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Comment by haolez | Hacker News Reader

Who wants to be a co-founder with me on a company that's focused on just making dumb appliances? We can start with TVs - just remove all the smart stuff, make it compatible with apps for whoever wants them without an additional Apple TV-like device, and that's it. Start building trust with consumers and find out a way of guaranteeing that this trust would never be betrayed. It's just a boring company forever.

Economy of scale would be against us, but maybe there is a way to surpass it. Fun thought exercise :)

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> find out a way of guaranteeing that this trust would never be betrayed

I have no idea how to solve this. The pressure to cash out just gets stronger as the business succeeds more. Even starting the "business" as a non-profit is no guarantee, as we've seen with OpenAI!

Agreed. This is the hardest problem and I don't know how to solve it either.

Would it be possible to structure the company so that it can never be sold in this fashion?

Maybe something related with prediction markets, like punishing the company heavily if it ever betrays these core values. Just thinking out loud.

You could certainly create a pro-user EULA that specifically locks in your company's ideals and forbids reneging on them in the future. This is essentially what the GPL is - it's an end user license agreement that is exceptionally user friendly.

Pro-user EULAs just aren't popular because they limit future monetization paths for the company, but it sounds like that is exactly what you want.

Is this idea viable? Who are these smart consumers and do they really exist in everyday life?

I think if you went in a Framework direction (opensource, high quality hardware, techie oriented, etc.) you would be able to make it work for a small high end market, particularly if you aimed it having a great "pc-connected" experience.

Smart consumers of this flavor are a minority but they exist. People who care can already bypass the "smart" features of mainstream TVs, thereby enjoying low prices and negating the privacy risks. Or they can pair a large computer monitor and separate audio system that never had smart features to begin with. To make the business work you need smart consumers who are privacy-conscious and are willing to pay more for it instead of doing a little more work on their own.

It is a bet on two things:

1. the enshitification of smart devices would continue progressing and, at some point, our product would just be better and enough reason to migrate 2. a single, catastrophic privacy event would change the public perception on the importance of privacy and trusting your own devices, which would change the value perception of dumb appliances

Any one of those two would suffice to make the business viable, in my opinion.

Why not keep your Smart TV disconnected from the internet instead?

For how long will this work? Eventually, these companies are just going to insert LTE capabilities and use their own connection for data acquisition.

> make it compatible with apps for whoever wants them without an additional Apple TV-like device

What do you mean by that? Isn't that the "smart stuff" you want to remove?

Smart stuff should be opt in, not opt out. Some people just don't care and just want to watch YouTube.

You could surpass that by just charging more. I would pay more for a high quality dumb set.

Sounds kind of dumb.

The Dumb Company is a great name, to be fair :)

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