this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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AssholeDesign

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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.

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Yes, I know, Roku sucks for a variety of reasons, and we can just add this to the pile.

Roku launched a new feature, Backdrops, which is just a screensaver that they foist upon you. But they must have gotten complaints about screen burn in, because months after the lauch, they pushed an update that adds this notification pop-up.

A few things that should have been obvious:

  • A television with the screensaver on is probably unattended.
  • The point of a rotating screensaver is to avoid static images that cause screen burn
  • The pop-up never goes away and covers the bottom of the screen across all images, with the QR code in stark black on white, which is most likely to create screen burn.

The thing is, this is such a small issue, but it belies a foundational disrespect for users. The carelessness and incompetence could be ignored, but the obligatory nature of pushing this out without consent or care is why it fits squarely in asshole territory.

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[โ€“] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That is phenomenal. Just absolutely stunning. The sheer stupidity of how they did that as astounding.

[โ€“] Steve@startrek.website 13 points 2 days ago

Its got that vibe coded energy