Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
iamvishnu.com
Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
1–10 of 217 posts
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#2Indeed a dark dishonest practice.
I won't touch services that do such things.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#3Indeed a dark dishonest practice. I won't touch services that do such things.
I love services like that. I love entering data into them! In fact, I love it so much that I wrote some scripts to do just that...
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#4I 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.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#5I also dislike websites that get you down a path before requiring an email signup or cell phone verification.
But I much prefer the former to the latter; pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? Whereas I won't give out my phone number under pretty much any circumstance (and don't have a spam-only number).
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#6I also dislike websites that get you down a path before requiring an email signup or cell phone verification. But I much prefer the former to the latter; pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? Whereas I won't give out my phone number under pretty much any circumstance (and don't have a spam-only number).
> pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right?
I used to, but I've since taken to just not signing up to things instead.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#7Adobe's web-based JPG to PNG converter is exactly like this. Upload a JPG, hit convert - it uploads the file, processes it on their end, and then refuses to give you the result until you "sign up for a free adobe account that we conveniently didn't tell you about until now!"
Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually decide not to purchase from them. They'll then start spamming you without your consent a day later.
Ransom sign-ups belong in the same tier of horrible.
Modern downloadable software does this too. You download a "free" partition manager or "free" PDF converter, or whatever "free" - you install it, get through their wizard/main workflow to do what you want, but then it says "oops, sorry, you have to pay for this!"
Anti-consumer stuff it all is. What a shame software and websites like this are allowed to exist.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#8I 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.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#9My 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.
Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
#10I also dislike websites that get you down a path before requiring an email signup or cell phone verification. But I much prefer the former to the latter; pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? Whereas I won't give out my phone number under pretty much any circumstance (and don't have a spam-only number).
> pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? I used to, but I've since taken to just not signing up to things instead.
When I have no choice, I use a free throwaway email service. Unfortunately it's much harder to get a throwaway phone number so it greatly annoys me when services (Twitter, specifically) require one