Each one is a bit funny in isolation, and it's also true that the most common feedback is always unhappy feedback, but every company looking for another vein to tap for sustenance hopes observers will write off their particular incision as hyper-specific. Besides providing a place to check before doing business with a company, the Consumer Rights Wiki is about making the cumulative effect of a thousand hyper-specific cuts harder to ignore.
Consider if your laptop was paired to it's specific charger and would refuse to charge with any other cable or charger. Lose or break your charger and suddenly your $2000+ laptop is irreparable.
That seems obviously stupid, right? And the sort of thing that ought to be illegal? Well, the headphones are the same, just with a different looking charging cable.
Apple gets all the heat for consumer rights issue, and rightfully they do need to do better, but every time I look, they are one of the best companies for repair and consumer rights. The rest of the industry is straight up atrocious.
Apple will sell you a replacement left or right airpod, and a replacement case. If you bought all 3 to form a complete product it comes out hardly more expensive than buying a new one so the replacements are fairly priced too.
No, why? As long as you know ahead of time what you are getting, seems fine to me. People are also allowed to buy impractical shoes in stupid colours, and that shouldn't be illegal.
Because it's destroying the planet creating mountains of ewaste. And because as a consumer, I don't want to spend a week doing research on every product to make sure they aren't abusing my rights in some confusing way that only shows up years down the line.
In the same way I like not having to check restaurants are poisoning me, I like knowing my consumer rights are being respected in every other industry.
Your preferences are not necessarily shared by other people.
What's next, banning pineapple on pizza?
> Because it's destroying the planet creating mountains of ewaste.
Don't buy stuff, then? Or in general, ask your legislators for a tax on ewaste?
> And because as a consumer, I don't want to spend a week doing research on every product to make sure they aren't abusing my rights in some confusing way that only shows up years down the line.
Read reviews, or rely on brands that have a reputation to burn, or ask your AI helper to read the fineprint.
Thankfully my preference for not destroying the environment and abusing buyers is shared by the majority in my country which is why stricter consumer laws are catching up to these tech companies.
Earth is much much bigger than you think it is. Even if you care about reducing waste, less then 3% of total waste is ewaste. Ewaste is not destroying the planet.
It's hard to take seriously when many of these pages are not anti consumer but just products that one random person distant like something about. Like for one the fact that it has a mobile companion app is anticonsumer.
You can't when against these people and I highly suggest ignoring these "consumer rights" people as their opinions don't reflect what makes actual business sense to do.
I encountered a BTRFS filesystem corruption today, nothing too heavy, it got recovered by a repair (even tough I don't know what caused it, memtest is clean and ssd is also clean), but while researching about it I was surprised to see Louis Rossman's business website show up !
Louis is quite vocal about transparency for consumers and openly sharing knowledge for people to be able to do repairs themselves or even set up a competing business.
Wow, the amount of AI-generated SEO content on this website is wild. I clicked on one of the related articles and it's also hijacking my scroll so I can't scroll down to the pages of extra content underneath the article.
he explained why he does that. In short, he was fighting to be displayed in search results by having legitimate content on the site for months, but the traffic was dying day by day and killing his business. He then asked Gemini to write him some bullshit SEO and went back to the 1st spot on google. Look for the video on his channel, it's not as bad as it looks.
I found this but keep in mind there were more videos about it. Let me leave the description of the video here:
Google delisted my business for almost a year. Professional SEO couldn't fix it, creating a new site didnt help. What finally worked was having AI rewrite my authentic content into corporate-friendly bunk. I hate that it worked.
This video took me a month to make because I felt ashamed of my decision.
He used that exact same excuse on another website that he AI generated for another project that was discussed here.
If anyone else was polluting Google search results with AI generated blog spam to promote their business the Hacker News audience would hate it, not accepting any excuses. I’ll probably get downvoted for saying this, but there’s a huge double standard that happens with figures that develop parasocial relationships with fans through their YouTube videos or podcasts. Can we just call a spade a spade and say that generating SEO blog spam with AI to get rankings for search terms like “btrfs corruption” just sucks? I’m not buying the whole “Google made me do it” story when the SEO blogspam pollution isn’t stopping at getting his repair business listed. The website is spamming software search topics like btrfs and synology issues with a million AI generated pages trying to boost his hardware repair business. Why is it so hard to admit that he’s just playing the same scummy AI SEO blogspam game that everyone else is, but trying to pretend he’s the good guy while doing it?
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Bose_QuietComfort_Sleepbuds_do...
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Tyre_warranty_sold_via_mobile_...
And there's also https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Mr._Clinton_the_cat
Consider if your laptop was paired to it's specific charger and would refuse to charge with any other cable or charger. Lose or break your charger and suddenly your $2000+ laptop is irreparable.
That seems obviously stupid, right? And the sort of thing that ought to be illegal? Well, the headphones are the same, just with a different looking charging cable.
Apple will sell you a replacement left or right airpod, and a replacement case. If you bought all 3 to form a complete product it comes out hardly more expensive than buying a new one so the replacements are fairly priced too.
Yes.
> And the sort of thing that ought to be illegal?
No, why? As long as you know ahead of time what you are getting, seems fine to me. People are also allowed to buy impractical shoes in stupid colours, and that shouldn't be illegal.
In the same way I like not having to check restaurants are poisoning me, I like knowing my consumer rights are being respected in every other industry.
What's next, banning pineapple on pizza?
> Because it's destroying the planet creating mountains of ewaste.
Don't buy stuff, then? Or in general, ask your legislators for a tax on ewaste?
> And because as a consumer, I don't want to spend a week doing research on every product to make sure they aren't abusing my rights in some confusing way that only shows up years down the line.
Read reviews, or rely on brands that have a reputation to burn, or ask your AI helper to read the fineprint.
Earth is much much bigger than you think it is. Even if you care about reducing waste, less then 3% of total waste is ewaste. Ewaste is not destroying the planet.
One of the most common grievances on ConsumerRightsWiki is when the terms of the sale seem to change after you've already purchased the product.
User is lead to believe X, if they don't read the fineprint.
X is not the case. Instead you get Y.
That sounds perfectly fitting into a consumer rights wiki to me.
Also, Clinton the cat is the much beloved cat of the persom who started the wiki.
You can't when against these people and I highly suggest ignoring these "consumer rights" people as their opinions don't reflect what makes actual business sense to do.
https://rossmanngroup.com/problems/btrfs-filesystem-corrupti...
I don't care who's doing it, that's not cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc
I found this but keep in mind there were more videos about it. Let me leave the description of the video here:
Google delisted my business for almost a year. Professional SEO couldn't fix it, creating a new site didnt help. What finally worked was having AI rewrite my authentic content into corporate-friendly bunk. I hate that it worked. This video took me a month to make because I felt ashamed of my decision.
If anyone else was polluting Google search results with AI generated blog spam to promote their business the Hacker News audience would hate it, not accepting any excuses. I’ll probably get downvoted for saying this, but there’s a huge double standard that happens with figures that develop parasocial relationships with fans through their YouTube videos or podcasts. Can we just call a spade a spade and say that generating SEO blog spam with AI to get rankings for search terms like “btrfs corruption” just sucks? I’m not buying the whole “Google made me do it” story when the SEO blogspam pollution isn’t stopping at getting his repair business listed. The website is spamming software search topics like btrfs and synology issues with a million AI generated pages trying to boost his hardware repair business. Why is it so hard to admit that he’s just playing the same scummy AI SEO blogspam game that everyone else is, but trying to pretend he’s the good guy while doing it?
It's a pity that pages cannot be created in other languages, given that anti-consumer practices also occur outside the English-speaking world.