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People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

• dotcoma 1y ago
  I thought people loved targeted ads! ;)
  • s5300 1y ago
    [dead]
• zuhsetaqi 1y ago
  I wonder what they expected when buying such a device from Amazon.
  • shmeeed 1y ago
    I never thought the leopard would eat MY face!
    • sshine 1y ago
      Yet people get leopards as pets. I remind myself multiple times per week of the ways I compromise by letting questionable service companies into my life. “I really should self-serve this.” — I guess people who don’t fantasise of self-sufficiency to the nth degree, and don’t get angry at being force-fed straight uninterrupted ads, just think of the immediate upside.
  • neilv 1y ago
    IIRC, when it was launched, with the camera, the Web page had a top image of the product sitting on a bedroom night stand, naturally pointed at the owner's bed. Either the marketing people weren't very aware of privacy (specifically, the chatter around that time, about covering webcams against hackers, and about whether adtech was listening in on device mics), or they have a dark sense of humor.
  • HiPhish 1y ago
    I think a lot of normies still think that when they buy a smart appliance they are buying an appliance like from yesteryear, except with more features. In reality they are buying a computer shaped like an appliance of yesteryear. Your smartphone? That's not a phone, it's a computer shaped like a phone. Smart TV? Computer shaped like a TV. Smart watch? Computer shaped like a watch. This brings with it all the advantages and disadvantages of a computer. Except that the user is not given any of the advantages they have with a desktop or laptop computer. Companies get away with it because in the normie's mind the smart watch is a watch first and foremost, and who would expect to log into a terminal on a watch? Why would you need security updated for a wristwatch? This is how artificially restricted technology is slowly being introduced into people's live, one appliance at a time.
    • jopsen 1y ago
      Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the trend. But one could argue that a computer is just a cheaper implementation of the yesteryears discrete electronics. Which was itself a cheaper implementation of old school mechanical gears, switches and timing wheels, etc. A locked down computer, could have been mechanical for all the user cares. Fixing a dishwasher a while my dad told me that back in the day, they operates with a timing wheel that switched between different stages, and they had a lot of wires. Todays dishwashers are cheaper and have fewer mechanical control parts (if any).
      • EasyMark 1y ago
        which should in theory make them more dependable but I've seen friends go through a few yet my 25 year old whirlpool has only ever had the door seal replaced and it works fine if loud as hell compared to modern ones.
        • baq 1y ago
          Over those 25 years manufacturers were able to optimize mttf of all components to ‘a few months over warranty’. Solution would be to legally increase minimum warranty as the market extracted all value and is now socially inefficient.
• orsenthil 1y ago
  This shouldn't be surprising. Amazon is known for such non-customer friendly behaviors.
  • hinkley 1y ago
    Amazon: our definition of “customer obsessed” is indistinguishable from stalking.
• Animats 1y ago
  Do the "smart displays" monitor the behavior of people in the room say and do to determine what to pitch to them? They're already aware of whether someone is near the device. What else are they monitoring?
  • hbosch 1y ago
    Unfortunately, they don't need to. Besides the troughs of data from third-party sources, the likelihood that an Echo user is also an Amazon shopper is probably approaching 100%. They get so many good ad signals just from retail, books, Prime Video, etc. that they really don't even need to actively monitor you with a mic or camera...
• more_corn 1y ago
  Advertising will expand to the point where we won’t take it anymore. And ultimately it comes down to power. If we can’t stop it ads will arrive. On the display on your fridge. (Unless you can stop it) on the display in your car (unless you can stop it) Where’s the line for you? And have you preserved your power so you’re in a position to stop it?
  • Gigachad 1y ago
    It's already happened. Most news websites are so loaded with ads now that it's impossible to use them. No one clicks the links and reads the actual articles anymore. And if you do you'll be fighting against constant full screen adverts and getting sent off to new tabs when you accidentally click them. The major platforms like Reddit and Facebook have restrained them to the maximum people will tolerate and reducing the performance disruption and layout changes that the smaller sites are plagued with.
• gdulli 1y ago
  It's not conspiracy or hypothesis that the only point of these products is ads, it's the straight up business model. When are we going to hold people accountable for being surprised by the obvious actions of these companies? It wastes our time and it's boring to keep responding with, what did you think was going to happen? We've tried not shaming these people, will shame get them to stop buying this stuff and actually creating change in the world? What will work? > “This is getting ridiculous and I'm about to just toss the whole thing and move back to Google,” one Redditor said of the “full-volume” ads for Alexa+ on their Echo Show. Any article that quotes this and doesn't point out the crushing stupidity of it has failed. Do it politely, if you must, Scharon Harding. But if I wanted to be exposed to Reddit quality ideas I'd be on Reddit.
  • ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    > When are we going to hold people accountable for being surprised by the obvious actions of these companies? How should they know? Genuinely asking. Yeah WE know, we've known forever because we're the people who make this shit, both professionally and in our spare time. We know the costs associated with making these little magic devices, and we know the ongoing cost of powering them. Your average consumer does not. Not only do they not know, they do not care, until they feel their privacy is being eroded by it. Instead of being mad at people for taking a product advertised to them at face value to just be a useful thing for them to use, and not something actively designed to spy on them and then use that collected information to bombard them with ads, why don't we just say to companies: hey, it's no longer acceptable to sell loss-leader products that perform a handful of user-friendly functions that also then double as privacy violations and harass customers with ads? If we kill surveillance capitalism, not only do we de-fang the advertising industry which is actively making every tech product on the face of the earth worse to suit it's purposes, not only do we permanently end the privacy issue on the side of users, we also reduce climate threatening emissions and hideous power waste that is required to make all this atrocious shit work. And you might say "well they SHOULD care!" and yeah, I kinda agree, and also I recognize that people have a lot of shit they already have to care about, and frankly, I don't think they should have to care about this. I don't think you should have to worry if your new TV is spying on you, I just think you should be able to buy a fuckin' TV, and take it home, and plug some shit into it, and watch TV. I think that's a better world to strive for than all the consumer awareness we can muster. I am perfectly able to, but don't WANT to have to shop for electronics like I'm actively negotiating a hostage crisis where the hostage is my ability to jerk off in my living room without 3 ad agencies knowing about it, and I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take.
• neilv 1y ago
  I recently bought a Kindle/Fire device pre-owned, to save money. But seeing full-screen shitty consumer products ads on the 'covers of my books', sitting around my home was so depressing, I paid the extra $10-$15, to retroactively turn it into an ad-free device.[1] Though, even with Special Offers disabled, it still puts oversized icons for marketing promotions, bursting out of the search bar at the top of the home screen. This is one of the reasons I find the home screen a little bit unpleasant to look at, and avoid it as much as possible. [1] If you want to remove Special Offers from your own Kindle/Fire (I don't know about Echo Show), go to https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices , click on the icon for your device, and scroll down, to find an option to disable Special Offers by paying some amount. IIRC, it said the amount was the difference between the original retail prices of with-ads and ads-free versions of the device. I've also heard some people can get Special Offers removed for free by customer service, but in my case it seemed like a fair deal, so I just paid the modest fee.
  • exe34 1y ago
    turn off WiFi and transfer by usb.
    • RandomBacon 1y ago
      Amazon no longer allows eBook downloads from their website.
      • henry2023 1y ago
        Then don’t buy from them, plenty of venues
        • EA-3167 1y ago
          I’ve purchased and backed up over 700 kindle books over the years. The day Amazon made backups impossible I switched to Kobo and have never looked back. Amazon can can go forth and multiply with itself.
• nipperkinfeet 1y ago
  These days, the general rule is to avoid buying anything 'smart'. They are all filled with advertisements and data-sharing practices and are designed to target you through their user interface and applications. They bombard you with offers for their other products and deals.
  • alex1138 1y ago
    I'm technically ignorant on this but would GDPR apply to this type of thing as well? (I hope so)
    • Gigachad 1y ago
      You'd be able to opt out of data collection and request a copy of your data, but not opt out of adverts in general.
    • torben-friis 1y ago
      Not really. GDPR deals with privacy and personal data handling. There are directives about transparency in the costs or charges tied to a sale, but it is not immediate that it covers including new ads as an extra burden on the consumer. Same for other directives regarding misleading advertising and the like, hard to prove that this new anti feature goes against the advertised product. it’s all very indirect and hazy, we’re in need of more protections for consumer to truly own their hardware.
    • gl-prod 1y ago
      GDPR doesnt block ads
  • sa-code 1y ago
    "Smart" just means enshittegenic. Ripe for enshittification. To stick to the metaphor (apologies if this isn't HN friendly) Smart TV? Fart TV Smart display? Fart display Smart fridge? Fart fridge
    • inquirerGeneral 1y ago
• Agingcoder 1y ago
  I sometimes wonder whether there’s an eu vs us difference here. At least when it comes to tv, I found the hard way ( a long time ago ) that the amount of ads Americans are exposed to is simply unbearable. This extends to youtube and similar services. Now, everything is global - so are we looking at European users or American users complaining ? If an American user says it’s an unbearable, then it’s unusable. If a European user complains… it depends ( and these days, it’s at least to me unusable, but I obviously can’t speak for everyone)
  • xandrius 1y ago
    I still think the eu user is correct, no amount of ads when using a product is ok. Imagine buying a tennis racket and being interrupted, as you are playing, to be told to buy something else. That would be ridiculous but that's we're been told is a valid business model today.
    • abstractbill 1y ago
      Imagine buying a tennis racket and being interrupted, as you are playing, to be told to buy something else. Sadly I've come to believe the pendulum is going to have to swing about this far before it might have a chance of swinging back.
• gbin 1y ago
  Simple enshitification, literally everything is going down that road. Somewhere a VP with a dashboard is super happy: they will get their $1M bonus and "après moi le déluge". Even local businesses get snatched by PE firms left and right, prices skyrocket, customers are pissed.... Is the business-consumer relationship valued at exactly $0? There is no system we can think of to avoid that?
  • krapp 1y ago
    >There is no system we can think of to avoid that? There is, but it requires thinking outside the box of "free market" capitalism, something most Americans are incapable of.
    • gbin 1y ago
      Please elaborate.
      • baq 1y ago
        Not op, but usually this is a shortcut of saying that the regulator prioritizes businesses instead of consumers and it predictably makes the market not as efficient for consumers as it is for businesses, i.e. consumers don’t even have a choice of getting what they want.
      • krapp 1y ago
        More socialism, less capitalism. Believe that governments are capable of more than venal corruption and committing violence against their citizens and build a society in which people have value beyond what the market can extract from them.
• Terr_ 1y ago
  We're way overdue to abolish the DMCA, in particular the "anti-circumvention" felonies. It shouldn't be a crime for me to customize the product I purchased. Or to sell people a kit to do the customization themselves.
  • ACCount37 1y ago
    Better yet: ban hardware vendors from denying the user an ability to customize software. They don't have to make it easy, but they should be forced to give a way to opt out of walled gardens and bypass "secure boot".
    • mindslight 1y ago
      Better yet: declare hardware and software to be two independent products/markets, and that tying them together is illegal anti-competitive bundling. Software products must be developed based on publicly-available hardware documentation, and using unpublished documentation from the hardware manufacturer should be illegal. The points where this might seem a little wonky (how do you deal with a hardware manufacturer constantly bumping chip revs) is exactly a constraint the market should be optimizing around in order to produce more end-user legibility/autonomy.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  • Andrex 1y ago
    Throw away the DMCA and you throw away all safe harbors for websites, and then the internet is truly screwed. There's no way the current congress would ever accept such a thing again -- Section 230 has been weaponized against it already. What we should be saying is Improve the DMCA. You've already clued into the biggest thing that needs to change (DRM/anti-anti-circumvention). Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is unpopular to say in HN-type circles but the DMCA is actually not that bad and mostly works as it should.
    • 1y ago
• jm4 1y ago
  Amazon sucks. They are one of the greediest companies there is. What they do with online shopping, logistics, AWS is incredible. They are in a different league and could generate more revenue than any company could ever need by just doing those things well. But that’s not enough. They have to stuff ads into everything and find every possible way to piss off customers all in the name of another buck.
  • aworks 1y ago
    How do you measure greediness? I worked for companies 4 levels removed from the consumer and they were all very motivated to get financial results for the current quarter. Despite their advantages, I assume Amazon is now short-term focused as well. Having said that, I finally tossed my Alexa devices.
    • bigiain 1y ago
      > How do you measure greediness? I think a decent first indicator might be "Is the Founder and/or CEO a billionaire?"
      • Nasrudith 1y ago
        That only indicates if they got in early or not. As notorious as CEO pay packages are they won't make you a billionaire. Really 'greed' in many cases is just envy projected. It doesn't matter how efficient or lazy the subject is, just that it makes the observer mad.
• GeekyBear 1y ago
  I've had two different family members complain that now days when they unlock their Fire Tablet, it launches the Amazon Store app to display the product page of whatever product was being advertised when they unlock the tablet. Is Amazon charging businesses who use their ad platform a fee based on how many times they display a product page?
• rconti 1y ago
  Holy crap, I thought "full volume" was metaphorically speaking until I clicked on the link. I'd smash the thing with a hammer.
• Liftyee 1y ago
  This is part of why I refuse to purchase things that further enshittification on principle, even if it means "putting up with" an open-source alternative. Anecdotally, I think that open-source software/hardware only ever gets better (because if it got worse, someone would fork it, etc...) while proprietary software will eventually succumb to rent-seeking and decline. I've seen many open source projects go from barely usable to matching their proprietary counterparts. Shoutout to Immich, full-featured self-hosted Google Photos alternative and my new favourite open-source project.
  • Andrex 1y ago
    Google Photos is an odd example to use, since it hasn't been enshittified (yet) beyond some questionable UI redesigns. I agree self hosting your photos is the way to go, though.
• syntaxing 1y ago
  I make an explicit decision not to get any Amazon hardware within my household. I don’t even trust the Eero brand.
  • Andrex 1y ago
    They got me by the balls with Kindle. Someone(/me if I had enough time) should make some kind of LLM scraper extension for Amazon's Web Reader. Run it on your own ebooks while you're signed in and you get the EPUBs. Maybe this already exists... I know there was some kind of cutoff earlier this year for unDRMing your Kindle books, but I definitely missed that by a mile.
    • boldlybold 1y ago
      Buy the ebook, then download a beautiful DRM-free and guilt-free version from Anna's Archive? win-win.
    • pixelmelt 1y ago
      I've been working on exactly this! After buying a book and having an awful exerience in their native reader I realized they no longer let you download your ebooks. Thus began the war on their web reader, they have some interesting defenses on how they encode the book, its basically a bunch of SVG paths that render to letters that are mapped to IDs that change on every request to fetch book data (the most you can fetch at once is 5 pages) the SVG paths also contain micro variations so an A on one page will never have the same path on another, you have to render and fill in every unique letter in the book and compare it to every other to create a unified mapping and THEN compare it to the letters of the actual font its using to actually find out what letter each character actually is. The only thing I have left to do is get newlines working properly and package it all up nicely for release.
      • boldlybold 1y ago
        Damn, that's an impressive obfuscation and debugging. If you get around to releasing it I would be interested.
• xrd 1y ago
  I had buyers regret after getting a Mycroft II device a few years ago. Lots of drama there. I still think it was an inspiring vision but you can't spell hardware without hard. But then I recently found neon which allows me to repurpose the device. And, it is incredible. I recall trying to build something for the Google devices and it was an awful experience. Getting root ssh access on my Mycroft device is amazing, and I have tailscale on it to boot. And, no ads, ever.
• reactordev 1y ago
  I’m of the mind to stop using consumer tech entirely. TV’s with ads before ads when you just want to watch a show. Tablets opening store pages on their own. Alexa listening in on every conversation. Smartphones tracking your every movement, app, contact, network, website you visit. It’s completely fucked. I got rid of social media a couple years ago and never looked back. I think I might take it even further and just remove all consumer tech from my life. Just a linux box.
• aomix 1y ago
  I’m afraid to upgrade from my ~6 year old LG OLED with a damaged corner because I pair it with an Apple TV and only see Apple ads occasionally on the Home Screen. I don’t know if a newer tv would give me the same experience.
  • mbreese 1y ago
    All TVs with an hdmi input (where the input is the default input used) will work for you. If the TV doesn’t show the last used input (so it could show you ads), that would be a major problem. Thankfully, I don’t think we are there yet for TVs that aren’t marketed ad supported … yet.
  • mapontosevenths 1y ago
    Most new TV's are fine if you just never connect them to network. Except FireTV's. They complain constantly about the missing internet connection because they REALLY want to show you those ads.
  • hapticmonkey 1y ago
    New LG OLED TV’s are fine. You can keep them disconnected and just use external HDMI inputs without any nagging or issue.
  • matty22 1y ago
    Sceptre TVs. They sell large, dumb TVs that do not contain any networking equipment at all. https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.html https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
    • dark__paladin 1y ago
      Yes, this is the answer in an ideal world. In practice, it's nearly impossible to buy Sceptre dumb TVs these days.
      • matty22 1y ago
        They are listed right there on the website. Add one to your cart and check out. What's impossible about that?
• mielioort 1y ago
  [dead]
• cyode 1y ago
  Benjamin Franklin was so close. "Nothing is certain but death ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶.̶"̶, taxes, and ads."
  • neverfrankled 1y ago
    Franklin was a publisher, and sold advertising, no? Washington wasn't much of a Temperance preacher neither.
    • morkalork 1y ago
      Now I'm wondering, the first news papers were sold out on the street. How long was it before there were ads in them? And was there the same intellectual hand-wringing about it at the time?
      • Nasrudith 1y ago
        The first newspaper ad was for a book and in the 1620s. I am not certain about intellectual handwringing but there were people who considered making money through commerce at all as morally wrong due to it involving neither toil as they recognized it nor might-makes-right. Based upon some truly stupid ideas of "fair price" and assumptions of fixed universal prices meaning that any merchant had to be a scammer.
        • morkalork 1y ago
          >people who considered making money through commerce at all as morally wrong due to it involving neither toil as they recognized it How very puritanical! That was the style at the time though.
  • FiatLuxDave 1y ago
    I'm certain we need to start taxing ads.
    • EasyMark 1y ago
• Aloisius 1y ago
  The most egregious thing for me is that companies aren't disclosing that these devices are used to advertise to you before you purchase them. Nowhere on the Amazon Echo Show product page is there any mention of advertisements. The product screenshots don't show advertisements nor does the product video. It absolutely should be illegal for a company to push a software update to an individual's device designed just to enrich themselves - certainly not without informed consent.
• everyone 1y ago
  I'm really confused as to what is the point of that thing and why anyone would ever want one in the 1st place?
• robomartin 1y ago
  I see many comments that express the same level of disgust I have for modern TV's, of nearly every brand, having mutated into intrusive digital signage with integrated behavioral tracking in my home. The question is: Would you pay $1000 to $3000 more (depending on size, etc.) for a TV with none of that. Zero. I would.
  • dmalik 1y ago
    No need to connect or use any smart tv feature. How much is your time worth? Apple TV is the best experience (not even close to FireTV) for the cost of it. There are ways to get completely ad free if you have time. I've been using a HTPC for close to 20 years for example.
    • robomartin 1y ago
      I think that if you want a modern 70+ inch screen I am not sure that plugging anything into and HDMI input will do it. You need to lobotomize the TV. I could be wrong. I am probably going to explore this to some depth next year.
      • hapticmonkey 1y ago
        Depends on the TV brand. I use an LG OLED TV and it’s 100% fine being used as a “dumb” TV. I keep it disconnected and use an AppleTV. I never see the TV’s operating system unless I want to adjust picture settings.
    • dingaling 1y ago
      > No need to connect or use any smart tv feature. Many 'smart' devices now have their own 5G modems, you don't have a choice of connecting or not.
      • bentley 1y ago
        > Many How many? Can you provide some examples?
  • 1y ago
• fud101 1y ago
  Can we stop posting amazon content here? i'm addicted to that damn site.
• ycombinatornews 1y ago
  Same with any Amazon device. I wish there was a way to recycle Alexa so it’s not just a e-garbage… after all my personal data and insights were mined
  • osigurdson 1y ago
    Don't stress about it. The junk was created the moment you bought it. Take it to the dump, they usually have some kind of electronics recycling so maybe less than 100% goes to the landfill ultimately.
    • ycombinatornews 1y ago
      Thank you and agree! I am waiting for a good moment to get rid of that ad display listening device. Life gets its way!
• diogenescynic 1y ago
  Amazon has really gone downhill in quality lately. It feels worse and worse and is more expensive all the time. They need competition. Walmart doesn't seem to be a true threat.
• JCM9 1y ago
  People will study the Amazon devices downfall for decades to come. Amazon managed to get these things in everyone’s home and people generally liked them. The stage was set for Amazon to knock it out of the park on AI and then they completely blew it. Like epic once in a generation missed the boat. Now it’s an annoying device that shows ads. Everyone I know is tossing these things in the trash now.
  • rhetocj23 1y ago
    Sounds like the vision for this stuff was playing into made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet.
    • bigiain 1y ago
      Yeah, Amazon jumped too early. The real business model that's winning the "made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet" is LLMs marketed as "Just about to turn into Artificial General Intelligence and turn the world into a post scarcity utopia" with the widely known but unacknowledged understanding that what they really mean is post scarcity for people who are already billionaires, not for the people we intend to put out of work -and that they don't need to create AGI for that, just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour.
      • themafia 1y ago
        > just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour. They're already there. Inflation nearly doubled prices for consumer goods while wages have remained static. People are clearly too paralyzed to effectively organize their labor pool against these monopolists. > Amazon jumped too early. I disagree. The platform is cheap to manufacture and efficient to operate. They kept the walls on the garden too high. There was never any push to bring third parties or developers onto the platform in a credible way and never on an even footing with Amazon's own offerings. They clutched it too tightly. It was never going to pan out in the long term. It was a dazzling loss leader right up until Amazon brass realized it was unsustainable. Then the usual conversion into selling your own users data and cramming every spare inch with visual ads came as predictably as it always does.
• dreamcompiler 1y ago
  > the company is working to improve the ad experience on Alexa devices There is one and only one way to "improve the ad experience" and we all know what it is but for some strange reason the companies showing the ads never seem to figure it out.
  • N_Lens 1y ago
    The proctologist is working to improve the spiky dildo experience. Thanks for your patience.
    • cornholio 1y ago
      We've got our best spike sharpeners working on improvements.
  • noir_lord 1y ago
    > "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," (Upton Sinclair) Time and time again over my career I’ve run into that one.
• dreamcompiler 1y ago
  I was thinking just today how nice it would be if I had a private AI that I could just ask "What streaming network that I already pay for can I watch Superman on without paying extra for it or watching ads?" and have it simply answer "HBO." And now, after reading this comment, somebody is on the phone setting up a meeting with VCs for Monday morning to pitch this idea. Only the VCs are gonna insist that the AI make me listen to an ad for rainbow sparkle toothpaste before it tells me "HBO." And this is why we can't have nice things.
  • baq 1y ago
    I just want a box of AI with a USB cable and hook it up to home assistant.
• kaonwarb 1y ago
  I can't reconcile Amazon's growing flood of ads with their famous first Leadership Principle: "Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust."
  • testdelacc1 1y ago
    Amazon’s leaders put revenue before principles I guess.
  • piggg 1y ago
    "advertisers are customers too"
    • fainpul 1y ago
      Exactly. For a company that offers "free", ad-supported services, the customers are the advertisers, not the users.
  • tim333 1y ago
    The main leader is off swanning around on superyachts and giving the customer thing a miss.
• aaronbrethorst 1y ago
  I have tried building 'apps' for Alexa on a few occasions over the years. The developer experience has always been such trash that I've simply given up in some combination of frustration, despair, and disgust. I'm not surprised that the end user experience has continued to get worse and worse.
• jmyeet 1y ago
  I've never had a "smart" speaker or a "smart" display or a "smart" fridge and the only "smart" TV I've had has been intentionally not connected to the Internet. I have got a Nest and a "smart" washing machine and dryer. Some random thoughts: 1. I've literally never wanted a cloud-connected always-on microphone in my home and I'm surprised anyone does; 2. All of the home automation software is awful, bar none. The only thing it's going to impact in society is being the source of future DDoS attacks most likely. Every time I've tried to use it I'm met with unhelpful error messages, networking software that can't get a DHCP IP address or a million other faults. Or the hardware is just deprecated in favor of the newest, shiniest softare or API (I'm looking at you, Google Matter); 3. "Smart" displays are probably most akin to "smart" TVs. No good comes from connecting TVs to the Internet. It's just uploading data about your viewing habits to sell as well as inserting ads. Some TVs get pretty aggressive about this too. I've heard tales of them trying to find an open network. If any TV did that to me I'd put a drill through the Wifi chip. But "smart" displays have to be connected to the Internet. I have no control over such a device so I'll simply never get one. I honestly don't know who buys this stuff.
  • allarm 1y ago
    > All of the home automation software is awful I understand that you’re referring to major vendor software, but Home Assistant is pretty decent, if not amazing. Try it out, check the success stories; it’s mind blowing what you can do with it.
• crossroadsguy 1y ago
  It’s like willingly increasing your own attack surface when you are already under attack. Also, let’s face it, it’s not just Amazon.
• asfs4fsdfadf 1y ago
  And, the prices of these malware boxes kill the market for any civilized competitors.
• ath3nd 1y ago
  [dead]
• Havoc 1y ago
  Always seemed suspicious to me. Pricing seems very low for the hardware provided, requires continuous cloud services over years and the claim that it'll boost amazon sales always felt a little thin
• matty22 1y ago
  > “This is getting ridiculous and I'm about to just toss the whole thing and move back to Google” "This pan is very hot, I gotta get outta here!" * jumps into fire *
• ryandvm 1y ago
  I regretted someone getting me an Alexa screen as a gift almost immediately. There's something viscerally annoying about being shown a fucking ad in my own kitchen. It's like a disgusting little highway billboard right next next to the flour tin.