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The slippery slope

90percentofeverything.com

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Re: The slippery slope

#61

Post by enaeseth »

csallen wrote: post #52

I'm going to nitpick a bit here, mostly because it's entertaining to play devil's advocate on a topic that's always met with such one-sided responses on HN (in this case: dark patterns). My question is: Why should a company make it easy for people to do exactly what it doesn't want them to do? Sure, outright trickery and lies are almost unarguably immoral. And the author definitely identifies many examples of that. B…

Interfaces communicate with their users (at least, if you ask me), and I sometimes find it helpful to explicitly put into words what I think an interface is saying. I interpret The Ladder's cancellation screen as saying, "You cannot cancel your membership without giving us a reason."

Imagine if you were trying to break up with a significant other, and they told you that you were not allowed to end the relationship unless you gave a reason first. That would be horribly controlling, and totally unacceptable.

Of course, a romantic relationship is rather more significant than a subscription, but I think The Ladder's exit process is controlling in the same way, and the only difference is that it occurs in a less important relationship. It still gives me the same feeling that my wishes and agency are being subjugated, and I believe that's a bad thing to do to a person, regardless of the particular situation.

Re: The slippery slope

#63

Post by vacri »

casca wrote: post #3

To disable Ad Tracking under IOS, go to Settings > General > About > Advertising > Limit Ad Tracking to On This is a worthwhile read (with excellent examples) on the ubiquitous "Click here to not receive third-party messages" pattern.

I like how it's called "limit" and not "disable". Compared to infinity, anything with a finite value can be considered to have 'limits'. Even Apple's $100B in cash has a limit, despite the staggering size. Weasel-words are an interesting phenomenon.

Re: The slippery slope

#64

Post by na8ur »

Very nice article. ethics! this is the problem of our society. the next article should be about making people sensible. How to reward them for been responsible. The thing is people don't care about their live. Managers change jobs, people accept NSA... Might be intresting to compare Customer-Live-Time-Value und Business-Model-LiveTime-Value. What if they knew that the bomb will be nightmare? I would love to see numbers? How about calculating Update-Costs of the SW to "how about having a new business model". The aren't these "dark pattern" businesses VC driven?

Re: The slippery slope

#65

Post by rogerchucker »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #23

Enjoyed the article, but I had to read it using the Clearly extension because the native web page is extremely laggy for me. I'm on a Win8 machine running current Chrome. It seems like such a simple design but hot damn does it chug when I scroll.

Don't wanna start an off-topic conversation but in spite of being somewhat of a Google fanboy I'm actively using (and have set as default) Safari instead of Chrome on my 2010 macbook pro for any page or site that is "heavy". My usage of Chrome has now shrunk to scenarios that involve heavy dependence on omni-search.

Re: The slippery slope

#67

Post by kingnight »

HNaTTY wrote: post #49
Fuzzwah wrote: post #23

Enjoyed the article, but I had to read it using the Clearly extension because the native web page is extremely laggy for me. I'm on a Win8 machine running current Chrome. It seems like such a simple design but hot damn does it chug when I scroll.

That's probably because it's a 15MB page including all the assets -- Somebody doesn't believe in jpegs. The page still downloaded for me in 2.5s though, so I have to give the guy some credit for having a beefy host.

I think it may have to do with the fixed 'border' the entire page has. It is interesting though how Chrome chokes and Safari glides, though with choppy repositioning of the fixed border on scroll completion.

Re: The slippery slope

#68

Post by aspensmonster »

>"Brand relationships are like human relationships."

No. Brands, corporations, and other legal fictions are not human. They're tools explicitly designed to generate profit. This is their fundamental purpose, and as such, they can never bear any significant resemblance to human relationships.

Aside from that, it's certainly an excellent write up. And I like the term too: Dark Patterns.

Re: The slippery slope

#69

Post by JoshuaRedmond »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #23

Enjoyed the article, but I had to read it using the Clearly extension because the native web page is extremely laggy for me. I'm on a Win8 machine running current Chrome. It seems like such a simple design but hot damn does it chug when I scroll.

I'm glad I wasn't the only person who had that issue. Strangely it works perfectly on the mobile version of Chrome for Android, but it grinds to a halt on the tablet version. This is especially strange as I have a Padfone 2 (phone connects to a tablet dock) , so the hardware is the same, and Chrome just gets relaunched in tablet mode when it's docked. Maybe due to the size of images being served being varied on screen size.

Re: The slippery slope

#70

Post by effbott »

mariusz331 wrote: post #18

It's funny. I'm on the phone trying to reach a student loan representative right now. I keep pressing 1 for English, 4 for a student loan representative, 1 again for the type of loan, then I'm back to pressing 4 for a loan representative. It's an infinite loop! I try hitting 0 for an operator but then I'm prompted to give a 4 digit extension for the party I want to reach.

Most automated phone systems will connect you to an operator if you press 0 repeatedly (as in 10 to 20 times in a row). There's almost always a way to get around automated phone systems.
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