13 Most EVIL Tech Fails

fake products false advertising ruthless scams these are the 13 most evil Tech fails that through Instant Karma have completely backfired for the companies trying to make some quick cash ranging from pretty naughty to Pure diabolical starting with Nokia and their Lumia 920 in the phone's promotional material this company decided that they really wanted to emphasize the power of the 920's optical image stabilization so they created this situation where a guy was holding the phone on his bike and he was using the phone to record this girl on another bike but viewers noticed something a little Sinister later on in the video the reflection of a person who was not the original cyclist holding the phone but in fact a completely different guy standing in a van holding a proper heavyduty film camera and that's because the video wasn't really filmed on the 920 it was filmed on this speculated to be a red Cinema Camera which I mean those things are like minimum $10,000 Nokia faked the entire ad and that's especially bad because this ad doesn't just vaguely imply that it was shot on the phone it basically tells you that it was but how did you break you can't do that in the age of the Reddit investigator meaning that Nokia was forced to make a public apology and pretty much soil the reputation of their one remaining successful product line it's all downhill from there reality you can't beat the internet and that's something that Netflix also had to learn in 2011 you might know that Netflix actually started off as an online DVD rent by mail service so people would use the website to pick what they wanted to watch and then the company would ship those out as discs alongside a prepaid return envelope but then as soon as internet connections started improving and people were also looking for alternatives to cable TV Netflix also introduced the option for subscribers to just stream a smaller selection of the movies in TV shows in their Library straight from their site like we do now and as Netflix's streaming business grew and they found that surprise surprise it was cheaper to run than manually going to the post office and mailing people discs they needed to find a way to encourage people to choose that option that's where they went wrong in 2011 Netflix decided that they were going to split their streaming and DVD rental services which were previously all included for one price into not just two different tiers but two separate companies entirely renaming their DVD service to quicker it would involve users having to have two separate accounts two separate websites to navigate and also two separate fees to pay the internet quickly came to the conclusion that keeping both subscriptions going after the split would result in a price hike of not 5% % or 10% but 60% leading 800,000 users to not subscribe to both but instead just cancel their existing subscriptions causing Netflix's entire stock price to plunge to half of its value talk about net flops it's 4 out of 10 fail and of course Netflix had to back out of the plan with their tail between their legs after only a month and this actually all remained one service until they completely stopped renting out DVDs last year yeah they've still been doing it this whole time but it can always get worse as we're about to see with some increasingly immoral gaming fails do you remember when every video game Studio was rushing to implement nfts in their games companies realize that if they made their in-game items nfts then you could verify via the blockchain that they are well and truly oneof a kind which artificially increases their perceived value and if you increase the value of your in-game items well that should drive more people to play your game for longer to earn them and create a marketplace where players could buy and sell them with of course the Developers taking a cut from each transaction oh my goodness wait that's the actual smoke alarm can you just uh disable that oh God just EA is probably the most notorious company for bigging up nfts not hugely surprising given they were voted worst company in America in 2013 but in recent years it has started to feel like Ubisoft is gunning for the title because in 2021 they revealed their plans for playable nfts and games through a service called Ubisoft quartz starting with Ghost Recon however because actually designing thousands of one-of-a-kind exclusive items would take Ubisoft a long time they had a better idea to give everyone the same item with the unique twist being that each one had its own serial number just like every other product you've ever bought in a shop but what made it so much worse is that the entire game was designed around those nfts each requiring anywhere from 100 to 600 hours to earn almost forcing players who wanted them but still wanted to actually have a life to take out their real wallets and pay thankfully Karma bites back the trailer for Ubisoft courts was delisted on YouTube almost immediately after it shot up to 95% dislikes and when the project eventually launched it was such a colossal failure that it will never not be funny the company likely lost millions in reputational damage from the move how much did they make from the entirety of their nft efforts about $400 so they could buy about seven copies of their own game it's a five out of 10 but worse still is what happened to a game that I was personally really excited for one of my favorite video games of all time actually is Star Wars Battlefront 2 on the PlayStation 2 this game is basically sacred for Star Wars fans and so imagine our reaction when EA comes in and they say they're rebooting this exact game for the modern era in 2017 but with NextGen realism I remember wanting to dial every single person in my contacts list just to tell them how big of a deal this was we were all so caught up in excitement that the world almost completely forgot that it was a designing this game and thus the microtransaction riddled mess that it would end up becoming when the beta of the game dropped if you wanted to make basically any progress at all you would have to open up dozens upon dozens of completely randomized loot boxes until you got what you needed and if you wanted to do that without spending a month literally glued to your television screen you going to have to take out your wallet and spend real money now it's one thing to have paid items in a game it's a very different thing for those paid items to be randomized and most importantly to to be crucial to actually winning these boxes they didn't just contain skins and cosmetics genuinely game-changing character upgrades that were likely to be the difference between winning and losing players were not happy and they made their voices heard one player complained to EA that it was basically impossible to unlock Darth Vader the most Shameless character to put behind a pay wall without paying real money and yep EA made it worse by responding to this by saying that the reason the characters were so expensive is because they wanted players to have a sense of accomplishment from getting them and this super condescending absolutely bold-faced lie completely blew up it became such a big Fiasco that even nonv video game news sites were reporting on it EA were actually taken to court by the Belgian gaming commission accused of promoting gambling among underage players and they've basically been arguing their case in court ever since the game has improved but no one has forgiven the company to the point where new releases from the company are still being investigated as recently as 2023 now say what you want about Ubisoft and EA at least they made the games that landed them on this list the same can't be said for raw raw was a massively multiplayer online life simulator that was promising enormous things the initial trailer showed off entire towns with a full economy where every player has a job can purchase property and vehicles and take out contracts with other players you can even become the mayor and govern your server it basically looked like GTA online but with 100 times the number of complex systems and mean the trailers were flashy and well animated but it was all cinematics not real gameplay that said it did not stop a lot of people from backing the project on Kickstarter leading the game to easily surpass the nearly $80,000 that the company was asking for in funding a lot of money absolutely enough to develop a game this sprawling not even close what these guys were trying to do here would have cost tens of millions of dollars and needed 100 developers at a minimum how many did they have two they had two people all signs were pointing towards scam and they so nearly got away with it but it was greed it was trying to convince people that they were actually working on something hoping they could squeeze out just a little bit more in Kickstarter funding they made a fatal mistake they released a Gameplay trailer of the game that didn't exist and as soon as the internet saw it people immediately realized that the whole thing from the furniture to the players Running Animation were all stock assets clearly just pulled together from the asset store that people would use as a base to actually build a game upon Kickstarter suspended their funding immediately and also slapped them with a fine of the total value of everything they'd raised so far now you might have recently heard of the right to repair the idea that as a consumer you should be able to freely repair your own device rather than having to send it back to the manufacturer who are basically guaranteed to charge you more than it costs looking at eone companies but quite possibly the worst offender is the huge Farm tech company John Deere who started integrating engine control units into their equipment that once they detect any problem at all just shut down many of the engines functions requiring specific software and tools to fix and where do you get those software and tools oh you go to John Deere ah now it makes sense this company was literally designing their products to make them purposefully difficult to repair while also refusing to provide Farmers or independent repair shops with the tools needed to do so which stings even more than the whole right to repair drama with iPhone because let's be honest practically no normal individual user is actually repairing their own phone whereas in the case of farmers and their tractors it's a very normal thing to fix it yourself oh and your livelihood depends on it you're going to miss your entire Harvest waiting for John Deere to have to fix it and that's not even accounting for the enormous Bill you're going to get because of it so thankfully the company is currently facing two class action lawsuits accusing them of monopolizing the industry and given that their repair business makes them 3 to six times the profit that they make on actually selling their gear it's looking less like John Deere more like OD deer can you imagine how stressful it's been having to research this video to learn all the excruciating details of this evilness the only thing that's got me through it is tab fullness the Serene meditative State you enter in which it doesn't actually matter how many tabs of hair pulling Le evil Tech fails there are open thanks to the organization the grouping and even the color coding of tabs in the Opera browser you stay stressed free the inner piece that descends when you're not being bombarded with stupid ads you're not digging through endless pages but you're getting instant answers from Arya Opera's browser AI we all face stressful things in our lives but by downloading the Opera browser using the link in the description you can at least find calm in your browser okay it's time to delve deeper into the depths of tech hell with a returning guest this is like the one series you don't want to be a regular on on a past fails video we talked about the sheer negligence of Boeing with their 737 Max aircraft the next generation of the most popular aircraft in history that thanks to a whole number of poor decisions crashed twice leading to the deaths of hundreds of passengers it was a catastrophe and they've done it again when on the 5th of January 2024 the Boeing 737 Max aircraft flying from Portland to California had to return for an emergency landing shortly after taking off when the door came off I mean just imagine you're flying at 60 ,000 ft in the air you're barely 5 minutes into Shrek 2 on your phone when the door right next to the seats flies off into Oblivion miraculously only seven seats in that plane were unoccupied and two of those just so happened to be next to that door meaning that somehow not a single person was seriously injured but people lost their belongings one person had his shirt sucked off his body and if he wasn't wearing a seat belt there's a very good chance he would have gone with it side note kind of incredibly one phone that fell out of the plane which looks to me like a a 14 pro was actually found on the side of a road still working after that drop yeah as far as this 737 Max is concerned after this incident with everyone being completely shocked that this could even happen to a plane that had just come off the production lines 2 months ago around 170 of them were grounded so they could be inspected for potential issues with the doors after which both United and Alaska Airlines found multiple loose Parts including installation issues with the exact same door plug that had caused the accident in nearly 10 of their seven 9 Boeing planes and then the Federal Aviation Administration found further manufacturing issues all but forcing Boeing CEO to have to admit to a lapse in quality control which you could argue is not evil it's just negligent but then I think persistent negligence in the face of even potentially fatal consequences feels pretty corrupt to me oh and the passengers of the Ontario flight are also suing them leading this to be our first 6 out of 10 Bill have you ever heard of bit connect there's a good chance you saw or more likely heard this Unstoppable in 2016 when the new cryptocurrency bitconnect first [Applause] launched here's some advice that I think some people could have done with at the time if someone is literally having to yell at you about how good their virtual coin is don't buy it bitconnect if you take what they say at face value bitconnect seems crazy profitable users were being promised a 1% return on their investment every single day which if you do the math means that if you drop so much as $11,000 on day one then with it compounding every single day by the end of 3 years you would be on 50 million the guy was basically promising people free money and the crazy part of it was that it kind of worked while the value of one bitconnect started out at 0.1 the sheer fever these guys managed to create around this coin it rocketed the value all the way to a peak of 455 and then the authorities got involved this was one of the first of what would become many crypto Ponzi schemes basically a scam where someone asks for an investment from you and then asks you to go and recruit even more investors you get paid but you're only getting paid because even more people are being lured into the Trap from the bottom of the pyramid and investing their money too and the problem with this is eventually the pyramid has to collapse cuz you can't keep finding bigger and bigger groups of new investors to support the growing weight from above so yes bitconnect was eventually forced to refund every single one of its investors and over $50 million in crypto was seized from one of its Founders ouch 7 out of 10 but we're not always so lucky sometimes tech companies do something truly awful and they get away with it so just before number five here's a quick fire round of the ones that got away with the iPhone 14 launch Apple really pushed the boundaries when they tried to sell the fact that they were using the exact same chipset for the iPhone 14 as they used for the iPhone 13 as a feature to iPhone 14 when I saw this my jaw Hit the Floor csgo Lotto was a website where people could gamble with real money for collectible weapon skins in the game Counter-Strike Global Offensive the site came out of nowhere when it was suddenly massively promoted by two gaming YouTubers who kept posting videos of them winning big and encouraging their mostly younger viewers to get involved and because it managed to carefully swerve gambling laws there were no restrictions on under 18s joining it until it was revealed that these two YouTubers were the owners of the site and they must have been making bank because they were exposed for paying other influencers up to $255,000 each to promote the site but what happened when they got sued for promoting well gambling for children well they literally got away with being told don't do that again Amazon is widely regarded as being the worst big tech company for how it treats its staff in terms of stress encouraging delivery drivers to make 150 plus stops in a single day often causing them to skip meals and even bathroom breaks in terms of safety with ambulances having been called out over a thousand times since 2018 in just the UK from Amazon warehouse staff and in terms of just general ethics with up to 18,000 workers recently fired in one go most found out via an email but up until this point it hasn't caught up with them in any meaningful way and then while every taxation system around the world charges you more the more money you earn the big six tech companies Amazon alphabet Facebook Netflix apple and Microsoft have each individually managed to sneak their way out it by situating their headquarters in low tax zones even though those aren't the zones they're primarily operating in they' managed to get away with paying just 219 billion dollars in taxes between 2010 and 2020 now that might sound like a lot but these are the richest companies in the world and that accounts for just 3.6% of their total revenue for reference people earning high amounts here in the UK pay 45% okay if you're enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be Wicked right no more companies getting away now it's time for the top five companies who are truly evil and who got punished just as badly for it starting with Wei workk the company who practically invented the concept of buying out Office Buildings and then renting out individual floors and spaces to businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs and we workg generated a lot of buzz it was great for networking it was great for motivating people who would otherwise be sat in their parents' basement it gave business people a more typical working life structure which as someone who works some pretty odd hours I can see the benefit of as could a lot of people cuz in fact at its peak Wei work was valued at an absolutely eye-watering hard to even think about 48 billion but nobody is immune to this series and practically the sole reason we work failed is their extremely irresponsible CEO Adam Newman this guy had something so good on his hands but he just kept making unbelievably Reckless decisions like buying a $60 million private jet before the company had even gone public investing heavily into a company that makes artificial wave pools or like when Newman changed the company's name from we work to we company which is a name he just so happened to have recently trademarked himself so that he could sell that name to the company making $5.9 million in personal profits but the final nail in the coffin came when wework eventually decided to go public now when a company goes public and everyone starts buying shares most CEOs they tend to wait for this moment before selling their own shares to maximize the value Newman for some reason decided to take out his entire $700 million in stock basically the night before meaning that at the point where we work actually became available to buy their now public stats just showed enormous losses which does not work Newman's continued poor leadership it got this company to a stage where they were so poor they couldn't even afford to fire their employees leading to him asked to resign a CEO we work is still around but it hasn't got even close to their dizzying original valuation sins but some fails stem from nobler goals than just trying to make a quick barck like for instance trying to solve world hunger like when scientists at mit's media lab developed what they were calling the food computer basically a pod designed to grow perfect crops with LEDs sensors pumps and precision machine learning algorithms constantly tweaking the internal climate the idea was to sell thousands of these things to Farmers to create massive agricultural servers which would allow anyone to grow anything and absolutely revolutionize farming as we know it they even announced that they' already started sending units to a refugee camp which could really help people except they hadn't it turned out the Project Lead Caleb Harper was just straight up lying about that for publicity and it turned out that wasn't the only thing he was lying about because in 2020 it came to light that the food computer itself didn't even work in the first place this guy had gone as far as to get his team to go out and buy potted plants from a store plant them in the computers and pass them off as spe specimens that have been grown from scratch from inside the devices MIT obviously fired Harper and shuttered the project immediately but it just gets worse because it turns out that the project had also been polluting the local water supply with toxic nitrogen infused Wastewater the whole time so MIT were finded too but I can't think of a more continuous lapse in judgment than what happened recently with Reddit on April 18th 2023 Reddit announced changes to their data policies so they could monetize their data better essentially before this happened a lot of tools will be able to freely access reddits data which means moderators who look after the various communities could create tools that help them to actively approve and reject posts as they come in that a lot of users were free to use third party tools to browse Reddit in a more organized efficient way and also that Reddit had become like the perfect place to train new AI models cuz it's just 18 years of pure human conversation so if you ever wanted to build an AI that talks like us and thinks like us then it's a gold mine and this this Arrangement worked out quite well almost all these moderators were basically doing reddit's work for them for free Reddit was earning healthy amounts of cash via the ad revenue from the site and the platform was also just doing a general service for the internet but Reddit didn't like that they decided that they wanted to start charging for the use of their data partly to obviously make more money immediately but partly because they knew this would also allow them to charge the third party Reddit clients like Apollo which since they have to access Reddit data to work bucket loads of cash like in the case of Apollo these charges would literally have cost the app $20 million per year in data charges so they were forced to shut down remember this isn't just a normal company deciding to up the prices of their products this is a company that's almost built by the people who saw their work as a form of Charity as a way to help share information that they felt like makes the world a better place and so when redditors caught wind of what had happened they were outraged it became Global News and many moderators of the subreddits they started to go dark in protest T Test either by privating those subreddits or activating the not safe for work tag so their content can no longer be monetized by Reddit at the beginning of the protest over 7,000 subreddits went dark with some going indefinitely Reddit then tried to calm things down by offering and ask me anything with their CEO Steve Huffman but his refusal to budge only enraged users more he was constantly saying stuff like this is like a protest in a city that goes on for too long and that the moderators who are unpaid volunteers remember are like the landed gentry meaning people who have been handed undeserved power without having had to earn it themselves essentially this company once the social platform with the biggest active community in the world continue to shoot themselves in the foot like this until their reputation was tarnished basically forever their Goodwill shredded which matters more so for Reddit than anyone not to mention the large hit to General engagement on the platform eight outs hand fail now it is hard to screw up more than that but I think Volkswagen takes it after what they they did in 2015 turns out that this company had been fitting their cars with engines deliberately programmed to activate their emissions controls only when they detect that they're in a Laboratory test which basically meant that Volkswagen cars were programmed to have two modes one that meant they were actually terrible to drive with low power and mileage which would allow them to pass the Environmental Protection tests and then the other mode that the drivers experienced which drove fine but was secretly pumping out up to 40 times the federal limit of some pollutants when it was found out that they been doing this since 2009 with 11 million cars across the globe being fitted with the test cheating technology this company rightfully got absolutely hammered facing eye-watering fines of $25 billion if that's not a 9 out of 10 fail I don't know what is but quite possibly the biggest riches to rags fail that we've ever covered in any one of these videos is FDX so this is s bankman freed who in 2019 founded the company FTX what became the second larg lest crypto exchange a platform like binance where people could buy and sell their cryptocurrencies and people were all in on it a combination of Hefty marketing budgets the promise of extreme returns and overnight riches and celebrity endorsements and big sponsorship deals like literally the Mercedes Ben's Formula 1 team and even the Miami Heat NBA team whose entire stadium was actually rebranded to the FTX Arena I mean these guys even had a Super Bowl ad with legendary comedian Larry David creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and freed was being hailed as God's gift to the world of crypto so how on Earth do you screw up from there well FTX was actually a mess what seemed on the outside like the future of investing was on the inside just problem after problem stacked on top of each other the first being that they weren't being completely honest turns out that as well as FTX bankman freed also owned another crypto trading firm called alamida research he said that both companies operated completely separately but it turned out that he was secretly sending customer deposits from FTX so money that people are traded in to Alam research to then invest in Risky things to try and turn it into even more money gambling with customer funds between companies without telling them is spectacularly illegal especially since we're not talking like thousands of dollars or even Millions this was done with $1 billion and there was an even more fundamental problem see the way that a crypto exchange should work is to constantly make sure that it has liquid assets lots of money to make sure that if any customer decides they want out that they want to swap their crypto back into dollar say that the exchange can give it to them FTX did not have that the money that bankman freed told people he had was actually almost completely just other cryptocurrencies which already makes them unstable should anything happened to the crypto Market but most worryingly their largest asset was their own cryptocurrency called ftt let me just get the straight so Sam made a currency he assigned a value to that currency and then he used that value as the coll natural to finance his projects and gain Investments and what that meant was that the ability of FTX as a platform to actually pay anybody was completely dependent on the current market value of ftt which is fine when it's doing well but then as soon as the ties started to turn against crypto which coincided with one of ftxs competing platforms deciding to get rid of every bit of ftt that they had in one Fell Swoop the market was suddenly flooded with ftt that no one wanted and its value collapsed FTX immedi imately lost a large chunk of the value that they had but then it gets worse because as soon as a ton of ftt is sold customers start to lose confidence in FTX to and so at the same time that FTX loses its money it has to give its money leading to a massive implosion bankruptcy of the company and Sam bankman freed facing up to 115 years in prison that's a 10 thanks for watching it really does mean a lot to me I'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 6,127,713

Keywords: tech, fails, amazon, apple, google, samsung, scam, netflix

Id: WqJhvUYLRzk

Length: 26min 55sec (1615 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024