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gyulai 4 hours ago

Reminds me of a comment I wrote just recently:

» I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.

My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age. « [1]

With that frame (the target audience for smart TVs is old people), "needing glasses" is not all that far-fetched.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462816

recursivecaveat 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I was going to disagree by saying that the menus are extremely confusing to the elderly. However if the goal is to extract money from them by generating confusion about what is an on-demand vs a streaming piece of media; you could not design a better software system. Reminds me of the theory that micro-transaction revenue in video games has driven menu UI in the direction of confusing and disorientating the player.