Yesterday I went to book a hotel and Priceline had a room for $129, which was $20 cheaper than Expedia or any other site.
Curious, I clicked on it and went to the Priceline site, and watched as a JavaScript animation “rolled” the price from $129 to $149 and alerted me that someone just got the last room. Obviously the whole thing was fake. (Why would they implement such an animation, and how likely is it that someone got the room in those two seconds?)
At this point, it’s not even nudging or dark patterns but just straight out fraud.
The fraud is the $129 room was gone hours, maybe days ago. It didn't just sell, the web site simply quoted a price they though was low enough to keep you from looking elsewhere, within reason. Once you looked serious about booking, they actually checked the hotel's inventory. You can really tell this happens when you try to book a room/flight/car that is sold out. They quote you a price, if you actually try to book, then, they tell you there is no space. Consolidator travel sites do not check the inventory of every room, flight, or car they quote you. They can't possibly do that. They are all estimates until they see your credit card number. One other thing about travel booking: I don't want the last or even second to last room at a hotel or seat on a plane. The chances of being bumped are too high. So telling me "only 1 seat left", isn't going to close the deal.
Expedia isn't checking availability, a middle man is, (one of the three GDS).
The middleman isn't checking availability every time because there's a cost to ask the carrier. And if you ask too much they will rate limit or deny you which means you get no availability.
The middleman is a price aggregation person, and tries to find rates and routes using all the rules the carriers specify.
Sure you can buy tickets directly from AA or UA. But what if you want to fly a connection that has both. Do you think AA wants to sell seats on someone's else plane?
Last time I worked in this industry (over a decade ago) sites like expedia didn't work through a GDS but hotels would explicitly put available stock directly into them, if they had 10 rooms availble they might put 5 on expedia, 2 on another site and 1 each on 3 smaller sites. So expedia only has to check it's own data and the prices typically didn't fluctuate intra-day. I was working on software to automate most of this process.
Whether you got the last seat at a price point has nothing to do with odds of getting bumped. Also US airlines almost never forcibly bump passengers who meet check-in requirements, especially with the new max compensation limits.
> Consolidator travel sites do not check the inventory of every room, flight, or car they quote you. They can't possibly do that. They are all estimates until they see your credit card number.
In a small town in Denmark, a hotel i was booked into was full, so they tried to send me to the other hotel in town, but that was full, so i slept on a sofa in a meeting room. The meeting room's floor was scattered with pieces of Lego, which made night-time trips to the bathroom somewhat terrifying. Not the most auspicious start to a business trip.
They may, but sometimes rooms also become damaged due to rock stars throwing wild parties, or more mundane things like when we noticed a concerning amount of water dripping through the ceiling in our bathroom in Denver. Once they came to check it we got a free upgrade to a larger room.
I don't think keeping unbooked rooms "just in case" is economical so if this sort of thing happens you may well need to be moved out to a nearby hotel at their expense.
Remember, for every software-based dark pattern or fraud out there, there was a software developer who implemented it. Before we throw stones, we, as a profession should get better about self-policing and cleaning our ethical house.
What a strange comparison. Would you consider it equally unjustified to hold construction engineers and architects responsible for constructing a death trap? Even if that is what the customer ordered?
It's probably not a coincidence that engineers and doctors are professionals well known to place their own ethical standards above their customers. It is expected that a doctor refuse to carry out a procedure that puts innocent people at harm.
A doctor can lose their license for malpractice. A lawyer can be disbarred. Architects and civil engineers will lose their license if they knowingly create an unsafe structure.
These professions have codified standards, licensing, and membership requirements for practitioners. There is a real incentive to conform and maintain your license because otherwise you cannot work. In these professions you know the standard of ethical behavior and you can reasonable expect your fellow professionals to also refuse questionable requests. An unethical client is going to have a hard time going down the street to find someone else who is willing to do what you won't.
I'm not trying to excuse the bad behavior of some software developers. My point is that the software industry and profession lacks much of what other professions have established in order to maintain high standards.
You're comparing situations where ethical violations put lives truly at risk with situations where someone is possibly induced into (but can fully opt-out of) a larger sales transaction?
Yes, and it seems to be a fair comparison to me. Both the unsafe situations and fraudulent situations can be avoided by the adherence to standards, which the software industry currently does not have. The other industries mentioned do, and they seem to work quite well.
Of course it seems like a fair comparison to you, it's your comparison. To everyone else, putting it as nicely as possible, it's very off. Software that has the potential to cause serious, directly attributable material harm to lives is already heavily regulated: The FDA regulates medical device software, the FAA regulates flight software, the FTC regulates communications software, etc. For everything else, there is court. If you buy a laptop with a lithium ion battery that explodes and causes you burns, you will probably be rewarded handsomely in a suit. If you want to sit here and try to argue in front of a judge that dark UI patterns are causing you some sort of material harm, by all means go for it in court. My advice to you is you probably won't get very far / laughed at.
One often overlooked relationship I find to this sort of argument is that economic harm is somehow independent of physical harm.
While in the purest theoretical sense, its obviously clear/true, the more we abstract parts of life away to monetary valuation and control, the more economic effects have real serious indirect physical consequences.
So someone lost a few bucks due to a manipulative ad? Most the time this has no serious consequences as devious as it may be. However, when lost assets become more significant or lead to serious economic distress, it can and does directly result in health effects that have physical consequence.
Obvious extreme examples include cases of financial ruin that lead to mental health distress leading to suicides. Small repeated loss could also lead to unhealthy lifestyles over time coupled with poor financial choices resulting in limited to no access to preventative healthcare... directly leading to a cause of death (say heart disease from poor dieting).
Practices of advertising from the tobacco industry in the past provide a good model for how these can effect peoples choices which over time had serious physical consequences--the main difference being the tobacco industry actually provided a dangerous product that their behaviours pushed. Arguably consumers have to actively make a choice to follow through but with enough data, people are tending to be more and more easily manipulated.
Software developers are not professional lawyers, businessmen or psychologists. It is therefore not their job to judge whether to implement functionality that sells things you don't have. The only way they could be held accountable in the ways tou want is if we force them to be expert in every field in existence so that whenever they implement software related to it they understand the implications fully.
> To everyone else, putting it as nicely as possible, it's very off.
As one of the other people, I disagree.
Also note that a lot of the trade regulation groups like the bar associations also ensure a good standing in the "community", so they would sanction whatever equivalent lawyers have to dark patterns, if they were frequent enough/egregious enough.
If I adhered to standards I would have forced password rotation (a shit policy) because the standards are behind me. They only recently changed. I was right all along. I literally protected people's data when the standards would have put them at risk. No, thank you.
It's a perfectly apt comparison. Software "engineers" are not actually engineers. We are not professionals, we are wage labor.
* No professional code of ethics.
* No professional body that oversees the profession and sets standards.
* No licensing or certification (except maybe in Canada).
I'm sure I'll get a bunch of flack for this, but it's well past time developers stopped indulging in classist self-flattery pretending they're the peers of doctors, lawyers, or accountants.
Lawyers are notorious for being mercenaries for hire. The most successful firms contract with corporations that take advantage of the law to their gain and society's detriment.
Medical doctors work for an industry that bankrupts sick people for being sick and and a huge number (if not a majority) of practicing doctors can be implicated in the opioid epidemic that has killed thousands and ruined countless lives.
Ethical contracts usually just lead to more politics imo. At the end of the day, we all bow to money in one way or another (some are just willing to bow lower than others).
Maybe we should stop pretending a profession can somehow make a person better than someone else in some sort of meta/ethical way.
Addendum: Personally I wish the law were more open to allowing people to defend themselves. A few years ago I went to court to defend myself in what I was sure was a simple misunderstanding in traffic court. Halfway through my second sentence (not in the legal sense), the judge interrupted me. Then the police officer tried to explain what he put in the ticket may not have been comprehensive. The judge cut him off too and decided it was in my best interest to "learn a lesson" and found me guilty of a violation I was not guilty of. The lesson I learned was if I had paid a lawyer $500 I would have gotten an honest hearing. I don't see the ethics or standards in that.
I don't follow your argument. Existence of the things you mention are not really the main distinguishing features of different socio-professional classes.
A programmer is still more like a lawyer in almost every conceivable way than they are like a bricklayer: level of education, social circles, work environment, pay, cultural values, etc.
(This has nothing to do with "self-flattery" unless you think I'm making some sort of value judgment about these different classes, as opposed to just describing them).
Lawyers will not commit malpractice because they would open themselves up to liability and damage their professional reputations.
In contrast, most software devs will code up whatever evil garbage features their bosses tell them to. They don't even have a concept of malpractice. Very rarely, one might quit, but they have no standing to say "no" to their employers and remain employed.
Michael Cohen had a law degree, dude. Christopher Duntsch had a medical degree. It's just people. They're not gods because they have some degree.
And that's only the named people. I don't know how many people you know in medicine or in law.
If you're unfamiliar with things being upcoded or out of network doctors substituting in late and then having patients incur massive fees, then maybe it's best to familiarize oneself.
And there are lawyers who specialize in getting the right rich guilty people out. The Razor didn't get the name by chance.
Why are you comparing coding up dark pattern feature to the malpractice? It's more comparable to, e.g. a patent troll's lawyer drafting a letter intended to bully a troll's victim into paying out of fear of litigation costs. Or reviewing a forcing arbitration agreement that a company intends to make all its employees to sign. Or other things that can be considered morally 'evil' but completely legal and wont get anyone sued for malpractice.
Amen! And as someone who is an actual licensed P.E., it still makes me a little angry when I see computer programmers who call themselves "engineers." This is technically illegal under some circumstances in many states, but rarely enforced.
The original meaning of engineer was: "A constructor of military engines; a person who designs and constructs military works for attack and defence."
It is first found in English in 1380, when I doubt any professional certification bodies existed.
Eventually it evolved to mean what you got your license in, and then evolved further to include things like "software engineers".
Unless you build engines, the word engineer to describe what you do is etymologically inaccurate. So why is your particular stage on the path of organic evolution of this word more valid than anyone else's?
That's true, which is why you wouldn't put P.E. after your name or represent yourself as a Mechanical Engineer etc... No one who knows what a PE is going to be confused by someone calling themselves a software engineer, and audio engineer, or a sanitation engineer.
I understand the other argument that the job title "Engineer" is being diluted, but that ship sailed a long time ago. There are way more people with engineer in their title than there are PEs so I doubt any widespread legislative attempt to change this would be successful. And it's not just software engineers. Plenty of people working as engineers with ABET accredited engineering degrees haven't passed the PE exam either.
It's not possible to actually become a licensed/professional software engineer as of April this year, at least in Florida. Florida requires that you pass the NCEES PE exam - not sure if there are other exam vendors used elsewhere in the US - and NCEES elected to stop offering the software engineer exam citing low demand:
I've spent all of 30 minutes studying this, so, hardly an expert. But it seems like the genesis and ongoing purpose of P.E. accreditation is to protect the health and safety of the public. There have certainly been some high profile examples of poor software engineering affecting health and safety - thinking about the Toyota acceleration issue and the VW emissions scandal - but I am wondering if people really think an accreditation body would prevent this sort of thing from happening. What would a Professional Software Engineer be, and why would they be inherently better or more qualified than what we have today?
> It's not possible to actually become a licensed/professional software engineer as of April this year, at least in Florida. Florida requires that you pass the NCEES PE exam - not sure if there are other exam vendors used elsewhere in the US - and NCEES elected to stop offering the software engineer exam citing low demand...
There's no demand because they made the process more or less impossible for developers to ever get to to the point where they take the PE exam.
First, the candidate has to pass one of the Fundamentals of Engineering exam to become an engineer-in-training. Except, whoops, there isn't a software specific FE; the most relevant one is the EE/Comp. E. exam. Take a look at the list of topics: https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/FE-Ele-CBT-specs.pdf Most developers aren't going to pass that even with a CS degree.
Secondly, you need 4-8 years of supervision by a licensed engineer. Again, whoops, there are barely any software developers with a PE license, so who would they get to supervise them?
Frankly, the situation was so absurd that one has to suspect that NCEES didn't want to certify software developers as PEs.
You can't really use engineering methodologies to guarantee public safety from software. Engineering wants to model behavior and add margin on the worst case scenario to make failure unlikely.
Provably correct software development is too slow and specialized to be economically feasible. Even formal correctness is not enough, you also need to defend against unpredictable hardware faults. No traditional engineering discipline needs to do this.
I disagree. An engineer is someone who applies a science to build a solution (aka a product). Mechanical/Electrical/Nuclear engineering is applied physics. Petrol/Chemical engineering is applied chemistry. Pharmaceuticals are applied biology. And finally, Software engineering is applied Computer Science.
The situation in Canada is that you cannot legally call yourself an "Engineer" unless you have a P.Eng license. While you do not need an engineering degree to undertake this, if you don't have one you will have to ask the licensing body to adjudicate on "equivalent experience" - not sure what happens if they don't agree but I expect you'd have to take some courses. The licensing itself requires at least a professional practice exam (and possibly technical ones) and work experience overseen by a P.Eng. Software developers can take this certification but it is not particularly useful to their career except in narrow circumstances.
I think this is a great point and perhaps if developers thoughts of it that way more they would take more initiative to create those things. If we don’t, they will and by they I mean people who will have limited understanding of the impact of those codes.
Pretty much every countries engineering certifying body does have a track for it professionals.
I do have to ask why all the self hate here why would a rational person what to degrade there profession do you want to be working in a blue collar job with worse working conditions?
For myself, I want software devs to recognize that they have more in common with blue collar workers than they do with their capitalist employers and act in solidarity. If it were up to me, there'd be a software guild akin to the Hollywood screenwriters guild, and it would set ethical standards and advocate for better pay and working conditions for people writing software.
In the case of most front end dark patterns, management or a designer is the equivalent of the architect and there is no Engineering involved to implement the design--just skilled labor.
In the case of something more complex, developers don't have the leverage of established regulatory bodies and guilds.
Developers don't always come up with dark patterns or fraud, but they implement them. It's possible to say no on ethical grounds, isn't it?
I was once asked to finish and deploy code that the previous dev had stolen from his old employer. I said no because the code was paid for by someone else and belonged to them. It wasn't a big deal -- my career didn't suffer.
I would find somewhere else to work if I had ethical concerns over what they were asking me to do. For example, the UK’s department of work and pensions was a contract the company I work for had at the time when there was a huge furore over IDS (a politician)’s policies.
If i had been assigned to work on that project I would have resigned.
I call those asshole user stories unless there is a logged story “as a user, I expect inventory prices to be accurate in real time.”
I don’t like user stories that are anti-customer and in the developer’s favor unless it’s clear that there’s a path to fairness.
The motivation to a system should be to have as current as possible pricing, not some nightly batch that shows cheaper, unavailable prices and pisses off people when the real price is actually checked.
I think it's not going to be so obvious. If you write a feature that is intended to deceive then sure, but the developer who wrote that feature was probably told "ok, if the inventory is below a certain threshold, then add this behavior". The feature itself is benign. Should a developer resign anytime they can concoct a theoretical way in which a feature they're writing could possibly be exploited?
So do you think that the correct way to make sure buildings have enough exits is to shame construction workers into not working on buildings that they think have too few exits? Keeping in mind that an individual worker may only have knowledge of a small section of the overall building.
To your point specifically how many low level German laborers were prosecuted for following orders to build a prison camp or lay railroad track?
Sure, but it usually comes from management on high, just as adding two dozen different tracking and adtech schemes to a single page does.
I've walked away from job offers where I found at interview I really didn't like the smell from how they were making money. I also recognise a 25 year old me might not have had the financial luxury to do so, or to just say no to a boss asking.
Were software a regulated profession like medicine or legal with an ethics body I'd be inclined to agree. Maybe it's time it was, but I suspect stronger consumer protection and treating dark patterns and policies as fraud would be a vastly cheaper route for all concerned.
Both the IEEE and ACM have codes of ethics. You don't need to have effectively a guild regulating entrance into a profession--which, if you take the requirements for a PE in other branches of engineering as a guide would probably exclude anyone without the appropriate degrees and other requirements--to have ethical standards.
> if you take the requirements for a PE in other branches of engineering as a guide would probably exclude anyone without the appropriate degrees and other requirements--to have ethical standards.
How would one know one is meeting ethical obligations if they havn't been educated. Password storage, for instance, it's not obvious to many people why plain-text password storage is bad -- it _still_ happens at companies to this very day.
I'm all for people being able to code and do their own work, just like you should be able to build your own shed or house as long as it meets building codes. Maybe we need the equivalent of building codes (except not proprietary). The GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act are sort-of the start of that, I think.
>How would one know one is meeting ethical obligations if they havn't been educated.
I probably wasn't clear. Ethics courses should probably be more common (and embedded in engineering curricula more) although they are certainly available.
My comment about the PE is that it typically requires, for example, a four-year bachelors degree in engineering in addition to other requirements. [1] Thus, moving to a more formal professional structure in this manner would basically exclude career shifters, boot camp grads, self-taught programmers, etc.
> I probably wasn't clear. ... My comment about the PE is that it typically requires, for example, a four-year bachelors degree in engineering in addition to other requirements.
I may not have been clear; how do you know you've built a building that fulfills your ethical obligations if you don't know how to determine so? i.e. you're ethically obligated as an engineer to not build something you know (have determined to the best of your knowledge) is unsafe to use, but how do you do that if you don't know how to? (Especially when there are _many_ people who could.)
Basically I'm saying that you can't have (professionally required) ethical obligations without also having the knowledge and ability to fulfill said obligations.
For issues that aren't a matter of life-or-death, like the vast majority of software, yeah, strict licensure is probably overkill and against the spirit hacking.
However, that people aren't licensed EEs doesn't prevent them from tinkering with arduinos or SDRs; they simply can't sell their skills specifically as an electrical engineer.
I think there is some sensible ground between where we are now and not being able to program without a license (which would be a dystopian nightmare). As I mentioned, clear "building codes", better and more comprehensive best practices (e.g. OWASP), and having said things built into contracts or projects designs from the start, not as afterthoughts (i.e. having business take said best practices seriously).
In the building case, you probably won't be the only set of eyes on it.
But to the greater point, I guess the ethical principle is don't do things that can put people at risk if you know you don't know what you're doing--much less put people at risk because you just don't care or want to take shortcuts.
If you think you know what you're doing but don't? I'm not sure how an ethics course or even a license is going to help there. Because you think you're doing things safely. Arguably, you're not even being unethical, just incompetent.
Now, a license is supposed to be something of a guarantee of a minimum level of competency. But it's pretty minimal. After all, it basically just means you do have an appropriate degree, have worked in the field under someone for a few years, and have passed some standardized test. All that suggests you know (or once knew) something about the basics, but not a lot more.
ADDED:
>However, that people aren't licensed EEs doesn't prevent them from tinkering with arduinos or SDRs; they simply can't sell their skills specifically as an electrical engineer.
In at least most states in the US, sure they can. (And in the ones that theoretically prohibit you from calling yourself an engineer if unlicensed, that's almost universally ignored.) I've known tons of people who have worked or work as electrical engineers and I'm sure few of them have PEs. You don't need a PE for most jobs. Though it's probably more common with civil engineering.
I think part of professionalization would include your professional organization having come up with a set of standards for password handling that must be followed under penalty of professional sanction, having those available online and in printed form, and having courses that programmers could take to help them work under those guidelines efficiently.
Programming seems like a job particularly suited for professionalization, simply because programmers have to constantly be learning new things, and that's a thing your local org could provide to keep the lights on rather than relying completely on dues payments. If they were a blanket organization, they could even control supply through raising standards, and could certainly detect wage-fixing collusion easier than individuals.
Having clear guidelines and a place to find instruction that supports those guidelines makes "If you think you know what you're doing but don't?" a pure ethical problem. You either checked or you didn't.
Maybe look to the National Association of Realtors for a framework.
I’ve quit jobs partially over ethical issues with the software I was being asked to write. Once at around 25 years old and once at around 35. Since we have no powerful guild or professional organization with teeth, responsibility for our conduct is our own. Judging by the down-votes, though, heaven forbid you suggest on HN that a developer should take ethical responsibility for their own actions!
>there was a software developer who implemented it. Before we throw stones, we, as a profession should get better about self-policing and cleaning our ethical house.
This would require self-reflection by a community who constantly denigrates Facebook and the like for their issues, but happily punch the clock and collect RSUs from the same companies. It's easier to simply blame your superiors.
> Remember, for every software-based dark pattern or fraud out there, there was a software developer who implemented it
I think you ended that sentence prematurely.... "..after their boss, marketing team, etc., told them to." I don't think I've ever met a dev who implements these things because they think it's a good idea.
I think things get murky with complex relationships that exist in industry. For example, I think it would be hard to argue that a company like Expedia or Priceline created a feature so their customers (hotels) could exploit it.
Also, what leverage do you think a developer has in these sorts of situations? Should the developer say they're not willing to write the feature because it's possible customers could exploit it?
Funny how you get down voted for pointing the reality of the situation. Dark patterns would go away tomorrow if software developers really cared about it.
I've only ever seen this accomplished with professional organizations and licensing. Medicine is the easiest example. Clinicians can push back on unethical requests by arguing that complying with a request would result in them losing their license. That gives the employee a lot more leverage.
There are professional engineers (PE) in the US as well. But the software engineering one has been discontinued because basically no one got it. You can get PEs in other fields of engineering. How common it is probably depends on the field and on the type of job. (Basically, you get a PE so that you can sign off on designs where regulators or other government agencies are involved--or want an official credential for e.g. being an expert witness/consultant.)
This is absurd on the face of it. Should mustache wearers self-police themselves after Hitler and Stalin wore mustaches? No, I share nothing with the guy who wrote the emissions cheating and I share nothing with the guy who wrote these dark patterns in. We both use the same wrench and we both call ourselves the same title, but he’s the bad guy.
Or perhaps it’s clearer if we talk about Jewish people not self-policing Jewish bankers committing fraud, or Catholics with their child abuse, or perhaps Muslims with their bombing? Surely I’ve definitely opposed scamming just as much those people have.
Had the same thing happen with Priceline just a few weeks ago, except instead of $20, the price was double the advertised price and only changed when I entered my payment info and tried to pay. I finally called and booked over the phone after having three different rooms double in price when I hit the confirmation button. The person on the other end must have really wanted to make the sale at that price, because they booked me for a month later than my request as the advertised price for my days seems to have just straight up not existed.
It was a pretty hellish experience trying to get them to change the dates, but in the end, they knew that I had a confirmation with my dates and I had paid, so it really would be fraud to not give me the room. Priceline: only once.
This reminds me the progress bar in TurboTax to check whether you have every number correct. Any modern computer should not take more than 1 second to do the verification and the animation is pure fake.
Not defending them here, but at a previous job I noticed them doing the same and asked why. Turned out when they updated the site to make the UI/UX faster they got calls to customer service from people saying that didn’t think it worked because “it went too fast”.
Sounds like the Houston airport where people complained about waiting too long at customs during international travel, and the successful response was to simply elongate the walk to customs.
I've also read that this is the reason baggage claim is so far away from arrivals. It means passengers spend less time standing around the baggage claim area waiting for their bags. The overall wait time is the same, but it's the dead time spent waiting that people hate.
I’ve found baggage claim to be nearest the exit, presumably so that one need not lug their bag the half-mile from the plane. And baggage claim needs to be outside security so it all works nicely.
Baggage claim being far away from arrivals, and baggage claim being near the exit, are orthogonal requirements. Baggage claim could be close to both the exit and arrivals simply by having arrivals be near the exit. But airports are intentionally designed such that you have to walk pretty much the entire length of the terminal to go from arrivals to baggage claim.
Recall hearing a similar story about Kayak years ago. They found users were less likely to trust the search results if the page loaded too quickly. IIRC they found that 7 seconds suggested the right amount of "effort."
I read this somewhere as well in regards to airline flight searches (can't find the source unfortunately). The article claimed they introduce an artificial delay, so people think the website "worked hard enough" to find them the best price.
It makes trip planning (especially internationally) extremely frustrating.
If you import 2000 stock/crypto transactions into TurboTax, you can see when it really is recalculating, because the app freezes anytime you go to the next page.
Ya, this isn't a dark pattern. IIRC - They did this because they got customer service complaints from customers saying they didn't believe the results because they were used to older systems "sitting there and churning though numbers".
It's a dark pattern, because it's deliberately wasting everybody's time to cater to people who refuse to learn. It should instead say "verification complete in n milliseconds" (or n microseconds if the milliseconds number looks too small). There could even be a "details" link with a log of all the verification steps.
This is getting pedantic but: it's not tricking people into anything. People don't have a choice. In a real dark pattern, you're trying to convince users to do something -- here, the users were going to (get their numbers verified, do the web search, whatever) anyway, it's just the illusion of doing more work.
Reminds me of a website that used a random number generator for the "<n> persons are looking at this right now". The random number would be stored in Redis for some time so it wouldn't go randomly up and down upon refresh, at which point it would be obviously fake.
Candy Crush Soda Saga does it with microtransactions.
The game is a puzzle in which you need to do something in a limited number of moves and on defeat screens there are notices along the lines of "420455 people bought extra moves to beat this level".
This isn't limited to travel-oriented sites either. I went to Lens.com the other day to price-shop some contacts, and my price at checkout (right where you're putting in your payment info) was something like $15 more than in my cart! Even accounting for taxes. It was still an okay price relatively speaking, but I immediately left, because there's no way I'm rewarding that behavior.
Of course, I then got the "you left something in your cart" email.
B&H did this to me for a monitor. Said there was a sale, I put it in my cart, got to the checkout page still on sale, was putting in my info and going to the final confirmation page and it was suddenly $50 more?...
The tech behind these sites is tricky - to make it work at all, they do a lot of caching. The "roll" in price is probably the change between the last time someone searched for that room type at that hotel and now (when availability gets rechecked). My guess is it could also roll downwards.
> Big business has done an excellent job of systematically destroying trust in the customer at every step of every process.
This is a really interesting point. Even though we should test our assumptions about the reasons for the price increase here against Hanlon's razor [1], it's very easy to _feel_ that we're being taken advantage of, and emotions matter a lot in purchasing decisions.
A savvy competitor might be able to take advantage of this kind of pricing clumsiness. (For example, I recently bought a new car from a "no haggle" dealer for pretty similar reasons... Working with traditional dealers in the U.S. is a very painful experience for many.)
The thing is Hanlon's razor can't really be applied to a corporation. A corporation is inherently an immoral actor; it doesn't act maliciously, or at least it shouldn't. It acts rationally. The key note being that it's rationale therefore need not be ethical or moral at all.
I don't think corporations are stupid at all, they're the collected intelligence of thousands of people being used with the moral and ethical consequences abstracted away to where they can act in horrifying ways and not feel any remorse. This is why probably the hundred or so people involved in denying a cancer patient's claim for insurance payment don't feel bad; none of them made the decision, it's just a process.
So, with that in mind, I don't think Hanlon applies here, if you want a razor, use Occam's. And the theory here that requires the least assumptions is that corporations would sell their own mother if it made them one red cent, so when I hear "priceline changed it from $129 to $149" my prevailing assumption is the low price was to get you in the door, and they've found that a price increase of $20 at the point of sale isn't enough to deter customers. They're probably A/B testing a number of increases to see just how much they can squeeze from people.
This reminds me a lot of Charles Stross' talk at 34C3, where he described corporations and competition between them as "human-powered AIs" that maximize profit as their only goal, similar to how a neural network only blindly minimizes a loss function.
Maximizing profit is not a simple, one-dimensional, short-sighted thing necessarily. It can involve building a brand, which means getting people to trust the organization as if it were a moral person. And once the brand is built, new management can come in and exploit it, breaking down that trust.
So I think that it's obvious that the sort of behavior people are wont to declare is the norm these days has a large cyclical element, and perhaps a secular one as well, but it's not as simple as a universal race to the bottom or we never would have developed the society we have in the first place.
Your last statement hangs development of society on the growth and ubiquity of corporations, which frankly is absurd to an offensive degree.
There is a long and disgraceful history of corporations opposing damn near everything and anything that would even remotely upset the status quo that they're used to. Everything from women's rights to equal wages among races to ending child labor to the right to unionize, all the way to health and safety laws, the 40 hour work week, and even basic labor rights like whistle-blowing all receive the same frantic and "THIS IS THE END TIMES IF THIS HAPPENS!" treatment from the corporations and their lobbies.
And it's been wrong every. Single. Time. Somehow, some way, the businesses adapted to giving their workers basic human decency, fair wages, etc. and it was never once at the behest of benevolent corporate overlords but in fact was always at the direct demand of regulatory oversight.
If anything, society has developed by fighting, tooth and nail, at every turn, the wailing and howling corporate opposition to anything even remotely not immediately profitable.
I disagree with your first sentence. But apart from that, the term "corporation" does not necessarily only mean large for profit joint stock corporations in the US, of the sort that are typically demonized. For instance, worker cooperatives or credit unions can be types of corporation. Or, "the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere is the Harvard Corporation, known formally as the President and Fellows of Harvard College"
So, I think you have a rather facile understanding of what you are talking about.
> the term "corporation" does not necessarily only mean large for profit joint stock corporations in the US
I like how you couldn't even attempt to define what I was talking about so you could condescend to me about not understanding it without basically restating the exact way I was using the word. Well done.
When people think "corporation" they think exactly that, large for profit stock corporations. Yes, credit unions are technically corporations. Hell, even LLC is a kind of corporation. You're arguing dictionary versus contextual usage, for reasons I can't quite put together.
And "typically demonized?" How much of modern colonialism and the exploitation of the developing world can be laid directly, unambiguously, at the feet of corporations?
If something is a fundamental part of society, then it's necessarily linked to essentially everything bad in society.
And if something is linked to power and wealth, it's linked to everything bad that people can do with power and wealth, which is everything.
You casually use the term "developing world", but I think that term implies those countries have the goal of becoming more like the US and Europe, and that that's a good thing. Do they need more wealthy and powerful corporations of their own, or is there another path?
Funny, I made this very same statement in a recent, unrelated post. In fact, I think corporations, at least in some cases, rely on the expectation that they won't fuck the customer over and are given the benefit of the doubt. That's especially prevalent with older generations that seem to trust what people say a bit more, at least from my observation.
I understand what you're saying, but in specific instances, this isn't about a "feeling". I won't generalize to all travel booking sites, but I will say that my former favorite booking site, Hotels.com, has clearly made a decision to embrace mendacity wherever they think it will benefit them.
The most glaring example is their complicity in hiding "resort fees" for some properties by moving notice from the room selection page (which is misleading to start with) to the summary page under an opaque "mandatory fees" line item.
Regarding car dealers, consider "doc fees" and "destination charges". It's not about feeling we're being taken advantage of - it's about an obvious attempt to mislead.
> I just assume any time I'm dealing with a corporation, I'm getting fucked over. That's why I feel no remorse for fucking them over any chance I get.
I don't think that's different from saying "most Elbonians are crooks, therefore I feel no remorse for fucking over Elbonians". Collective punishment isn't a good thing.
Corporations get to define themselves. They can also dissolve and reform. Can an "Elbonian" do the same?
"Collective punishment" applied to a corporation is called a boycott and I see zero problem with consumers expressing their preference in this way. Zero.
> "Collective punishment" applied to a corporation is called a boycott
I think that's not the usual meaning of 'collective punishment'. I believe that term is usually applied when many people are subjected to punishment in retaliation for the deeds of one person (or of only a few), not when one person (or corporation) is subjected to punishment by many people.
Corporations are not entities born out of their control. They are constructed, deliberately, to maximize profit at a cost that does not exceed that profit. That's all. They are not people and they do not have any sort of rights, or at least they shouldn't.
On a technical level, this kind of cache update is necessary, but on the user experience level there is a clear difference between "let's see if you fail to read carefully and confirm the sale at an increased price" and explicitly apologizing for failing to respect the old price and stopping the checkout to ask for extra confirmation.
Seriously, who are the people writing these features? As 'software is eating the world' I think we'll need an ethics board/bar association or something soon.
> As 'software is eating the world' I think we'll need an ethics board/bar association or something soon.
This seems so unnatural to me, programming is not as close to something like law as people make out. If a company decides to implement fraudulent process, it is the responsibility of the company. Whether that is via software or calling people over the phone or speaking to people in person.
If you want to argue that every person involved in implementing "something" should answer to an ethics board, then your argument goes way way beyond programming. Law is a special case, and they use "legal ethics" which do not attempt to encapsulate some universal ethical code for reality, they are to prevent abuse of the imperfect system that is "the law", the closest thing to that in programming is linting or compiler warnings.
Mentioned in a few related threads about Facebook and e-commerce dark patterns: we don't put our peers to task enough and make them aware about the potential harm they do.
Another comment here also mentioned that consequential actions are abstracted in large companies; group diffusion of responsibility gently removes most bad decisions that would normally make a person think remorsefully about what they’ve done.
Having an ethics board would be a top-down solution. The bottom-up, which I’m more fond of, is releasing literature and material to anyone working in tech about how their work could actually affect their end users; we need to help each other develop more self-awareness of the results of our work instead of the breadth of material about the work itself.
I strongly feel these are not "peer" decisions but managerial dictates on what to do. A board could still help to give the engineer a reason to be able to say no other than "no, please fire me"
Umbrella statements are complicated (Google is evil, Facebook is evil, etc..).
Individual actions, not so much. Using a user's 2FA phone number as a way to send menial account notifications or as a means for your profile to be found is evil. Scraping all data on public wireless networks when you're photographing the streets is evil. Sending unsolicited messages to all your contacts without telling you is evil. Making it as hard as technically possible to cancel a membership is evil. Tricking users into upgrading their license using blatantly false information (see Turbotax) is evil. That's not at all complicated.
For real. I am always amazed to hear about such fraud, because it means somewhere, a programmer with zero ethics decided he didn't care what he was doing as long as the paycheck cleared.
Also I would not be surprised to find a lot this stuff was out sourced. Someone in other cointry might be more desperate for money. So lying to the final end user might be pretty low on their I won’t do this.
You can also have people who are “I dont want to lose my job by making a big a stink.”
I am not sure people would risk their fincial stability over lying unless said lying would also affect them in other ways
That should be illegal also, and is in some countries.
In France, for example: “Le vendeur doit clairement signaler les rabais proposés par rapport à un prix de référence réel. Il est ainsi interdit d'augmenter le prix d'un produit avant la période des soldes, dans le but de faire croire à une offre promotionnelle plus importante qu'elle ne l'est réellement.”[0]
My translation: “The vendor must clearly indicate the discounts offered relative to a real reference price. It is thus forbidden to increase the price of a product before the sales period, with the goal of making people believe that a promotional offer is more significant than it actually is.”
This sort of practice shouldn’t be considered normal. It’s one of the many ways in which low-level corruption is widely legal and accepted in the US.
> It isn't really fraud unless we start regulating and prosecuting it. And we don't, right?
I can't let this stand. Actions were right or wrong before the first regulation was written and before the first judge banged his gavel under an acacia tree. Wrong actions continue to be wrong no matter what laws and judges say.
Lying to make a sale is fraud, whether it's regulated and prosecuted or not.
All of the above should be prosecuted. If you want markets to be anywhere near efficient you're gonna have to force the capitalists into it. If we don't we'll eventually be back to kings.
it's happening to me too a lot lately on Booking.com.
The feeling I am left with is "next time I need to book fast without too much searching and checking other sites".
I guess this the exact mindset they want their users to have.
Sites that refuse to display an image without javascript are a pet peeve of mine. Naturally most popular image hosts are guilty of this. Even imgur which was created because other image hosts were so obnoxious and has since become more and more like the services it replaced.
That would be an interesting court case: if you browse with Javascript off, and only see the fake price, could you bring a case of false advertising if (as I'm assuming is the case) they never intended to sell at that price?
If "2 rooms left" isn't true, it's not a nudge -- it's fraud. (The author is misusing the industry term "nudge" in UX, which is about which default option is selected, or which option you're guided towards most easily.)
Honestly I always assumed that on large booking websites, "2 rooms left" would be at least "legally" accurate somehow (like there are 12 rooms left, but only 2 of that exact arbitrary configuration of precisely 198 square feet).
Because if not, wouldn't they be opening themselves to a class-action suit some smart lawyers would be taking advantage of? Isn't that why we have class-action suits in the first place? (Whereas an individual property site, I'm less likely to trust because who's going to bother suing.)
If it's a lie, how are Expedia, Priceline etc. not being sued?
I don't think, it's "2 rooms left at the hotel" or even "2 rooms in the hotel left (at this price)". I believe it can be "2 rooms left on [whatever booking site]" — perhaps because there is additional room inventory withheld from the web site. Or that additional rooms are currently "unpriced" in the database, and that price is generated at display time.
So after you book the room, another room can be added to the available inventory, and now there are "two rooms left at this price" again.
I did a bit of traveling last summer (mostly using Hotels.com ). There were times when I booked the "last room" and then checked again after booking and there was magically another "last room" available at the same price.
I've had the experience of needing to book 4 airplane tickets through a reseller, and having a hunch it would be cheaper to book in 2 goes since there were only "2 tickets left at this price". Since they had 24hr cancellation, I took the chance, booked 2 tickets, and was right, after a few minutes, 2 more tickets were available at the original price.
The formulation I'm used to is "2 seats left (at this price)", the parenthesized text generally being a smaller font. I'm assuming that's how the "legal" accuracy is coming into play here.
It's stunning to me that anyone would use a euphemism like "behavioral interventions" to describe deceit and attempted manipulation – dark patterns. Marketers show no concern for ethical behavior and yet they complain when people reject their "nudge" as an assault by blocking ads.
I mean this is the core of adtech right? It's built on using psychology to sell things. That's basically always going to mean some sort of deceit or asymmetrical information.
When your whole industry, your day-in-day-out work is based on the assumption that this is normal, of course it all just becomes second nature.
Adtech could be, in a different world, the industry of finding out who needed a certain product so that they could be connected to companies selling that product.
Even replacing "need" with "want", there's plenty of room for entirely ethical adtech that just isn't done because it's slightly less profitable than the unregulated craziness we have.
For a simple personal example, I have weirdly-shaped kitchen cabinets, and it took me months of trial and error to find a cutlery organizer of exactly the right size to fit. If I'd had some way of plugging in drawer measurements and getting back a list of things that fit, that would have been a purchase the first day.
You're not describing advertising, but rather search. Advertising applied to your situation would either mean that the size of your drawers were stored in some surveillance database to foresee your need for odd sizes, or more likely being repeatedly bombarded with ads for ones you can't use.
Depends on how you define need. If you define it as "they will die without it", then sure. If you define it as "makes your life better in proportion to the money spent" I don't think your statement is necessarily true.
People are fully capable of making unnecessary purchases off store shelves, even at antique shops where the goods don't have box art. People like buying stuff they don't need. I think our corporate overlords are terrified of what would happen without the mind control, but I think it would just be a more subdued and happier version of what we have now.
I can't imagine what model of the world people have who think that people wouldn't want things they don't need if it weren't for advertising. This is a view I see a lot, and it baffles me how anyone could think this having met any humans or read any history. I'm not endorsing it as salutary, but it's fundamentally human to want things that are unnecessary; that restlessness is what's what's driven our history as a species, for better or for woes.
Maybe the word "need" is bad here. People always buy some things for reasons other than pressing needs. However there's a difference between latent desires and what advertising does to people. There's a reason why my old boss kept saying that the key to marketing is "creating dissatisfaction". Or, in other words, essentially making them miserable so that they seek respite in purchases. This isn't healthy.
No disagreements that advertising manufactures demand to some degree. But the claim in your upthread comment was that people wouldn't buy what they need without advertising; you may have meant it more narrowly, but I've seen the literal sentiment expressed often enough (esp on HN[1]) that I didn't see any reason not to take the statement at face value.
I accept the blame here for sloppy thinking/writing; I should've expressed my initial statement more narrowly, instead of tightening it throughout the discussion.
As you correctly observe, the statement "people wouldn't buy what they need without advertising" is obviously wrong. What I was getting at was manufactured demand, and my belief that it's a significant part of non-immediate-need purchases.
Ah OK. You also had the misfortune of accidentally expressing something I've seen people here express sincerely before, which is why I didn't assume the more charitable, less-consistent with your comment's meaning.
I don't have any disagreement with the claim that some demand is advertising-generated (in fact, it's a non-trivial part of advertising's purpose). Thanks for clarifying!
There are other reasons why people may be "using goods of a higher quality or in greater quantity than might be considered necessary in practical terms" than just status - reasons like trust and opportunity costs. I frequently go for "higher quality than necessary" when buying tools or hardware, but I do it because I have a bad experience with products of equal quality to what's necessary, and I don't want the hassle of dealing with fixing, replacing and managing the fallout of a "just right" product breaking quickly or turning out to be garbage. I wonder if Veblen classifies that as "practical terms" too?
I don't actually need this bowl for sugar cubes on my desk, but it makes my life slightly easier. No one has ever advertised a sugar cube bowl to me in my life, unless you count the mere fact of them existing in view of the camera in British sitcoms as "advertising".
Thanks but no thanks. All you have done is describe contemporary Adtech in the terms they wish to be seen in. What you describe still requires keeping massive surveillance databases on prospective targets, which is intrinsically aggressive.
If I have a problem that needs solving, I will research it, hear earnest recommendations from friends, or find about it through static advertising in appropriate venues. Imagining that I have some problem that I am not aware of, and that I will be grateful for your communication if only you can reach me, is the epitome of arrogance.
One thing confuses me in this discussion: are businesses free to lie?
It sounds like businesses might lie, and the consumer is responsible for detecting that, and the only consequence for the business is that enough people “kick back”. But that would still mean it’s rational to lie when it causes a net increase in profits.
Not good for society. Isn’t this something the Federal Trade Commission is supposed to help with?
What if we just took the whole patent troll industry, and had them target corporations for their false advertising instead of for their legitimate inventions?
The nuanced view is that while lying is legal, causing economic damages through lying is a civil tort. You can brag that your car can do zero to sixty in 3.5 seconds all you want, so long as nobody loses money on that basis.
It depends on the jurisdiction. There are a number of locales with 'truth in advertising' type laws. Around here I see signs for 'probably the best steak in town' etc., which I find amusing every time I see the weasel wording.
Even most truth in advertising laws allow for some sales puffery. Typically you can "the best steak in town!" But you can't say "Rated the best steak in town" if it wasn't.
It also feels like, at this point in history, "Best steak in town!" is, even if pretty widely untrue (e.g. the steak is leathery, very few people would consider it edible let alone the best, etc etc), that's a benign kind of puffery.
People aren't basing large decisions or spending large amounts of money on the veracity of that being the best steak in town.
I think that's another reason why that stuff gets a pass. It's small-time, it's local, restaurants already run on razor-thin margins, etc. You can't systematically defraud ten thousand hotel-bookers a day with a "best steak in town" sign in your window. And to some extent, we expect everyone to have that kind of pride in their restaurant, so who cares if they say that stuff?
Taste is subjective therefore best is subjective as well. I make the "best" beef fillet steak (for me), but most people would throw it away (it's well done, I prefer it like that... but waiters often try to convince me to change my order if I order a well done steak!).
I ordered a "well done" hamburger at a bar & grill type place once and it was delivered charred. I supposed the cook was offended, but I didn't get it - it was just a hamburger.
The claim of having the best steak, the best steak in the world, or the best steak in the universe, is permitted. This sort of claim is known as "puffery". Saying that your steak was voted best steak in the state 10 years in a row by Consumer Reports is a more specific claim and is false advertising if not true.
Saying that someone just bought the last hotel room at that price when it wasn't true is definitely a specific claim, is false, and is misleading advertising and is illegal.
We don't need more of the same laws. We can stop many of the dark pattern practices being described simply by enforcing existing law. It's pointless to create new redundant laws when we have no intention of enforcing the existing ones. Obviously the new law won't be enforced either and we'll just have more laws on the books. The purpose of these proposals is for politicians to claim they did something by passing a new law.
In my opinion, claiming to have the best steak in the town is a lot different than claiming your bogus health drink or natural vitamin pill actually helps your mind and body. Best X in town is an opinion, snake oil is snake oil.
"helps your mind and body" is true for most drinks since water and sugars are needed to stay alive and to think. It's not even puffery because it's empirically and provably true.
"Helps cure your cancer" on the other hand is not only misleading advertising but falls afoul of FDA prohibitions on making unsubstantiated medical claims.
It's marketing, this Hegelian ping pong is continuous. At one point in time €XX.99 was new, miney-back guarantees were new, introductory rates...
The most interesting part to me here is:
"a world saturated with behavioral interventions might no longer resemble the one in which those interventions were first studied."
This is where the intentional pseudo-science of consumer behaviour^ kind of of meets the world of (at least aspirationally) sciences, psychology, behavioural economics, etc..
Does the invisible hand Adam Smith described still work the same way once we are all hyper aware of it. Is it still invisible? Do any human behaviour discoveries mean anything outside of their narrow time and place contexts. Can we tell the difference between ones that do or don't?
Can we really learn about human behaviour?
^it's intentional pseudo science because it isn't looking for truth, just useful tactics using some scientific (or pseudo-scientific) methodology.
I understand playing up the strengths of a product and minimizing the weaknesses, but I don't know how baldfaced lies like "2 rooms left!" were ever acceptable. That's just the business jumping up and waving a flag that they can't be trusted. Sometimes I'll still buy something but only if I can tell myself that the person who made the website is probably not the person I'm actually doing business with.
2 rooms/seats left etc is not true in most of the cases.
The way it works that an OTA (online travel agency) gets a maximum of 5 seats assigned before they get new ones.
Technically it's true from their point of view that there might be only 3 seats left before they get new ones assigned, however it is not true from the consumer's perspective who might be tricked into believing that there's only 3 seats available on the entire plane.
This is also the reason the threshold number for displaying these messages is never more than that as they don't even hold that much inventory at any given time.
That reminds me of the terrible movie Don’t Mess With the Zohan. His cousin or someone runs an electronics store and there’s a big sign that says “Going Out of Business”. Turns out the store’s name is Going Out of Business.
Many years ago I bought a piece of stereo gear from a shop that was going out of business. They did genuinely go out of business, but I learned shortly after that I could have bought the same thing $10 cheaper by going somewhere else. A cheap lesson.
I bought some ski goggles at a "spring clearance sale". Stupidly, I did not search on the internet first. They were marked up $40 above what the manufacturer charged on their website.
Are you sure it is the same store? 20 years ago (and probably only applies to my state) you could only order 3x (I don't recall exact numbers or details) your current inventory once you announce the going out of business sale, and you had to be in business for a year an a half. People would open a furniture store, give good deals for 18 months - just to eat. Then they will sell out for a lot of money to a going out of business company who would cram the store with inventory, raise prices and then do the sale. When the doors closed (because they were out of inventory) the old owner would start a new store in the same location under a slightly difference name and repeat the cycle.
Nothing about the store differed externally in the years that i looked at it, but ive never gone inside so maybe it was changed in some way like you mention? I live in California btw but im not aware of the laws regarding this.
>as a counterpoint "going out of business" sales are common in the brick and mortar world, especially in sectors like furniture.
I'm confused; if the price isn't good, what does it matter what type of sale it is? "Going out of business" should be points against buying from said store, no?
A "going out of business" sale sign indicates they are eager to move their inventory, potentially even at cost, to avoid additional storage, transportation, disposal fees, etc.
If it's truly going out of business, that's leverage for the buyer, precisely because while you can simply choose to shop elsewhere, the number of available buyers is finite and approaching zero.
So if the "price isn't good" you can negotiate, whereas at a healthy business there ought to be no negotiating.
In the same vein, there's a massage parlor near me that's had a "grand opening special" for several years now... these are examples of "dark patterns" in older industries than tech.
It just means either the place is small and only has 2 rooms (eg. A family run guesthouse), or they only have 2 of that exact type of room left (balcony, twin bed, non-smoking), but might have plenty of other slightly different rooms left.
I started to book two one way plane tickets the other day (with both Eurowings and Ryanair). During both booking processes I saw a messages claiming "seats are going fast, book now" or something like that.
However in the next step of the booking process I was allowed to pick my seat. In both cases, the plane wasn't even 50% full.
It's stupid if you make it so transparent to your customers that you are lying to them.
PS: I ended up not booking the flight that day, the next day one of the flights was 15% cheaper. :-)
PPS: I have my browser configured to delete all cookies when I close it.
Don't both of those airlines make you pay more to select your seat? It's possible they were lying, but it also seems plausible that seats were sold but not assigned yet.
Just yesterday on Priceline I was told "only 2 rooms left!" at a hotel I stay at frequently on this type of trip. I knew it was BS, and as I clicked through, I had several different types of room to choose from, with no less than 8 rooms of any kind available.
I wonder if it was 15% cheaper for you based on a server cookie (eg browser ID and/or IP), like the email offers that come through if you abandon your cart. [Yes I see you delete browser cookies, but fingerprinting works].
In Europe, it's very rare for flight prices to go down.
There is a certain number of seats available at each price point, so they only way price can go down is if cancellations happen.
I don't know why airlines don't use a fancier pricing algorithm, but I think the protocol for flight aggregators and travel agents is very primitive, so doesn't allow it.
> There is a certain number of seats available at each price point, so they only way price can go down is if cancellations happen.
Airline price algorithms (industyy name is Yield Management) can be very complicated and counterintuitive, and differ greatly from airline from airline - your summary is way too simplistic. I have personally observed prices dropping many times - to the extent where I don't think there is all that much value in booking weeks or months in advance, especially on short, high density routes.
A huge number of factors go into pricing regimes, and they evolve over time. Getting paid earlier is always better, so prices start low, and based on historical demand. But if the algorithm notices a bump in sales to some specific city on some specific dates - maybe a concert or convention - it will experiment with raising all price buckets, lowering it again if it notices too rapid a falloff. "Common sense" means that a great deal of people try to book their flights maybe 4-6 in advance, so the algorithm will try to ensure a healthy profit during that period, but if demand is unaccountably low for some reason it will often ease off and lower them. I've seen prices drop just in the last few days when evidently they've decided all prudent people have already bought their tickets and are trying to fill the last seats with impulse purchases or bargain hunters. I once had to rebook a flight at the airport after missing it by a few minutes - and the price I paid was less than for the one I missed!
Anyway, it's nowhere near as simple as a series of buckets with price tags on them, and hasn't been for 20 years. Hotels, by the way, use comparable systems.
This is not quite accurate. The same seat can have different prices depending on a number of factors such as booking classes, availability rules, fare components, time of booking, OTA mark-downs etc http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf gives a good overview what goes into pricing, although said being said it's from 2003 so things have evolved since then.
"Two thirds of the British public (65 percent) interpreted examples of scarcity and social proof claims used by hotel booking websites as sales pressure. Half said they were likely to distrust the company as a result of seeing them (49 percent). Just one in six (16 percent) said they believed the claims."
"(34 percent) expressed a negative emotional reaction to these messages, choosing words like contempt and disgust from a precoded list."
There goes your reputation.
Amazon has become really bad. I have to decline "Amazon Prime" three times to get to checkout. Remember when they boasted of "one-click ordering?" And they lie, claiming that "Amazon Prime" is free.
Well, I'm beginning to think that some retailers have exposed patterns that consumers can exploit. I noticed that even without Amazon Prime I get a free shipping option, which is supposed to be slow, but almost always comes about as quickly as Prime. I just got an order from another business, which gave me several choices - I could have spent $20 on shipping, but I took the free one that was supposed to take a few weeks, and it got to me in two days.
I've had instances where I get told that "our lines are unfortunately very busy at the moment. If you do not wish to wait, you can find more information at our website or you can send an email at bla@bla.com. We expect the average waiting time to be 20 minutes."
If you wait past that discouraging message, you get transfered to their support centre, and your call gets picked up in ~2-3 minutes.
That message is a blatant attempt to reduce the load on their customer support by discouraging callers and making it a painful to use channel.
I was once asked to implement a system in Asterisk to park all incoming calls in a wait queue with a random time between 15 and 30 minutes before even transferring them to a ring group to be answered.
I bailed on the project. The last thing I heard is that they were still arguing over which "your call is important to us" message sounded the most sincere...
That message is a blatant attempt to reduce the load on their customer support by discouraging callers and making it a painful to use channel
This was my precise experience implementing analysis software, interactive telephony ("Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes") and going through the business case with senior management at an east coast call center ten years ago for a major consumer electronics and home appliance manufacturer, you probably have one of their smartphones in your pocket right now--call takers were saddled with what I thought were obscenely short call windows to resolve a call and be ready to take the next; three minutes to troubleshoot, diagnose and help a customer fix a washing machine, for example. One second over and the agents score went down, and they would face penalties.
What got implemented was a maze of menu options that (and I can say this authoritatively and quite honestly) were not captured beyond the second level to filter and properly triage calls into hunt-groups or queues, or even do any sort of business analysis to determine where the most of our calls were going, but were deliberately designed to give agents more time on their existing calls and keep the hold queue artificially small.
This is what exists at the root of my suspicion that this "menu options have changed" maneuver is all about numbers and stats that are ultimately meaningless in every practical definition that could be applied here.
---
parting note:
Ten years and a different telecom company later, I find myself staring at an email last week with the call center company's name on it, we've just signed a strategic partnership with them. Is it irony? Who knows. Am I chuckling morbidly? God yes.
Wish I knew. For my part I actively suggested at every turn how to handle call flow and queuing much better, business partners had their minds made up and effectively wanted us to just "shutup and implement".
I love the "please check our website" line. There's no way in hell I'd sit here on hold if your freaking website was working. The reason I'm here is that your website is broken.
I would actually prefer they made it more blatant. Like if you're gonna nudge might as well just push.
* Put people on a mandatory minimum hold of 15 minutes. Be explicit that they won't even enter the queue until then.
* Play ads the entire time. Not for their own service, just whatever.
* In between each ad have the message "press $RANDOM to continue waiting" and if you don't hear the right dial tone in the next 10 seconds just disconnect the call.
I've had to call into a number of phone trees, and as far as I can tell, the entire phone tree process is designed to frustrate people away from support as much as possible. "Listen carefully as our options have changed" is something they can throw in to annoy you, waste more of your time, and discourage you from hitting the button you know will skip the dialogue.
That's not really a suspicion I have at all, since working with business groups full-time to this very day in building and deploying interactive voice systems, I suspect it's not about getting people to listen, it's about arbitrary OKRs.
I think spam/scam is reaching a crisis level and it is impacting everyone who tries to communicate with the public.
When Hillary Clinton kicked off her 2016 campaign she wrote an article on LinkedIn proposing that we cut the interest rate for student loans.
At the time I was getting two or three calls a day from "card services" which offered to "cut my interest rate"; these calls often had spoofed caller id. (I think
everybody else was getting these calls.)
Clinton didn't answer her own phone, so she didn't know this, and didn't realize that her message sounded spammy and scammy because people were being saturated with similar messages.
(Lately Ithaca phone numbers, but not surrounding rural areas, have been saturated with calls in Mandarin Chinese. My aspie-linguist friend tells me that the calls claim to be from the Chinese Embassy -- it seems to be some kind of effort to shake down Chinese students.)
For a long time the people I did marketing work with insisted that every web page end with a "call to action" but I think now that is a sure way to come across as inauthentic because I get pushback from readers.
That they managed to work the concept of "puffery" (their propaganda term for lies) into the law tells you everything you need to know about advertising industry ethics.
In all fairness though, a typical conservative legal department is going to take one look at that first statement and ask for documentation that it's true. Which, of course, you won't be able to provide.
Not everything said by a company spokesperson or written on a web page is fully vetted by legal but ads specifically often are.
I'm from and in Europe sick and tired of ads being everywhere, public transport, giant posters, and so on. That it's even worse elsewhere doesn't make the shit I'm wading through daily any more palatable.
Are physical ads like the ones you describe really so burdensome? As long as it's a poster, and not a bright, distracting video ad on a giant screen (I see these at bus stops), I don't mind them. Sometimes the design of the ads are interesting, even if the product they're selling is not.
> Are physical ads like the ones you describe really so burdensome?
Yes. They are everywhere. I cannot look at a building, a road, or go to the subway without seeing a hundred advertisements. My brain will try to read automatically any text in my field of vision. It is exhausting. My job is complex enough to overload my brain with things I do not need or care about.
It's a war on human attention. And we need de-escalation.
I guess that it is different for each individual. And, your experience is not like mine. But for the ones like me it needs to stop.
I read words in front of me, if they're in front of me, and think about what they actually mean, from a purely grammatical perspective. With many ads, that's already bad enough. Then there's the attempted manipulation versus the reality of the product. I apply this hairsplitting to everything I see, and where the intentions of what I'm analyzing are benign, it's fun -- for me. Even when I "find mistakes", it's more a "it's fun to think about things" thing. But when the intentions are not benign, I use it to fuel my vigilance.
> To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
-- George Orwell
> Because we are lied to all the time, in ways so routine they are beneath conscious notice, even the most direct lies are losing their power to shock us.
-- Charles Eisenstein, "The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies"
I never accepted or adopted said routine, when I was a kid, my mum often said "you're always thinking", and hating most ads is just a natural extension of that. I just have the one gear, and I haven't tired of it yet.
> Sometimes the design of the ads are interesting, even if the product they're selling is not.
Sometimes we can learn interesting things from a virus, I still don't want the disease. Most of what I could learn from well designed ads, I could learn from elsewhere, too, and none of it is essential, versus the essential things (like words meaning things, logical/critical thought, people behaving, talking and thinking like adults, and treating their clients as such -- and so on) most ads seek to undermine.
I spent a couple weeks in Hobart, Tasmania last year which has strict regulations on signage and outdoor advertisements. It was really refreshing, and returning to the States really made our ads stand out.
As the other guy said, when you go to an area that doesnt have so many the marketing is visually jarring and it takes a few weeks to get your marketing immunity built up
This is a classic example of a study in the social sciences that confirms my prejudices, but whose actual methodology is almost entirely meaningless.
The participants are not asked to make any consequential decision based on the information, but just to fill out a survey saying whether they believed the claims. A nudge-conomist would say that even though people have stated preferences, their acted-upon preferences can diverge, so this study proves nothing.
Even though I'm disposed to believe that nudges like this do create "nudge fatigue" and that people rapidly become immune to it (like the $*.99 pricing model), this study does nothing to confirm or dispute that notion.
Even broader I believe. For example recently I purchased a Vizio TV and based on their advertising of the TV on their website, it said it included a Android tablet remote (and they showed pictures of it on the page).
Apparently that was for last years model not the newer model I purchased. Needless to say, customer service was adamant at telling me they would not send me the android remote control because that is not included in this years model. Completely false advertising. I didn't bother further than this complaint.
A lot of Shopify (or other similar) sites use a nudge where a little toaster pops up and says "so and so from Canmore, Ontario just purchased widget xyz"
I never really thought much about it until someone (I think on here or Reddit) pointed out how it was annoying and a blatant sales tactic.
I suppose I never really assumed the worst, it's really a matter of how you define "just purchased". If you're talking to a flesh and blood salesman, he or she will also say things like "I just sold a pair of knives to your neighbour". Maybe it was 10 minutes ago, maybe it was last week, but the statement itself is true, I suppose? In my neck of the woods, I get lots of driveway sealant salespeople saying they're "doing a house down the street". Are they lying? I never really thought so, but maybe they are.
If they had done zero sales and were saying otherwise, then that'd be lying.
This happened to my wife once for something she was thinking of purchasing. While she was deciding, I went to my own computer and opened the web site and watched it. After like 3 minutes, it started repeating names, which led me to believe that they had only sold a couple dozen units! Also, it's pretty awful if you have a fairly unique first name. "Adolph from Palm Springs just bought our hemorrhoid cream!" Great, now the only guy named Adolph in Palm Springs is outed.
I’d love to build some kind of front end, “plain” website that allows to purchase from a number of established online vendors, but uses their APIs or affiliate interfaces and strips away all the dark pattern evil. At one point that more or less described Amazon, but they’ve been using some amount of that too.
Some amount? Amazon is rife with dark patterns! Amazon's choice, default "featured" search order, inability to filter certain categories by price, childish refusal to sell Google/Apple/<any competitor big enough to actually compete> devices, Prime walled gardens, etc...
You’re right, though Amazon’s dark patterns are more back-end, operations-level practices - I really meant the web interface. Even still, that has dark patterns embedded in it, like the refusal to sort by price you mentioned.
Craigslist is the one site that comes to mind that matches your description.
Looking at their jobs page I see this:
> a tech nirvana, no VCs, MBAs, sales, marketing, biz dev, or pivoting
Looks like the trick is to ignore capitalism and avoid hiring businessmen that focus exclusively on growth.
But would a company like CL survive being created today? Is it only effective because it's been around so long and has the network effect compounded over many years?
Your idea about the plain version of Amazon sounds neat on paper. But of course the question is, how is it going to compete against Amazon?
"scarcity and social proof messages so overused in travel websites that the average person does not believe them"
The example given, hotel bookings, it wasn't the use of these behavioral interventions, it was that the consumer realized the website repeatedly lies about it. There aren't really only 2 rooms left and 17 people have viewed it, it is purely the website being dishonest so often that it is assumed to always be dishonest
There is such a going as honest advertising, but these companies chose to misrepresent information.
That the authors take away seems to be it is the overuse of the lie means he'll probably come across the solution that they need to lie better or find a different lie.
Them consumers will get used to that lie and companies will come pay him for a third lie...
For these interventions to work, they have to have validity. You can’t fabricate scarcity - it needs to be a real thing or else of course eventually it will be ignored.
I think common sales strategies are just as bad as unsolicited flirtatious behavior that annoys many women around the world. Perhaps we can make them illegal on similar grounds.
Whether you're going after my money or after my body does not seem like a fundamental difference, really.
The "nudge" in the title of this article is drawing from the book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" [1] which cites one of the best nudges ever introduced - automatic enrollment in retirement savings plans. You can also learn more about true nudges from the Freakonomics Radio recordings. [2]
I wonder if the hole left by failing interventions is actually an opportunity for a different type of intervention.
The whole point of BE-based intervention is that humans have a limited amount of reasoning power to put towards a given decision and can’t always choose rationally, so the nudge is amplifying a heuristic to make it easier to choose something.
The restrictions of human cognition don’t go away - a failing tactic might simply mean opportunity for a new tactic.
We’ve seen this example with things like “fair pricing model” - this is a heuristic shortcut for trustworthiness. You aren’t trying to nudge me? Great!
Certainly new interventions will surface in response.
> humans have a limited amount of reasoning power to put towards a given decision and can’t always choose rationally, so the nudge is amplifying a heuristic to make it easier to choose something
That's a pretty disingenuous way of describing a multi-party interaction with divergent interests. It's not "easier" for the user because the "nudger" [manipulator] is trying to further exhaust the user's decision making capabilities to the manipulator's benefit. In fact, it's much harder if the user does not want to be taken advantage of.
When I see a website lying to me in our interactions (two rooms left, going fast, yeah sure), I just assume that if you're starting out our business trying to defraud me, it's not going to get any better and immediately nope out of there.
I don't care if they have rooms $10 cheaper. If you've already proved you will lie to me, I'd just be foolish to engage in any business with you at all. I might not detect your next attempt to cheat me, or I might be more vulnerable having already given you my money, or something like that. Much better in the long run just to decline to do business at all.
This has always been happening. Go back in time a decade at a time and watch a few TV commercials. The sales tactics used become more and more transparent and laughable the older they are.
It's a lot like stock picking. Strategies that work become more and more sophisticated over time because the results of the simpler schemes are already factored into the price as they became known.
Booking.com seems to take this a step further by including unavailable hotel rooms in search results with a "sold out, just missed it" label superimposed over them. That's pretty much the height of absurdity. It's the online equivalent of a used car salesman. It's really a gross experience. Booking.com unfortunately seems to have a lock on booking in Europe. I would be interested in hearing if and how folks are booking rooms in Europe without them.
I think if you're honest about it, then it is easier to have the end user trust you. It's the "in your face" nudge that's inappropriate.
For example, if you had a nondescript button that said "check room availabilities" and actually did it, I'd trust that over a toaster that said "two rooms left!"
It was on Morning Edition on OPB radio at around 7:45-8:10PT (Oregon Public Broadcasting, essentially a glove for NPR's hand). I wish I remembered more about the context.
Not the majority, no. But around 25% of people use adblockers, which might be higher than many expect. Also, very few people will stop using adblockers once they have started, so the number will only increase.
I, as a technical person, can generally tell when a website's failing because of an adblocker false positive, and know how to fix it. I know what the reputable extensions are, and I keep track of which ones get captured by the industry (like Adblock Plus). My webdev experience lets me know how important they are from a security standpoint.
A random non-technical person likely doesn't know any of this.
Maybe my intentions weren’t clear. The article appears to be suggesting that people are growing savvy to the ways of online businesses, citing some marketing tricks that laypeople recognize now.
I am merely claiming that if you don’t know about adblockers, you are most certainly not “wise.” That May feel like an attack but it’s kind of just the truth. Saying it’s not fair because they don’t have the technical competence to know better is just circular reasoning. It might not be fair, but we have significant low hanging fruit to pick before we start considering the general populace wise to the ways of e commerce.
As an aside, I don’t think I have ever encountered a website which both did not work due to ad blockers and didn’t give me explicit instructions on how to fix it, even if that solution is turning adblocker off for just that site.
> I, as a technical person, can generally tell when a website's failing because of an adblocker false positive, and know how to fix it.
How often does that happen? I believe that most people will be fine if the occasional website breaks because the benefit of ad-free/ad-reduced surfing is so large.
You must visit different sites than me then. It doesn't happen even on a yearly basis for me. The last time it happened was two years ago on my bank's website. And that was due to poor coding practices on their part
"And that was due to poor coding practices on their part"
Sure, you know that, but that's the point. The average user goes "that stupid extension broke my bank website and I had to hire someone for $150 to fix it".
I had a family member get soaked for thousands of dollars worth of Geek Squad "fixes" over stuff like this. We got her an iPad and she's been happy ever since.
IMO the obvious outcome is multiple devices for different functions. A stock device for banking etc. And then a weird thing you get from your nephew, who says it will track you less for general usage. If the latter doesn't work for something (or stops working altogether), you can always do it on the full-take device.
This will grow in popularity as ever more hardware becomes manufacturer EOL, but can be kept current with Ubuntu/Lineage/pmOS (etc).
Curious, I clicked on it and went to the Priceline site, and watched as a JavaScript animation “rolled” the price from $129 to $149 and alerted me that someone just got the last room. Obviously the whole thing was fake. (Why would they implement such an animation, and how likely is it that someone got the room in those two seconds?)
At this point, it’s not even nudging or dark patterns but just straight out fraud.