I’m trying to start a discussion about which Big Tech company changed for the worse the most in the 2020s. I’ve seen more complaints about privacy, layoffs, censorship, anti-consumer decisions, and monopolistic behavior, but I’m having trouble comparing companies fairly. I need help figuring out which company has had the biggest negative impact and what examples best support that view.
For me it’s Google.
Reason 1, ad business ate the whole company. Search got worse. More ads, more spam, more junk SEO pages. You feel it every day when you try to find one normal answer.
Reason 2, YouTube got meaner. More ads, harder rules, weird moderation, worse deal for creators. Premium keeps getting pushed harder too.
Reason 3, trust dropped. Killing products became a meme for a reason. Stadia, Inbox, Play Music, a ton of messaging apps. You stop buying in when you know they might nuke it later.
Meta is close. TikTok isn’t ‘Big Tech’ in the same old sense. Amazon got more anti-consumer too. Apple got greedier. Microsoft rehabbed its image a bit.
So yeah, Google. They went from useful nerd company to ad machine. Kinda sad tbh.
I’d actually put Meta above Google, even though @chasseurdetoiles makes a fair case.
Google feels worse in a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ way. Meta feels worse in a ‘we know exactly what we’re doing and we’re doing it anyway’ way. The core product strategy this decade has basically been: maximize engagement, blur the line between social connection and algorithmic addiction, copy whatever threatens them, then wrap it all in PR about community and safety. Facebook became kind of a hollow shell, Instagram got more hostile to actual users in favor of reels, creators, shopping, and endless ad stuffing.
Also, Meta’s reputation problems are not just annoying-customer stuff. A lot of the criticism hits at social harm, especially around misinformation, mental health, and manipulation at scale. That’s a different tier for me. Google’s search decline is super real, but Meta feels more corrosive overall.
Apple deserves a mention too btw. Not ‘most evil,’ but the gap between privacy branding and App Store rent-seeking is… pretty wild lol.
So my ranking is probably:
- Meta
- Amazon
Microsoft somehow pulled off the rare Big Tech move of seeming less evil mostly because everyone else got worse. not exactly a ringing endorsement, heh.
I’d put Amazon higher than most people here, maybe even #1 depending on what you mean by “turned evil.”
Meta is the most socially corrosive, sure. Google feels the most disappointing. But Amazon’s 2020s arc has been uniquely ugly because it combines consumer lock-in, seller abuse, surveillance, labor heat, and quiet market power in a way people normalize because the box shows up fast.
What changed this decade was the mask slipping. Prime got worse value. Search on Amazon got more ad-ridden. Third-party sellers got squeezed while Amazon keeps taking a cut from every direction. Alexa went from exciting to weirdly stagnant. Whole thing feels less like “customer obsession” and more like “tollbooth on modern retail.”
So mine is:
- Amazon
- Meta
I do think @chasseurdetoiles is right to keep Meta and Google at the top of the conversation, but Amazon gets off easy because its harms feel boring and logistical instead of culturally explosive.
Pros for ': none obvious here.
Cons for ': not applicable, and honestly it reads like placeholder text if that was intentional.