Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

regulations.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 542 posts

Re: Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

#171

Post by snegu »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #44
dmix wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 10yrs ago NBA did this to me. They made it impossible to cancel a $99/m sub. Their instructions were login and go to the cancel button but the cancel button was broken and said call this number. But no one ever picked up the number. I will never buy a NBA branded thing after that obvious bullshit scam.

New York Times does this also. As far as I can tell it's literally impossible to cancel a subscription. I had to close the card attached to my account.

That's interesting! I recently cancelled my NYT subscription using their live chat with no trouble at all.

Re: Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

#172

Post by yladiz »

heavyset_go wrote: post #156
jackson1442 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the few things that actually makes me happy with the closed ecosystem of the App Store on iOS. There's virtually no risk with subscriptions in there- they can all be canceled in a few clicks in the Subscriptions section of your Apple ID. And if something's straight up a scam or an accidental (but unconsumed) purchase, you can request a refund from Apple with rather little friction. First-party trials a…

> This is one of the few things that actually makes me happy with the closed ecosystem of the App Store on iOS. And yet there are scams that are costing users $5 million a year, or more, on the iOS App Store[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26794228

There are also scams costing people money without using iOS, for example where the person is tricked into thinking they have a debt and sending thousands of dollars in cash to a random address[1]. What’s your point?

1: https://youtu.be/VrKW58MS12g (it’s the Mark Rober phone scammer video)

Re: Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

#173

Post by sandermvanvliet »

pindab0ter wrote: post #161
sandermvanvliet wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a large online retailer in NL that got told they needed to change their delivery promise because that’s not a promise you can actually keep. So it does happen, but probably not often enough.

Which online retailer was that? Happen to have a news item to link to?

Don’t have a news article because I learned about it through internal channels.

It’s the one that does it for the smiles

Re: Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

#174

Post by snegu »

litoorachure wrote: post #86
shiftpgdn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New York Times does this also. As far as I can tell it's literally impossible to cancel a subscription. I had to close the card attached to my account.

I don't think that's accurate today. I recently cancelled my NYT subscription from their website, didn't even need to call them. How long ago was your experience?

I also was able to easily cancel online a few months ago (not in California). I'm wondering if they changed their policies recently, in which case this complaint is out of date.

Re: Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

#175

Post by gnicholas »

I can't believe that the Microsoft Teams software automatically reinstalls itself in my login items every time I open it. I don't use it often — mostly when I have calls with people at Microsoft — but this happens without fail every time.

As far as I'm concerned, this makes the Teams software malware. I have never had any other software that repeatedly put itself into my login items that wasn't clearly malware. If I worked on Teams, I would be embarrassed.

Re: Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

#176

Post by jupp0r »

offtop5 wrote: post #97
shiftpgdn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New York Times does this also. As far as I can tell it's literally impossible to cancel a subscription. I had to close the card attached to my account.

They way to do this is to run the subscription though something like Google Play. Then you cancel it on Google's side. Be wary if a company avoids Google. For example Tinder started forcing users to subscribe directly instead of using Google. This is because most people cancel almost immediately since once you subscribe you find all your matches are bots. The entire purpose is to make it just hard enough so you think…

This. PayPal works too, probably others.

Re: Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

#177

Post by jrockway »

amluto wrote: post #126
jrockway wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm highly in favor of making this illegal. My credit card expired and I switched my NYT subscription from through their website to through Apple (so I could cancel), and they sent my account to collections! Working with the collections agency to get it removed was easy, however. I guess the law that I would be in favor of is twofold: 1) You must be able to cancel subscriptions from the same website that you created…

I would be in favor of a different approach: a merchant should not, under any circumstances, be able to remove money from an account, charge a credit card, or otherwise take money from someone without the explicit authorization of the customer. In this context, explicit means one of two things: 1. The customer intentionally authorized that specific transaction. A specific transaction means one transaction. If a merch…

I think the explicit authorization is the contract you sign that allows for the subscription. It's already pretty risky to loan people money, and your system makes it even riskier. (Consider the business model of cloud providers; you agree to pay for whatever you use, and then they charge you for last month's usage. If you could just not pay, then the business wouldn't really be viable. You'd have to figure out what you're going to use in advance, and pre-pay, and the consequences for getting it wrong by 1 cent would be unnecessary downtime. Cloud providers of course let you pre-pay at a discount, but having both pre-pay and post-pay make a lot of sense. But, we're all paying extra because of the people that walk away at the end of the month and don't pay their bill.)

It would be worthwhile to consider not letting "click agree" create a binding contract. I think I'm in favor of that.

I agree that things like newspapers don't need to be a subscription or have a contract. On the first of the month they should just pop up a dialog that asks if you still want the subscription, and if so, it charges your card for 1 month. I would certainly like that, but it does carry a risk on my end -- if they go out of business on the second of the month, I'm stuck paying for 29 days of the subscription I can't use.

Like I said, the big problem is not being able to cancel. That's why I buy subscriptions through Apple -- there's always a cancel button. I think we should make that mandatory for every subscription provider.

Re: Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

#178

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

burkaman wrote: post #124
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #47

I had an experience a couple of days ago with exactly this type of thing (I downloaded the comment form, and I'll send it in). In this case, it nearly cost the app maker a sale (I doubt they'll go out of business on the loss of my sale. As it happened, they didn't actually lose the sale). I wanted to ID some of the plants in my yard, looking for native vs. introduced, so I downloaded a couple of apps. One was a good…

Have you tried Seek ( https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app )? It's from iNaturalist, which might be the community-based one you found, but you can easily ignore the community stuff and use it without an account. Works pretty well, I recommend it.

Yes, iNaturalist Seek was the community-based one. It was also regarded well.

Re: Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop

#179

Post by jackson1442 »

dqv wrote: post #66
vultour wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "Compatibility" section under each app which tells you whether it works on your device. You can also click on it so it tells you exactly which OS versions are supported.

So instead of filtering it out or graying out the "get" button, I need to click on the link in the app store and find the compatibility section (the last part of the page) to find out if it's compatible? That's a dark pattern.

It's been a looooong time since I've had this issue, but I distinctly remember the "get" being grayed out (for example, gps-dependent apps on a non gps-enabled iPad). Has this regressed?
Post reply on HN