A high-zoom photo of what appears to be an exterior wall; There is graffiti, and the wall has cracks in it and the finish itself. There is a fake framed portrait of the monopoly guy pasted onto it; It is partially torn off.
God these massive corpo user interfaces suck

A bonus reason we should break up monopolies

Published on : filed under "Fuck Off, FAANG", by WFL

Thanks to Julian Hochgesang for the fucking amazing photo in the hero; I didn't expect something so perfect for what I'm writing about today.

In case you haven't noticed, there are a lot of very large corporations right now that hold the keys to some very fucking large castles.

Many of these castles have become chimera; Akira-like amalgamations of platforms and products, the partitions pulled apart to create a conflicting cultural conflagration with the hopes of retaining signifigance in the zeitgeist.

Legacy systems stapled to the prior acquisitions, with little regard for their ongoing functionality.. Or user experience.

Let's take a look at just a few examples from the FAANG world, which should easily make my point.

First up? Meta (should we be calling it MAANG now? Nah, that's dangerously close to racism currently very popular in the US anyway).

Meta eats everything

Meta is a disasterous combination of horrific integrations and inconistent design and UX; Tying things like the Meta Quest VR goggles to a Meta account is insane, especially given how they require you use the same account for both work and personal use (unless you're very lucky and were able to work around their awful moderation systems).

It doesn't stop there, though; Anybody who has had to manage business pages will know that there is so much bad UI/UX that it's a wonder people are able to do anything on the platform.. And their security and privacy management for personal profiles? That's just as fucking bad.

I mean, helping a user with their privacy doesn't mean you have to hide the configurations for it.. Well, actually, for Meta it does (because they will eat every bit of data you provide and make you feed them more).

They aren't alone, however.

Google's oodles of abandoned apps

Fucking Google. They started with a simple search engine, and are now a massive, bloated creature that's basically a bunch of equally bloated bodies tied to it. Some are rotting, near death, neglected like beta fish in a Petco.

If you ever needed a prime example that one business cannot manage everything (Fucking fuck you Elon, Twitter - oh, I'm sorry, X - will never become an everything app and the only thing truly growing there is your diseased ego), it is Google.

They've shut down countless apps and systems they've built or acquired; more than you probably realize. What's hilarious, though, is that on the UI/UX front they failed in a spectacular fashion despite literally building a popular design language that is now practically stagnating.. Material Design. The clearest example of Google's failure, though?

The insane number of both subtlely and grossly disparate UIs.

Google Search finally has dark mode, but their office suite? Yeah, no, that hasn't happened yet.

Analytics and other developer-centric systems? Yeah, those have configurations buried under layers and layers.. Assuming they even decide to keep those functioning and don't just send them to the graveyard.

What tweaks me the most, however, is how Gmail - which left it's extended beta in 2009 - has a completely different UI language for the e-mail settings than the rest of the entire platform.

I seriously don't think they updated the UI for e-mail settings since it left beta.

Oh, and they've been hilariously knocked in the past for using inconsistent colors throughout gmail while pushing their Material Design language.

Let's step back from Google, though (seriously - I use Startpage for search, because Fuck Google (TM)), and talk about one more.

Amazon practically consumes it's namesake

Ah, Amazon.. You disgusting bitch.

There are so many insane failures by this disgusting pile of brown waste in terms of both business practices as well as UI/UX.. If anybody on this list needs to be broken up immediately, Amazon is probably at the top (though the others aren't far behind, honestly).

I have 3 personal bugbears here in regards to Amazon's poor interfaces, however, so.. Let's just focus on that here. We all know Amazon fucking sucks.

The first one? The Amazon Vine program.

For those of you who are unaware: Good reviewers get invited to the Amazon Vine program so they can request products to review. They don't haver to pay for these products, either (although you do have to pay taxes on them, FYI).

I am one of these Vine reviewers, although I have definitely stepped back from what I previously did, and am basically waiting for them to kick me off the platform while I enjoy freebies of stuff that I kinda might actually want.

Obviously the biggest reason is how much of an Earth-sized shit-stain Amazon is, but in the case of Vine?

The entire UI is built as if you asked a junior developer to piss it together in a day with an early version of ChatGPT. Shit breaks constantly, it's not mobile-friendly, and is so worthless some folks have built apps to act as alternative interfaces to the platform because Amazon sucks so hard.

The second rotting carcass in Amazon's amalgamation of acquisitions?

Managing subscriptions.

They have so many ways to subscribe to numerous things - from streaming channels, to Kindle Unlimited, to regularly delivered products - that it's almost viable to think this was planned from the start to be hard so they can keep billing you.

The last point against Amazon, however, is one that I'm sure everybody has noticed..

..How fucking much of a pain in the ass it is to find something and not have slop shoved in your face.

Browsing categories frequently resuilts in frustration due to running head-first into the wall that is featured layouts for higher-level categories that outright hide some sub-categories, necessitating a janky-ass search that doesn't always get what you want.. And then you hope you can browse one of the categories in the sidebar filters..

..And those filters are so wildly inconsistent and frequently useless that your best bet now is to find something via regular search engines, look at the manufacturer's site, and then search for the model number of what you want.

Jesus fucking Christ Amazon.. You're like a goddamned incontinent dog shitting all over the planet.

Someone needs to scoop up all that shit - and Jeff Bezos - and launch it all into the sun in his penis-shaped rocket.

Fucking fin; I'm stressed after writing about this shit and don't feel like writing a proper conclusion. I'm going to go eat a goddamned cookie.