61–70 of 217 posts
I wish there were a way for users to share the websites that do this and other dark patterns so that I can avoid them. Effectively a reputation system. Search engines used to do this, but apparently not any more. We need a replacement.
Also: TV companies, please don't show me advertisements instead of the TV show I want to watch. Car dealers, please tell me about all the expensive feeds and add-ons before I agree to buy the car. Phone companies, gyms, fucking everyone, please tell me about the $50, $150 "sign up fee" in addition to the $X a month cost. etc. I mean, good luck guy. You are a human on a planet run by humans with all the power imbalanc…
I hate those too. On the other hand, I've been adjacent to the decision to add them before. You're under a lot of pressure to increase conversion in your onboarding funnel, so you test out moving your email capture up a bit in your conversion flow (ie to before you deliver results) and it works! Conversion increases throughout the funnel! So you keep it. Dark patterns like this persist because they measurably work. S…
It works because it's manipulative and most people don't have the context to understand. Some may think they now have to sign up or they'll lose something.
"Preying on the uninformed and less tech literate" works, sure, the same way basically every other scam works, by pressuring people to do things they normally wouldn't.
Yesterday I was using a website to generate a logo (not mentioning them they don’t deserve any publicity), and after entering the details, refining what to emphasize on, description, my email and logo requirements, they generated some and refused to show it unless I pay, not just signing up.. literal scumbags, why would I pay before even seeing the logo ffs, what if I didn’t like it? How about all the time and detail…
I've been trying to order from non Amazon sites as a habit lately. A large percentage of them use the same platform, maybe it's Shopify? During checkout, they have a checkbox asking if you also want to receive promotional emails. It's annoying that this is checked by default, but I can tolerate it to some degree since I still have the ability to opt out. I always uncheck it. Always. Almost without fail, I end up rece…
My assumption was always that there are two separate systems at play, and once your email is entered, it gets put into some sort of cart rescue campaign..which sends...promotional emails.
My biggest current peeve is not allowing me to see shipping costs until I’ve given basically all my information to a company before I’ve checked out.
This is why Amazon is still winning. The competition needs to compete better.
Granted, Amazon has much less need for that endless stream of marketing email because they're already the de facto first choice shop. It's a lose-lose game if you're a conscious consumer and both want to support a non-Amazon monoculture for internet retail but also don't want to have to yet another drip feed of marketing email.
Ideally there'd be competition among email service providers to recognize the modern landscape of CAN-SPAM compliant but entirely unsolicited and unwanted email and provide user tools that aggressively bin non-transactional email and penalize senders that send 10 "transactional" emails for a single interaction ("here's your confirmation! here's a shipping update! here's another shipping update! are you satisfied with your purchase? leave a review!) as shadow marketing.
Either they're knowingly doing this for brand reinforcement reasons or are honestly clueless and don't recognize that a single email that links to a continuously-updated order status page is preferable. I figure mostly the former, but either way there are limited mechanisms to encourage vendors to make judicious use of email.
I dislike this as well. If I really want to see whatever the sign-up is blocking, I try temp-mail.org. Haven't had any issues with temp-mail yet but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
Yesterday I was using a website to generate a logo (not mentioning them they don’t deserve any publicity), and after entering the details, refining what to emphasize on, description, my email and logo requirements, they generated some and refused to show it unless I pay, not just signing up.. literal scumbags, why would I pay before even seeing the logo ffs, what if I didn’t like it? How about all the time and detail…
That's the whole point, they want you to be invested.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solution to this is to use a masked email or at the very least add a `+` tag so you can block it easily or know who's the source of the junk mail. Fastmail offers this feature, and I think 1password might. The `+` tag should be possible with any provider, `me+hn@example.com` Of course now you have to have a way to keep track of what email you gave to what company. I usually do `firstname_company/website@` to make it…
That's not really a viable solution for the average, not-so-tech-savvy folk, though. Edit: Hit me with the downvotes, I don't mind, but I also enjoy hearing about why my perspective might be wrong. From where I sit, I can imagine that plenty of people annoyed by these kinds of email harvesting patterns also don't know enough to employ the kind of method described here. I feel like that's a solution, but not one that…
Not at this moment, but we're getting close
More and more often, Safari offers to fill in an anonymized email address for me when I fill out a form.
It's not detected and offered 100% off the time, but is improving.
Even my wife has started using it, and she is not a techie.