Is this legal?
I can only speak for Germany, where it's definitely not.
Can you cite a law?
For future reference.
38 People are looking at this post right now
61–70 of 196 posts
Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now
#62I imagine sometime in 2030 when a 60 yo uncle/aunty sees this "38 people are looking at it", calmly right clicks on the HTML elements and sees the use of math.random and says "Nope, bye bye stupid website".
I think these tricks are closing on their end of life as percentage of internet-native people are increasing.
Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now
#63Incredible that they would implement such a dark pattern using easily discoverable client-side code.
I've seen these kind of messages before on several travel sites, and always immediately figured they were bogus, but I obviously can't be 100% certain they didn't influence me in some way - but how can it possibly be legal to deliberately lie like this to try to trick people into giving you money?
Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Its not illegal. Fulfilling your basic legal obligations is not the definition of integrity , and often the two are at odds.
what is your definition of integrity ?
Integrity -- the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
The definition of integrity requires honesty. Do you think it is honest to tell people "there are 38 rooms left" when you know 38 is a random number?
The definition also requires you to act morally. Do you think that anything legal is moral, and vice versa?
Slavery was legal. German extermination camps were legal. Were these moral?
Smoking weed is illegal. Is it immoral?
Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now
#65one of my friends used to work for Agoda as a software engineer who said similar things about his company using dark patterns to fake urgency. This is very common in the travel industry and i've seen many companies employing similar tactics.
Agoda seems to be owned by Booking Holdings which I think implements these kind of dark patterns most aggressively.
Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The source code literally calls Math.random. I hope that defence wouldn’t fly in court, even if accidentally true.
Always get in the seat of the defense. I would absolutely have made a few headless browsing bots masquarading as users just incase this scenario occurred Look your honor the logs say other users, “people”, were looking regardless of our random function
Would admitting to gaming those numbers make your defence somehow stronger? Or would you withhold that information, and perjure yourself?
Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now
#67I imagine sometime in 2030 when a 60 yo uncle/aunty sees this "38 people are looking at it", calmly right clicks on the HTML elements and sees the use of math.random and says "Nope, bye bye stupid website". I think these tricks are closing on their end of life as percentage of internet-native people are increasing.
Except with wasm and mobile, being able to look at source code will probably also be a thing of the past.
Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it happened to me, a hotel was priced significantly cheaper on Google and on their site initially. When the price went up I just called the hotel and the higher rate was their standard and only rate that they offered. The initial advertised price was never an actual option.
AFAIK Google takes this sort of thing rather seriously... if they ever hear about it.
Problem is that they know almost nobody is going to try to contact Google about this, and of those that do, their emails are almost certainly going to be of ignored.
Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now
#69cheapoair.com did a similar trick on me few years back.
I searched flights and after finding my flight, I clicked book. waiting for few seconds with a spinning thing , I got error message that the airline increased flight price, and I have to pay the new price.
So, I went straight to airline website to check their price, and it was lower than the first low price cheapoair showed me.
since then, I always check direct pricing before booking
Re: 38 People are looking at this post right now
#70I imagine sometime in 2030 when a 60 yo uncle/aunty sees this "38 people are looking at it", calmly right clicks on the HTML elements and sees the use of math.random and says "Nope, bye bye stupid website". I think these tricks are closing on their end of life as percentage of internet-native people are increasing.
I think it's natural to feel like the populace is heading to a more competent place as the elderly age out, but anecdotally I think the opposite might be true. I've met kids in middle/high school who didn't understand how to do rudimentary OS operations, resolve email disconnections, update apps that didn't come from a store etc. The worst was when I taught a semester as an adjunct. Most of my students simply were unable to zip files together and send them as an attachment... Internet native in the iOS era is seemingly much worse than the XP era