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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

#111

Post by tonymet »

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…

The sad truth is that businesses follow consumers. It’s been borne out through app insights . Consumers need to stop first

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

#112

Post by geraldwhen »

nickthegreek wrote: post #9

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.

Some sites ship by weight and size instead of fixed rate. UPS and FedEx shipment prices fluctuate intra daily, and sometimes by quite a bit. I’ve used sites that required the same, and the shipping costs would update so frequently that I ran scanners to find good deals on time to buy.

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

#113

Post by TheAngryCanuck »

sublinear wrote: post #50
TheAngryCanuck wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually worked out to my advantage! I did this on a site, found out that they didn't ship to Canada so I abandoned the cart. I got all the oh no emails so I emailed them back telling them I CAN'T buy their stuff because you WON'T ship to me. Couple of days later the company CEO emails me back. First he apologises (bonus points to a Canadian), promises to fix the cart abandon logic, and offers to ship me 2 of th…

That sounds like a fine resolution, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Far too many businesses are being run by people completely out of the loop. Emails, especially from the CEO, are legally binding.

I'm not saying this would be the response from every situation like this. I was just really pleasantly surprised

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

#114

Post by makeitdouble »

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.

The other part of it is service providers wanting growth from cheap tricks. The mental laziness and expecting to have their cake and eat it too is the same.

At some point there needs to be more than sterns looks to discourage these behaviors.

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

#115

Post by Sebb767 »

jjulius wrote: post #34
frfl wrote: post #32

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…

> That's not really a viable solution for the average, not-so-tech-savvy folk, though.

You can explain this feature of gmail/fastmail to a reasonably technical person in 5 minutes, where 'reasonably technical' means that the person understands the concept of mail folders. Sure, it might not work that easy for your grandma, but I'm reasonably certain that most people in the developed under 40 fall in that category.

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

#116

Post by ljm »

Dalewyn wrote: post #100
Badumtss8 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Adobe is basically a monopoly and it is well documented that they allowed piracy because it meant that the pirates would become dependent on their tools.

Doesn’t matter how you edited a photo technically, it is still photoshopped.

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

#117

Post by davidmurdoch »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #16
nickthegreek wrote: post #9

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.

Including your email address. And then you abandon the cart, because it doesn't make sense for you to pay $50 for shipping. But then you get those emails 'you forgot something'. No I didn't.

I do this on purpose because about 24 hours later sometimes they'll send you a 10% off code.

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

#118

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

I met someone once where it later developed that they had begun lying to me from the very beginning.

It ended poorly.

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

#119

Post by rlpb »

wruza wrote: post #44
rlpb wrote: post #4

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.

Any reputation system is prone to manipulation, with its uselessness correlated to popularity.

I am optimistic that a social graph can help with this, using transitive trust and making it easy to transitively "cut off" bad parts of the graph with a blocklist. The problem is that commercial graphs do become useless, as you say.

But with the Fediverse we now have a graph that is resistant to this. I'm not aware of anyone building a reputation system on top of it, but this is something I expect will develop in the future. The system's opinion about a particular data point would then be personalized based on the people you say you trust to indicate that information, combined with the people they say they trust, and so forth.

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

#120

Post by gruez »

Sebb767 wrote: post #109
janalsncm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and any spammer will do this anyways. This is the digital equivalent of spelling your name backwards for anonymity. I don’t know why people still suggest it.

It still works, in my experience. Also, stripping out the plus is risky for sites, as it might actually be a part of the address, especially if it's not @gmail.com. You can get a tad fancier and automatically mark mails without + as spam (only works for new addresses, obviously) or use a dash as separator (if your mail provider supports it). This won't block a targeted attack, yes, but it's usually sufficient to filt…

>Also, stripping out the plus is risky for sites, as it might actually be a part of the address, especially if it's not @gmail.com.

Sure, stripping out everything after the + isn't specified in the RFCs, but I know of zero public email providers that allow + in email address AND treats them as separate address (eg. foo+bar@example.com is a different account than foo+baz@example.com).

>You can get a tad fancier and automatically mark mails without + as spam (only works for new addresses, obviously)

Sites that reject + in email address preclude you from doing that.

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