, shut up, and be happy we aren't (yet) complete slaves to our corporate overlords?

You're like the person house-training a puppy who, while still doing a fair bit of their business inside the house, finally manages once to wait and go in the yard once, nonetheless yells that that's the "bare minimum" and smacks the poor dog with a rolled-up newspaper.

How exactly is standing up for basic consumer rights going to "backfire"?

You can stand up for basic consumer rights in ways that don't result in the puppy getting hit with a rolled up newspaper.

 

[seanondemand]

The college basketball landscape has plenty of problems - but I remember watching March Madness games on my iPhone 5, for free through their official app, in 2013, and the idea that you can pretty much do the same thing is 2025… credit where it’s due, NCAA’s got a good product with March Madness Live.

 

[djdaedalus]

It's easy to see that companies with a small market segment, and users who are quick to share bad experiences, would be responsive to complaints or suggestions for improvement. Unfortunately even those eventually either grow too big or are bought by rapacious investors. The CBS takeover of Fender guitars is still remembered as a sour note by musicians. How long before the companies in this article suffer the same fate?

 

[Scone Muncher]

I was hoping others would share examples of positive experiences in the comments...anyone? Bueller?

I don't have one to share that I can think of, alas.

 

[Erbium68]

I'd say the closest thing to a "fake" word would be either fictional slang or dialect (e.g. A Clockwork Orange or 1984)

The words used in Clockwork Orange are Russian transliterations. Burgess was one of the group of British writers who learned Russian at the behest of SIS. I learnt Russian from another member of that program.
1984 is something else - it is a constructed simplified language which is immediately comprehensible to an English speaker. Like enshittification itself in fact.
Languages evolve, the OP needs to deal with it.

 

[Don Reba]

You're like the person house-training a puppy who, while still doing a fair bit of their business inside the house, finally manages once to wait and go in the yard once, nonetheless yells that that's the "bare minimum" and smacks the poor dog with a rolled-up newspaper.

You can stand up for basic consumer rights in ways that don't result in the puppy getting hit with a rolled up newspaper.

Do we want corporations to think they can treat us as badly as they want and still expect praise when they loosen the screws a little?

 

[TalkingZebra]

If this is supposed to be some kind of "feel-good" story, it doesn't seem like it.

I read it as 2 companies 'benevolently' helping customers out of a DRM trap of their own making. It's like a firefighter setting your house on fire so you can thank them for rescuing you from a burning building. Sure, you're not in as bad a place as before, but the whole situation never should have happened.

As an anecdote of needlessly-oppressive DRM, I used to work with a piece of radio broadcast software ~15 years ago. Its name isn't important, but it was obviously written in VB6 and probably could have been made by a single person over a weekend. But, it required:

1. USB dongle
2. Serial number
3. Invoice number
4. Calling the vendor for an authentication code

All for a piece of software that cost maybe $300-400.

 

[adpenner@tpn]

There is a certain fake word that has been excreted on almost every article comment section for months. It means "something worsening" and appears unwanted, like a little bit of poo left on the floor by your dog, child, or neighbour. Said dog/child/neighbour beams at you as if it's the best present in the world.

edited for brevity

'Transistor' was a fake word, once.
You know how 'fake' words become real words? By people using them.

 

[adpenner@tpn]

"Cromulent" would be a good example.

I don't know about you, but it certainly embiggened my vocabulary.

 

[Galvanic]

Do we want corporations to think they can treat us as badly as they want and still expect praise when they loosen the screws a little?

Do we want corporations to think that if they loosen things up that we won’t be pleased by it no matter what, so why bother? Don’t smack the puppy.

 

[forresthopkinsa]

A recent example of actually really excellent behavior from a tech company IMO is Framework, who recently showed off their "gen 2" lineup and have, against all odds, maintained their principles around upgradability and sustainability.

It's ironically really refreshing to see a company that is willing to transparently tell its customers, no, we won't build that new product and take your money, because we don't want to grow too fast and overextend ourselves.

 

[adpenner@tpn]

Now you've done it, new banjos will have USB activation sequences so they make sound.

Thank-you!
Can we do accordions and bagpipes next?

 

[chaos215bar2]

You're like the person house-training a puppy who, while still doing a fair bit of their business inside the house, finally manages once to wait and go in the yard once, nonetheless yells that that's the "bare minimum" and smacks the poor dog with a rolled-up newspaper.

You can stand up for basic consumer rights in ways that don't result in the puppy getting hit with a rolled up newspaper.

No one here is hitting "puppies". These are full grown businesses which should and absolutely do know better. This comparison is just absurd.

The only counter here I see that's worth anything is that Native Instruments technically wasn't the one perpetrating fraud. Which isn't wrong, but they did provide the transfer code.

Ultimately, Nate trusted whatever verification NI used to initiate the transfer, and it turns out that apparently that verification was insufficient. That's on NI, and why looking at this and saying "guess I shouldn't buy anything NI sells" is still the right response. These companies operate in a very competitive market, and no one needs to be using their products. There are plenty of alternatives.

 

[domikai]

Here's a funny one: In order to reign in unwanted / dark pattern resubscriptions, I used to replace my credit cards regularly so automatic resubs failed. Earlier today I discovered that when I'd subscribed again to a big publication I've read online for years, they had reactivated an old subscription I'd allowed to expire in addition to the new subscription. I'd been double billed for some time, but with a 6 month offset, it had gone unnoticed. Trying to cancel the second subscription online resulted in "something's gone wrong".

Hmm. I click on the "Chat Now !" customer service button. This was clearly an act of optimism. After a few walls of upselling responses, I type "Is this a real person ?" and the response is "Yes ! I am a real persona and my name is Nathan !". That's strange. The rain falling on my leg smells of urine.

Persistence, repetition, and a chat restart with a different "Real Persona !" did eventually work when a person took over. It took a while.

 

[sfbiker]

All I wanted was a simple way to give someone my money. No gimmicks, no intro offers, no "TV provider" BS—just a pure streaming play that puts all the games in one place, for a reasonable fee.

...

The Max streaming service had all the games, except for those shown on CBS. (You can't have everything, I guess, but I get CBS in HD using an over-the-air antenna.)

That seems like a pretty low bar for success "They couldn't give me everything I wanted, but hey, they were really good at taking my money, so that's a win!"

I've found that all of the streaming providers are equally good with taking my money - it's the "providing me the content that I want to watch" where they do poorly.

 

[Ser Simian]

I was hoping others would share examples of positive experiences in the comments...anyone? Bueller?

I don't have one to share that I can think of, alas.

OK, I'll share. It's not great, but it's the best one I've got. It's also 100% true.

I'm my household we have a saying that helps remind us to temper our expectations when buying convenience food. It is this: Fast food restaurants do not give a fuck about the drive through. They know you're most likely not going to notice a problem until it's too late, and even if you do, you'll still have to wait in line again (or even get out of your car, thus defeating the whole purpose of using the drive through) to correct it, so it doesn't really matter if they get your order right, or not.

Recently, I went through the drive through of this no-name Mexican place that just opened near my house. I ordered a combo plate that comes with two carne asada burritos. I pull up to the window and pay, and when the guy hands me my food he says "I gave you an extra burrito." I'm like "OK, thanks?" It seemed odd, but he didn't offer an explanation, and I wasn't inclined to question it, so I just kept driving.

When I got home I discovered that he had, in fact, given me an extra burrito. But it was some sort of rice and beans and cheese concoction, and that's when I realized what must have happened. Someone had obviously made the wrong kind of burrito when preparing my order, and rather than just serving me the wrong burrito (or even doubling down and serving me two wrong burritos), some brave soul had noticed the mistake, and this person – nay, this HERO – had the courage to stand on their principles and, resisting the onslaught of corporate greed with every fiber of their being, make me the two burritos that I'd actually ordered!

But the thing that got me the most, the thing that touched me to my very core, was that they could have just tossed that extra burrito, or even eaten it themselves. Instead, some humble saint decided to give that burrito to me, the lowest of the low – a wretched drive-through patron, for free. And when I ate that burrito, I wept openly, my faith in humanity restored, if only for a moment.

 

[invisible21]

I do support for a post production house and have dealt with iLoks for the last 20 years. Yeah they're not perfect but they're pretty damn reliable and, at least for me, it's a HELL of a lot easier to move hundreds or thousands of licenses between a computer on a single USB key than having to sign in and authorize every damn plug-in.

To each his/her own, but I've never really found them to be oppressively bad or difficult to use. The only real gripe I have is that it took them FOREVER to implement native Apple Silicon support, which in-turn seemed to hold up native versions of other software.

 

[Galvanic]

No one here is hitting "puppies". These are full grown businesses which should and absolutely do know better. This comparison is just absurd

Says the person smacking puppies.

 

[madmax988]

The thing a lot of these shitty tech executives and middle management often miss is that even if your ONLY goal is maximizing profits long term, having "cheap" bad customer service doesn't neccesarily help you make more profits.

Take a company like at&t their phillipines call center employees get basically zero training and at&t doesn't trust them so they are locked out of many internal systems. You can easily spend 6-10 hours on a single problem a Domestic representative solved in under 15 minutes. And have earned good will with customer instead of customer wanting to murder your company.
Another problem is bad incentives for employees.
Take Google, they have the problem they haven't been able to solve of rewarding promotions to employees who start new good products often in their 20% time. But they don't reward them for improving or maintaining existing products nearly as much. So employees create an entirely new app that has 10% new features and looks promising instead of working on the old app and improving it 10%. (For example googles many many chat apps). The employee eventually gets promoted high enough they aren't responsible for the new app and the cycle repeats itself.

It's bs to act likes it's profits or being good to customers you can do both. And if you look further than quarterly numbers you realize how expensive buying goodwill is. And customers with exceptionally good customer service often share that experience and are incredible free advertising.

 

[mdrejhon]

On the enshittification front, how is Cricut these days?

I inherited a complete Cricuit machine in its box but not sure if worth opening it up. I heard of the subscription controversy a few years back, and that caused many to abandon or return their machines.

 

[Pugilistas]

I ignore anything that requires iLok. While they have indeed fixed up some of their most egregious problems, their history includes all sorts of problems, especially around upgrades to their software. iLok requirements are a blanket 'no buy' for me. Their past shitty history is a warning.

Native Instruments? I have a drawer full of mechanically functional hardware that is no longer supported, because driver or firmware updates are apparently too difficult. I have two of their software instruments, one of which is now deprecated. The company has been taken over by venture capital, and is now run by MBA bean counters.

Again, it looks like barely decent behavior to the writer of the article is held out as great. Of course, in the modern world, that may actually be the case.

 

[SubWoofer2]

Slithy is now in the Oxford English Dictionary, even if my phone's autocorrect does not recognise it.

 

[Maestro4k]

Content warning - unbelievably good ISP support story ahead...

I have one of those for Comcast, but it only happened because one of my problems got mentioned in a story on Ars Technica. The main issue their guy at HQ was trying to resolve was the mismatch between their bandwidth numbers and my router's, which were sometimes off by a significant amount. (And never in my favor.) Ultimately he couldn't find the problem, but towards the end of our last call I asked if he could check something regarding my connection. He noted there was a low signal and I thanked him and said I'd call to get them to send someone out. Instead he offered to put in a service call ticket for me.

They sent out three trucks. All of the guys that came along knew exactly what they were doing, spotted the problem before I'd even answered the door (the line from the pole to my house was, as one guy put it, "Older than Methuselah.") and insisted on checking my internal wiring after running an entirely new line from the pole. They replaced my splitters indoors with the high quality ones they use for free, which they didn't have to do, and even checked my modem to make sure it wasn't some piece of junk. They probably fixed my problem more quickly than the normal route would have, saving Comcast money.

It goes to show Comcast can do good support, they just don't want to.

 

[saanaito]

"Unshittification" is itch.io and GOG and Bandcamp selling everything they list without a shred of DRM whatsoever.

Unshittification is Valve selling you an actual handheld computer (instead of a locked-down gaming console) and not imposing any arbitrary restrictions on what you can install in the stock OS, and making the physical design of said computer relatively repair-friendly.

Unshittification is not ... this "slightly less ornery DRM" stuff.