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Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

iamvishnu.com

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Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#211

Post by [deleted] »

duxup wrote: post #77
fishtoaster wrote: post #43

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…

We want everything for free and we get what we deserve. The web is a brutal place for everyone. I’m not a fan of these choices but we as users demand a lot for free and sites are going to do what they can to try to survive.

[deleted]

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#212

Post by dogleash »

ryandrake wrote: post #106
burnished wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre attitude. If you change people's minds they behave differently. Hell even in your example, there is a difference between some programmer who tells themselves this and some person who raises a stink; suddenly doing unethical shit slows you down, costs political capital, and approaches being more trouble than its worth. Fewer shit things will get done because there will be less energy to pursue them. I'm…

It's ultimately on developers as the last, ethical line of defense: They're the ones typing in the code at the end of the day. Without them, the bosses couldn't implement these things. Unfortunately, for every good developer who draws a line in the sand, there's Bob, two desks down, who is happy to implement whatever dark pattern boss tells him to. Fuck Bob. What we really need is some kind of Hippocratic Oath for So…

> What we really need is some kind of Hippocratic Oath for Software, that we all agree to and can collectively use to resist this shit. Not going to happen, but one can dream.

Why spitball about a "Hippocratic Oath" when the ACM code of ethics exists?

You could promote the one that does exists instead of dooming that nobody will write or follow such a standard.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#213

Post by Nifty3929 »

falcolas wrote: post #129
Nifty3929 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely it! In the marketplace, only results matter and companies that deliver them displace those that don’t. In this case, result mean profit or at least conversions. The same was true for banks who were over extended on risky loans in the late aughts. If you didn’t do that, you were criticized by analysts and Wall Street for being too conservative, and anyway look how much these other banks are making.…

> In the marketplace, only results matter and companies that deliver them displace those that don’t. In this case, result mean profit or at least conversions. Were this the unalterable truth, mom and pop shops wouldn't exist. Companies who invest profits back into themselves would not exist. Public companies who pay living wages wouldn't exist. But they all do. Which means there's more to the formula; and that formul…

>> mom and pop shops wouldn't exist

Why not? Mom and pop shops can (and often are) be more profitable than any other business that would serve that market.

>> Companies who invest profits back into themselves would not exist.

Why not? Investing in your own business can be very profitable if you have good ways to expand your business.

>> Public companies who pay living wages wouldn't exist.

Why not? Public companies can't pay workers less than those workers demand.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#214

Post by bunga-bunga »

archerx wrote: post #175
bunga-bunga wrote: post #93

Dear 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.

There are people out there who do whatever pop ups tell them to do. I was in a meeting once and we need to check something on a site the other person just clicked yes on the cookie banner without reading. I told him “You should click no on those” and he replied “I know, every keeps telling me that but I just click yes anyway”. I just blankly stared at him for a couple of seconds and returned the focus to the meeting.…

To be fair, you’re often punished for clicking No (it takes longer, may cause a reload), so you’d need a very good reason to not click Yes.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#215

Post by naijaboiler »

fishtoaster wrote: post #204
Nextgrid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does “conversion” actually mean in this context? Does it mean bullshit “growth & engagement” aka the numbers of (mostly non-consensual) subscribers in the spam list going up, or does it mean actual profit? I could definitely see it working for the first case, which is all that your typical product/marketing person needs to justify their salary thus why the practice is popular, but I wonder if this actually ends…

That's a pretty good question. Ideally you're measuring "paid us money" as conversion, and that was the case for the anecdote I had in mind in the above post: we had a checkout screen with a decent price tag at the end of the flow that we could measure against. We could track the impact of changes throughout that funnel on the bottom line. But I have seen other decisions made based on proxies to "paid us money." Eg w…

If this measurement was done by product or marketing people, my lived experience was that the experiment design was flawed, the conclusions they reach are likely not correct ones.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#216

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

cafeinux wrote: post #183
tokai wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah well my life would be sweeter if I conned pensioners out of their savings. It's always easy to follow how people explain their unethical decisions - but it doesn't make them an inch less unethical though and people that use your line of thought to do harmful things are scum.

Sign-up popups are annoying, but not inherently unethical. Nobody's on the street because one dev tried to convert people.

We’re not talking about sign-up pop-ups though. Those are an annoying fact of digital life that isn’t _really_ that bad.

We’re talking about creating a flow and perception that you can use a thing built around an assumption that you then intentionally change at some next step. It’s a breakdown of an implicit contract you create with the user, for the purposes of farming data, getting more signups, increasing conversions, or whatever else. It’s just dishonest.

A few years ago a family member contacted me about this very thing. They had found a nice looking website to accomplish a thing. The website had published pricing for packages of their service, and provided a “free” sample. Except after you spent all the time to get that free sample running, you couldn’t actually use it without paying.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#217

Post by DamonHD »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #216
cafeinux wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sign-up popups are annoying, but not inherently unethical. Nobody's on the street because one dev tried to convert people.

We’re not talking about sign-up pop-ups though. Those are an annoying fact of digital life that isn’t _really_ that bad. We’re talking about creating a flow and perception that you can use a thing built around an assumption that you then intentionally change at some next step. It’s a breakdown of an implicit contract you create with the user, for the purposes of farming data, getting more signups, increasing conversi…

If feels to me like estoppel: misleading someone to do something to then use against them later.
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