In all those years I never had a single problem with Steam.
This.
I've been using steam since July 24th 2004, and I've never had a single issue that I had to go to customer service about. Steam is one of the best gaming clients ever made in my opinion, and you all can tell me it's not til you're blue in the face, I;m entitled to my opinion.
Boycotting Steam is basically saying that you never want to play another Valve game again. If you don't want your games to update all the time, go to the properties of that game (right click, properties), click the Updates tab, and then pick NEVER UPDATE THIS GAME option.
There so go, problem solved, you can now all stop badmouthing steam just because they automatically give you software updates to fix the bugs that your games might have which may make you extremely frustrated, make your game crash, freeze, not load, make certain scripted events not happen. Incase you hadn't realised, automatic updates to games is an extremely useful feature, which you CAN turn off if your desperate enough.
Just because you like using trainers doesn't mean steam is being a nazi updating your games, it's simple enough to just disable the updates. Your complaints have an easy fix if you took the time to look.
Edit:
And in answer to the OP's "How do we boycott Steam?"
The answer is this.
Stop buying games.
Either that or take the time to read the back and if it mentions needing steam to run or an internet connection, don't buy it. Simple as that really if you want to cut your list of playable games down by a fair number.
[Edited by FireflyPoi, 10/3/2010 9:08:43 PM]