If it didn't convert, it wouldn't exist
Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
91–100 of 217 posts
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#92I 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…
Just because a psychological trick works doesn’t mean you must use it. Have some respect for your users, developers. ‘Cause you’re one of them.
You'll enjoy this https://userinyerface.com/
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#93Dear user, No.
Unfortunately these patterns work great so they will never stop. As more dark patterns are “discovered”, we’ll see the web becoming more of a dump.
You see it every day, successful websites and socials become successful thanks to these pattern, not in spite of them.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#94Almost every 'online tool' you can find is just a very inconvenient frontend to a command line tool you can find and use by yourself. These file converters can all be replaced by ffmpeg or magick. Every single pdf tool online is a bloated proxy to libpoppler
The only upsides I see are for infrequent or one-off conversions where you might not want to go through the hassle of finding/downloading/learning the tool, and for unsupported platforms like mobile phones.
I suppose it brings awareness to the tools too if credited properly. Ezgif is one converter I've used a few times, and one of their info pages lists all of the CLI tools they use on the backend. That was quite handy to learn that gifsicle existed, something I was not aware of before.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really - the market tempts you with free to hook you in. You cannot honestly say that the market has asked for every abusive free product that existed.
Users don’t pay up front. You don’t get any traction that way. User behavior is a part of this mess.
Users have always paid upfront for software, until software companies with lots of capital started this non sense. All copies of Microsoft Office were paid upfront. Users are just reacting to what the software industry did.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The faster a web site asks me for an email address determines how fast I bail on even looking at their product/tool, or if I have no choice I put in a bogus email address to get past it, if it is one of those damn forms that sends you a link I use one of the various public inbox/temporary email address sites so I don't have to deal with the attempts to bring me back into the conversion funnel when I was just seeking…
The site owners don’t care. If something works on 99% of people and pushes away 1%, they will keep doing it.
I'm sure that's true.
But I am fairly sure we live in the world where when something works on 3% of the visitors and the previous thing works on 2.6%, the company does the new thing. That's nearly 20% growth!
Meanwhile, 97% reject their service.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#97I'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…
Do these stores' checkout pages have a section to enter your billing/shipping details on the left, and then a pane displaying what's in your cart and any active coupon codes on the right?
If so, it's almost definitely Shopify.
I know what checkbox you're referring to, and another fun thing is that if you use PayPal (or, I assume, another non-credit card payment method), it bypasses the "Sign me up for promotional emails" checkbox entirely... but it still checks it for you.
So if I check out with PayPal I have to select the PayPal option, sign in to PayPal, confirm, then in the store's checkout page go back a page to manually uncheck the box. Drives me crazy. Unchecking it beforehand does nothing.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#98I 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…
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Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#99I 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…
Just because a psychological trick works doesn’t mean you must use it. Have some respect for your users, developers. ‘Cause you’re one of them.
>Just because a psychological trick works doesn’t mean you must use it.
Your hand is forced if the other guy uses it and blows past you.
Reality cares not for niceties, and good people finish dead fucking last. You need to balance being a good man and an evil man to win or even just survive.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users don’t pay up front. You don’t get any traction that way. User behavior is a part of this mess.
Users have always paid upfront for software, until software companies with lots of capital started this non sense. All copies of Microsoft Office were paid upfront. Users are just reacting to what the software industry did.
No, the users definitely play a role here.
Remember how it became a meme to just pirate Adobe software because they were so bloody expensive? Well Adobe wants their earnings, regardless if their desire is justified, so Adobe and the rest of the industry changed gears to a model that greatly inhibits piracy and, at least in theory, reduces the upfront cost a customer has to pay in exchange for a higher cost over time.