Please call it asshole design.
Dark Patterns
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: Dark Patterns
#62The king of dark patterns: https://www.viagogo.com (try with any listed event) (edit: they recently got banned from AdWords IIRC)
That company is basically built on deception.
Re: Dark Patterns
#63There's one more: Suggesting that you lose benefits in a subscription business right away, when in reality, they run until the "contract" ends. Culprit: Amazon Prime. I just checked and they're still doing it (on Amazon.de). If you try to cancel your Prime Membership, they make it sound as if you lose all benefits right away, even though I pre-paid for the entire year and my membership will end with the billing perio…
>If you try to cancel your Prime Membership, they make it sound as if you lose all benefits right away
This method of obfuscation is also prevalent on most music services I have subscribed to ie. Spotify, Deezer, Tidal et al., which also make it harder to access the option to cancel in the first place. If you use PayPal for the afore-mentioned services, an entry for recurring charges also gets placed on the account and once you cancel, it sits there dormant. Although, it can be marked as inactive manually, however, the process is not intuitive and hidden away in settings, where direct debits are labelled as pre-approved payments.
Re: Dark Patterns
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many years ago, I reviewed the code at Booking.com that implemented this (in the version thar existed at the time, there's many more variants of it today) and it had a clear enough definition and was roughly what you'd expect it to be if you tried to design/implement it faithfully but without crazy out-there amounts of work: "number of detected-as-not-a-bot page views for this hotel (page) within the last X minutes"…
I don't know, still, most people's "psychological setup" isn't wired to handle this kind of manipulation on a frequent basis, even if "designed/implemented it faithfully". It would just make the web a little more serene place if the said websites did away with these kind of pernicious practices which only induce stress and agony.
I'm with you. Weirdly, even though I certainly have an above average understanding of these tactics, they almost certainly still have a minor effect on me anyway.
What I was trying to do was to preempt the allegations that Booking is lying to its users. None of the allegations I'd seen while I was there actually checked out on that front. I, like most others, severely disliked the urgency messaging, but as is with ethics discussions, it was never clear cut. I did not perceive that there was a widespread culture of trying to trick users into purchasing something they didn't want. For most of my tenure, I managed the infrastructure department, not product, so was a bit removed. Experimentation infrastructure fell into my scope, though. We invested significant effort into both education and countermeasures for things like p-hacking.
Re: Dark Patterns
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguably; it's not advertising the product itself (e.g. hotels). There's no rules against misreporting user or activity statistics as far as I know.
It is an interesting topic. I never worked in a brick and mortar store but I wonder if they purposely only place 1 or 2 items onto a shelf to create a false sense of scarcity. Meanwhile they have a whole pallet of them in the back. As a customer you would never know but if it came down to taking legal action, it would probably be pretty hard to prove without a doubt this was done on purpose. Scarcity or feeling like…
Next time you go to a restaurant notice where they seat you. Usually its in the front so the place looks crowded from the street.
Re: Dark Patterns
#66There's one more: Suggesting that you lose benefits in a subscription business right away, when in reality, they run until the "contract" ends. Culprit: Amazon Prime. I just checked and they're still doing it (on Amazon.de). If you try to cancel your Prime Membership, they make it sound as if you lose all benefits right away, even though I pre-paid for the entire year and my membership will end with the billing perio…
If you want to get really evil, combine this with "you need to tell us you want to cancel in advance or we'll charge you a termination fee". People will put it off thinking they will lose the benefits, then find themselves on the line for a fee because they didn't do it earlier (often giving up and continuing instead).
My old ISP had me mail them a copy of my new lease to prove that they could no longer service my area (let alone my state) to avoid a termination fee. Shit is byzantine.
Re: Dark Patterns
#67GMail seems to have opened a vector to amplify dark patterns by placing action buttons on messages. My least favorite is the LinkedIn accept invitation button, which I've clicked now several times by accident because I've spent years using GMail without it taking actions like opening GitHub PRs and accepting LinkedIn invites. I can't find a way to disable this feature. Does anybody know how?
One more reason to use basic html gmail (or avoiding gmail entirely)
Re: Dark Patterns
#68I'd add unnecessarily asking for a mobile phone number for the stated purpose of two factory authentication and then using that for privacy mining ala Facebook[1].
[1]https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/04/facebook-lets-people-find-pro...
Re: Dark Patterns
#69It's missing the one that I hate the most: the way Booking.com and similar sites create a fake sense of urgency. "9 people are actively looking at this hotel right now!" Yeah, right.
There are even companies that will implement this design for your own ecommerce site (https://fomo.com). Reportedly they make a lot of money, 88k a MO th at least (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-social-proo...).