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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> but they've been on a path of enshittification since about 2017. My family bought a brand new Vizio TV for our living room in 2022 and that thing is nothing but headaches.

It sounds like you knew it was on the path of enshittification since 2017, so then WHY would you buy one 5 years into that descent that you decry?

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I'm a teenager, I don't spend the money in this house.

Apologies then for assuming the buy decision was up to you or that you could influence it.

Yeah, it's about the same as how my dad buys those Amazon Echo things. I absolutely hate them and am incredibly uncomfortable with having them in the house, but he sees no issue with them whatsoever despite the fact nobody uses them and they just suck up our power. He's quite the impulse customer however, so I can see why he would buy anything Amazon would show him that remotely resembles a "good deal". He was really confused when he got that big Echo Show they came out with that could run Fire TV applications because it was like $30 one Christmas and I told him I really hated it.

> despite the fact nobody uses them and they just suck up our power.

As a teenager, I would be subversive and unplug them

Don't think I haven't done that XD

This would be consistent with it being, like all TVs, terrible, and getting worse, but not quite having reached the incredible heights of awfulness of the average TV.

TVs have become a bit like printers; one starts to suspect that the manufacturers gain some sort of actual benefit from making them ever more annoying.

(Personal conspiracy theory: An evil billionaire left their money to, er, the opposite of a charity, which compensates companies for making products deliberately more irritating.)

> Personal conspiracy theory: An evil billionaire left their money to, er, the opposite of a charity, which compensates companies for making products deliberately more irritating.

Bigger driver are consumers’ demand for high returns from their pension funds.

Eh, dunno; some of it, of course, is attempts to increase profitability, but some of it just feels gratuitous; crapness for its own sake.

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