People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
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".
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.
Yet we have plenty of internet outside of the USA where we don't have the DMCA. There are various laws that tackle some parts of it, but there's also consumer-friendly laws as well (e.g. the right to repair although that's for physical goods).
But we should not tolerate broken laws because they have some benefits, when we have the power to remove and replace bad laws with good ones.
Perhaps there could be a government-mandated requirement to distinguish between "buy" and "rent". If you get a device bundled with a service, then there should be a subscription fee you have to pay for it without the ability to outright "buy" it. That would make it very obvious to people whether they are buying something to own or merely renting it. My take is very simplistic here but I hope I managed to convey the concept.
I disagree, it's much less simple in the long run. (A phenomenon I'm sure is painfully-familiar to a lot of software developers.)
First, it's playing whack-a-mole with just one of many kinds of infringement on the user's ownership. It does nothing to protect against aggressive spying "telemetry", against forcing users to make an Acme Fridge Online Account to continue, or against standard/free features being "discontinued" and then introducing a suspiciously similar paid-subscription option.
Second, even in that narrow "showing ads" aspect, there are too many dimensions to lock down by spec. For example, consider the difference between a system that shows X minutes of ads when idle which are instantly-dismissable, versus another system that shows fewer/shorter/smaller ads which are unskippable phases of normal operation.
In contrast, freeing users to fight back--and to share what they've developed--encourages a democratized and counterbalancing force, which will naturally be strongly aligned to consumer interests regardless of yearly electoral changes.
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.
I still have a bunch of standard echo devices and they seem to be getting worse and worse over time. They completely missed the AI boat despite being positioned to be the ones to bring it to everyone’s homes and even the basic stuff seems to be getting worse. The devices misunderstand and fail to hear queries entirely more than they used to.
I’m honestly very tempted to switch to Google home at this point. I’d consider switching to Apple but I have one HomePod specifically for some home automation integration and it seems even worse whenever I try to use it.
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.
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 , 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.
Thinking about it now, he probably meant it was OK regarding their contracts with studios. Our engineering chain of command was completely obsessed with customer experience. The business side, not so much.
Such a metrics-driven company will surely know something about how incentives drive outcomes.
Not sure they really care about many metrics these days.
“Our primary investors are also leveraged heavily in the commercial real estate market and they’re losing their shirts and we need their money, so…”
And then we didn't have enough desks, outlets, and internet was slow. Lmao.
Plus, most TOSes have very little legal effect, in either direction.
Fascinating isn't it? It continues over decades. I cannot recall ever once opening an overt ad among, what, hundreds of thousands? Google `subverts' in search I've opened, but that only layers their more desperate enshittings. Newpipe escaped and saved me from Youtube's thousands of bearskin hoodies, butter and bowel movements, pink salt trick, something about men's erections and a tomato.
These must be smart people who engineer this, this `inverse' offensive ad targeting, it must be for some brilliant objective, but I remain completely lost at what it could possibly be.
Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.
Maybe one day they'll turn it into an yearly thing to avoid ads.
I respect that they offered the option at purchase time and then at any point after, and at a reasonable price.
And isn't this an option that the everything-is-a-market HN libertarians would like to have: People who want less expensive, say, TVs, can get the existing market price for that. And people who don't like that ads/surveillance, but want the nice economies-of-scale hardware, can pay what the brand would've made on advertising and surveillance, to opt-out, for that unit?
Ideally, a lot of the current surveillance and advertising (implemented almost entirely by HN's own field) would be outlawed, but paid opt-out can sometimes be a reasonable pragmatic individual compromise, for now.
Or maybe I'm wrong - did the $X you paid for ads-free also give you root access?
Which I bought for pragmatic business reasons.
Don't worry, I have a home full of Debian, OpenWrt, Coreboot, a non-'smart' TV, GrapheneOS, etc.
There are no IoT devices, and I go out of my way to avoid buying devices with IoT shoved in. For reasons obvious to people who know how they work, and who know what their business priorities and track records are.
Also, in startups, I usually use open source, avoid unwarranted vendor lock-in and certain known-jerk companies, and try to work with people who are similarly-minded about such practices (it's a useful signal of better-than-average people who care, IME).
Amazon can can go forth and multiply with itself.
That said, Kobo is great if they have the book you're looking for.
No internet required. No sync software required. It’s quite nice!
The update script was pretty much this (on a laptop set up not to automatically mount removable filesystems):
#!/bin/sh -x
DeviceMountPoint="/media/pocketbook"
mount "$DeviceMountPoint" || exit 1
cd ~/doc || exit 1
rsync -crltv . "${DeviceMountPoint}/."
Status=$?
umount "$DeviceMountPoint"
exit $Status
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB-FS_PocketBook_MYSERIALNUMBER-0:0 /media/pocketbook vfat user,noauto 0 0if buying isn't owning, copying isn't stealing.
Is Amazon charging businesses who use their ad platform a fee based on how many times they display a product page?
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.
Time and time again over my career I’ve run into that one.
Some not so reliable sources I found:
https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/q2i0by/is_it_true_t...
https://www.reddit.com/r/plotholes/comments/11khig/comment/c...
Source? Like 20+ years of ubiquitous surveillance, tracking and micro-targeting.. and yet non-pet owners still get ads for dog food, males get ads for feminine hygiene products, single people are offered deals on family vacations, and people who just bought a car get car advertisements for the next 3-5 years which only taper off when it might actually be time to buy another car.
It’s nothing inherently bad with “smart” devices. Just the business models behind them.
All I really need or want is something I can plug a few gaming consoles into... so HDMI, composite and preferably s-video. No bells or whistles or Internet connection necessary.
Another benefit — advertising displays are also designed to be always-on and last much longer than consumer devices.
The other side of the coin? Because of the first two points, they are also rather cost-prohibitive.
Nevertheless, anyone know where I can pick up a good one?
Not if you steal one! Which has 3 great benefits, you get a free screen, wherever you stole it from no longer bombards passersby with intrusive advertising, and whoever though doing that was a good idea is now out the cost of their expensive screen.
> Nevertheless, anyone know where I can pick up a good one?
Your local shopping mall late at night...
<All jokes. Honest. Although as Hunter S. Thompson said “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me,”>
(I hope so)
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.
To stick to the metaphor (apologies if this isn't HN friendly)
Smart TV? Fart TV
Smart display? Fart display
Smart fridge? Fart fridge
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.
Your second point is about the extent to which manufacturers are allowed lock their product behind proprietary interfaces (protected by the excesses of the DMCA, and lack of compliance with Right to Repair). Remember the 2023 bankruptcy of e-bike manufacturer VanMoof, locking out its customers, even ones who had purchased it? Probably legislatures will only pass meaningful consumer laws after a wave of smart bankruptcies and data asset transfers. If even then. Perhaps one flashpoint will be the rise in subprime auto lenders using "kill switches" as a high-tech repossession alternative. How are consumers protected when the company itself fails (as is currently happening with Tricolor [1], likely followed by others)?
[0]: https://www.impulselabs.com/blog/the-past-and-future-of-smar...
[1]: https://www.kbb.com/car-news/a-big-auto-lender-went-bankrupt...
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).
But yes, the don't make them like they used to -- in fact they never did!
People said the same thing 25 years ago, and 25 years before that.
A modern fridge is probably cheaper (corrected for inflation) and more energy efficient.
Moreover, few appliances lives to be 30 years old just because they don't break.
Case in point: my better half is looking for a new oven. Because the 10y old one we have is noisy, compared to the new smart ovens. (I personally hate the fact that the top models are so smart, I must spend a second or two watching animated Siemens logo, before it's ready for input).
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.
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.
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.
Having said that, I finally tossed my Alexa devices.
I think a decent first indicator might be "Is the Founder and/or CEO 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.
"Nothing is certain but death ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶.̶"̶, taxes, and ads."
Washington wasn't much of a Temperance preacher neither.
How very puritanical! That was the style at the time though.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
Except FireTV's. They complain constantly about the missing internet connection because they REALLY want to show you those ads.
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.
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.
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.
Dumb question: why not flip through the pages, take screenshots, then use OCR? Maybe some kind of jank Amazon DRMalike?
Also I've released the tool and a post about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226
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?
There is, but it requires thinking outside the box of "free market" capitalism, something most Americans are incapable of.
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.
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.
I agree self hosting your photos is the way to go, though.
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.
"This pan is very hot, I gotta get outta here!"
* jumps into fire *
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.
> “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.
1. I get a lot more value out of (some) Reddit threads than I get out of most online journalism, including Ars Technica, so I’m never surprised to see really bad quality from journalism.
2. I’ve had two Google displays in my home for over 5 years, and have never seen a single ad on mine (with default settings / no hacking). So it’s not that surprising (to me anyway) to see these reactions from customers (unless you already had higher expectations from Google vs. Amazon).
If you want change, you have to vote and lobby for it. That's what your enemies are doing [2].
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2014/02/13/googles_secret_androi...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/isps-spent-235-m...
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.
Because they’ve got eyes, memory, and a working brain? Every product Amazon has ever put out has wound up with ads in it, as has Amazon itself, so why in gods name wouldn’t this new one be covered in ads? It’s not 2005, this stuff shouldn’t be surprising anymore - everyone is on Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, and if you can’t recognize that those are ad platforms from ad companies and you somehow haven’t heard from anywhere anything about the surveillance capital aspect of this (not the term, but the actual practice), I’m not sure what to say at this point except we fucking tried.
And I agree, we _shouldn’t_ have to worry about any of this crap, but were we’re well past the point where that should be considered a reasonable expectation by anyone. We’re a quarter century into this now, anyone who’s still surprised by it, yeah, that’s a “them” problem.
Because not everyone has been immersed in that world the whole time. A whole lot of people don't know fucking anything about Amazon beyond it being the best store on the Internet. I've got relatives who still don't understand email requires Internet access brother, because when you're not a nerd, this computer shit just doesn't matter to you. I get that it's hard to empathize, but like, a HUGE swath of the public just doesn't fucking care. They don't know how computers work, they don't know how surveillance advertising works, all they know is the man at Verizon said email is this icon, and web browsing is this icon, and their grandchildren are in this other icon. That is the extent of their technical knowledge and they desire no more.
And like, I don't they should need to have it. I don't need to know shit about plumbing, about electricity, about carpentry, or any one of dozens of specializations utterly crucial to my ongoing existence in this world. I know tech, because it's my job. People who's job it isn't shouldn't need to know shit to move safely through the world.
There is this, though:
I don't need to know shit about plumbing, about electricity, about carpentry, or any one of dozens of specializations utterly crucial to my ongoing existence in this world.
That's the crucial difference. In each of these cases you can contact a specialist to make sure your basement doesn't flood or you don't get decapitated by your roof caving in. More to the point: you know when it's time to contact a specialist and you can easily find one. With everything around consumer electronics and hostile practises neither is the case, so you somehow have to impart that information to the uninitiated with whatever means necessary, so they - at least - recognise the limitations of their knowledge. Then regulate away the extremes.
If we don't act on these practises - and soon - we'll drown.
The question is: Would you pay $1000 to $3000 more (depending on size, etc.) for a TV with none of that. Zero.
I would.
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.
Many 'smart' devices now have their own 5G modems, you don't have a choice of connecting or not.
How many? Can you provide some examples?
I'm not surprised that the end user experience has continued to get worse and worse.