
The slippery slope - justinph
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/07/23/the-slippery-slope/
======
csallen
I'm going to nitpick a bit here, mostly because it's entertaining to play
devil's advocate on a topic that's always met with such one-sided responses on
HN (in this case: dark patterns).

My question is: Why _should_ a company make it easy for people to do exactly
what it doesn't want them to do?

Sure, outright trickery and lies are almost unarguably immoral. And the author
definitely identifies many examples of that. But there are other instances
where I just can't agree with classification of the UX as a dark pattern.

Let's take The Ladders, for example. In order to cancel, you have to fill out
a form with a few required fields. What a shady, underhanded, and downright
spiteful trick! Or is it? Most cancellation forms online will take you through
an intermediary confirmation step, anyway. What's so evil about requiring a
small form to be filled out? The questions are directly relevant to the act of
canceling, and if you truly don't give a shit, you can fill it in with
gibberish. Even if you give honest answers, you could be done with this form
in literally 5 seconds. It almost certainly took you longer to fire up your
browser and navigate to their site, anyway.

My point is: The company is not attempting to trick you or obfuscate the
truth. They know that the presence of the form will likely lower their
cancellation rates by a marginal amount, yes, but there's nothing immoral
about lowering cancellation rates. And the form isn't _nearly_ long enough to
be considered difficult or unreasonable, so it's not like they're attempting
to frustrate people into staying. In the end, it convinces some people to
change their minds, but nobody gets hurt.

Compare that to, say, The Ladder's decision to auto-renew monthly
subscriptions while hiding that fact at the bottom of the page in small gray
font. Or to email subscriptions with no unsubscribe link. Or to burying opt-
out checkboxes within gigantic forms. In these cases, companies are outright
tricking people.

~~~
eieio
Acting shady hurts your brand.

Harry Brignull(the author) discusses this in a talk[1] that I found on the
dark patterns website(I checked out the website after loving the article).

He makes the argument that sure, many of these tactics might increase your
conversion rates or make you some money, at least in the short run. But it
also causes you to come off as seedy, to come off as a back alley discount
store instead of as a premium brand.

He points out that if you're doing this and you're aware of that and you're ok
with it, that's one thing. But plenty of sites might not have realized what
they're doing and how it comes off.

I know I personally resent it when sites leave boxes like "sign up for our
newsletter" checked or when they have fake download box adds. Making it hard
for me to do what I want to do, no matter how you do it, bothers me. It feels
like you're the adversary of the site, not a customer or friend.

I believe he talks about it around 12 minutes in but the entire presentation
is _easily_ worth watching. He has another one aimed at designers that I plan
on watching as soon as I find my headphones(the sound is too low for me to
hear it on my MBP).

[http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/12/17/dark-
pattern...](http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/12/17/dark-patterns-an-
overview-for-brand-owners/)

~~~
buro9
> Acting shady hurts your brand.

These companies are not silly, they understand the damage to their brand can
be quantified as $x and that the benefit to their bottom line can be
quantified as $xx .

Sometimes you do things you know have a negative, because you believe that the
positives outweigh it.

Not that I agree with these dark patterns, but I understand why companies
choose to implement them.

~~~
adrianhoward
_These companies are not silly, they understand the damage to their brand can
be quantified as $x and that the benefit to their bottom line can be
quantified as $xx._

Actually - they often are silly. It might be $x right _now_ , but it turns
into $10x later on as the consequences of that initial damage roll on and
affect future interactions, recommendations, etc.

It's very easy to quantify the short-term gains being sneaky get you. It's
much harder to quantify the longer term consequences.

~~~
luikore
By doing this they survived first and took place of some other honest
companies. Still very large benefits.

~~~
jmagoon
Do you have examples of that? Because he has several examples of the opposite
in his talk.

------
casca
To disable Ad Tracking under IOS, go to Settings > General > About >
Advertising > Limit Ad Tracking to On

This is a worthwhile read (with excellent examples) on the ubiquitous "Click
here to not receive third-party messages" pattern.

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
Let's not forget about disabling "Interest-based ads," for which there is no
path to get to... other than going to a link in Safari. The link is
oo.apple.com

This KB article explains the process.
[http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4228](http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4228)

Interestingly, this launches some sort of stealth app, not a hidden page in
the "Settings" app.

Also, there is another setting for including your location with iAd calls.
That one is Settings > Privacy > Location Services > (Scroll all the way to
the bottom, yes, past every single app that uses your location, about 35 in my
case) > System Services > Location-Based iAds

~~~
Joeri
And ofcourse following the link in the KB article just produces a timeout from
my ipad (though i do get a proper message that i'm not on an iOS device when
accessing it from my mac). You wonder why they even bother? If you have no
intention of opting people out, why even put up the page?

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
I suppose there is a legal requirement in some jurisdiction that the
functionality exists, but how accessible to make the feature was left
unspecified. Therefore, dark patterns prevail.

------
shurcooL
Spotify came up with a sneaky one.

I recently signed up and it only asked for some basic info. By default, of
course, all email notifications are turned on. When you try to turn them off
and save changes - it won't let you save because one "mandatory" field is
incomplete [1].

So you're forced to add more info if you want to turn off email notifications.

It's not a big deal, but it falls in the same category. I like the company
less now.

[1]
[http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4800/jfgt.png](http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4800/jfgt.png)

~~~
Too
Spotify is known for its shady tricks. Try figuring out that the client
consumes a very large portion of your upload bandwidth. Another one is when
they enabled the "local files" feature via auto update a few years ago, this
feature not only allowed you to play mp3 files via the client but also phoned
home to mama with a list of all your local music. There was no way to opt out
of this, the client just auto updated and started importing everything from
windows default music directory. It seems as though they update their TOS
every time i restart the client also, who would read that when you are in a
rush to start your music.

The way they remove songs from the library is also a bit disturbing, some
songs become gray and some just silently disappear. The frequency of removed
songs is also quite high, for a free service i don't mind but if i pay premium
and tons of my favorite songs disapear for each day i'm not going to be happy.

~~~
maaaats
When they introduced the option to play local music, it was a pretty big
launch and you were notified. And it has always been easy to select where to
grab local files from, or disable it. I think your point here is invalid.

The fact that they remove songs is not unethical, so not really relevant.

------
peter_l_downs
Long, but worth reading — a great overview of shady techniques that many
startups may feel are worth employing to bump their growth stats.

~~~
mooreds
It was even more interesting to me as a set of 'canaries in a coal mine'. If
you are working for a company and start to see many, or one, of these
patterns, it should serve as awake up call. Move on or don't, but be aware of
the corporate behavior.

------
purplelobster
I wish there was a browser plugin or something that displays all the blackhat
manipulation a site employs as you visit it, and give alternative options.

------
zallarak
Very well written. When you turn against your customers' welfare, you're
almost always going down a path of failure in the long run.

~~~
z-factor
Banks seem to be doing ok.

~~~
rocky1138
For now. It's only a matter of time before a startup or two breaks that
industry down just like they have for many others.

~~~
sudonim
I'm a happy customer of both Simple.com and USAA. Both are very customer
focused banks. The industry is being broken down, just really really slowly.

~~~
studentrob
Just curious, what benefits do you get from simple.com that USAA does not
provide? I looked at it in the beginning but it didn't seem to add anything,
perhaps that's changed.

~~~
superuser2
Serving customers who aren't military or from military families?

~~~
sudonim
You can open a bank account with USAA if you're non-military. However, some of
their other services are not available to you.

~~~
superuser2
Like mobile check deposit, which is a big deal if you don't live near a
branch.

------
mariusz331
It's funny. I'm on the phone trying to reach a student loan representative
right now. I keep pressing 1 for English, 4 for a student loan representative,
1 again for the type of loan, then I'm back to pressing 4 for a loan
representative. It's an infinite loop!

I try hitting 0 for an operator but then I'm prompted to give a 4 digit
extension for the party I want to reach.

~~~
toyg
It could be that the pool of operators for your type of loan is empty (i.e.
they're all offline or engaged), and the app is set to automatically let you
try again with some other department.

Just going with Occam here, but I've seen a couple of callcentre call-routing
systems and the potential for misconfiguration is fairly high.

~~~
andrewflnr
Hanlon, actually. Just for the sake of terminology:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)
. It keeps me sane.

------
namenotrequired
Great article. This reinforces the "Data informed, not data driven" mantra -
you can optimise a feature on your site for a single metric but always take
the human effects into account.

It also shows the importance of talking to your users in person. An A/B test
may prove that ticking a box by default will get so and so many more users
opting in, but it can't show you the look on their face when they realize what
you just did to them.

------
khawkins
One large claim made here is that while Dark Patterns may increase
subscription rates, they hurt brand image. Are there any scientific studies
measuring the magnitude of such damage? Perhaps the occasional irritation is
worth 5 others "duped" into accepting more advertising.

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

~~~
HNaTTY
That's probably because it's a 15MB page including all the assets -- Somebody
doesn't believe in jpegs.

The page still downloaded for me in 2.5s though, so I have to give the guy
some credit for having a beefy host.

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

------
na8ur
Very nice article. ethics! this is the problem of our society. the next
article should be about making people sensible. How to reward them for been
responsible. The thing is people don't care about their live. Managers change
jobs, people accept NSA... Might be intresting to compare Customer-Live-Time-
Value und Business-Model-LiveTime-Value. What if they knew that the bomb will
be nightmare? I would love to see numbers? How about calculating Update-Costs
of the SW to "how about having a new business model". The aren't these "dark
pattern" businesses VC driven?

------
nissimk
This reminds me of the android ui for turning of WiFi when the screen is off.
It used to be on one of the settings pages. Now you have to go to settings,
WiFi, menu, advanced. There are numerous articles in the Google index of
people having trouble finding this option. It makes a WiFi only tablet last
for a very long time without recharging if you don't use it too much. Why
would they want to hide that option?

~~~
lnanek2
Kind of prefer it is hidden myself. As a developer with apps that sometimes
upload and the like in the background, I don't want countless emails from
users who have flipped that switch and can't get their scores to post or
whatever.

------
Too
If you want all these patterns collected in one page, try booking a flight
with Ryanair.

------
alexdimitrov
in iOS7 Advertising is in Privacy. Maybe apple are taking notes.

~~~
mullingitover
Stole the words right out of my keyboard. This is fixed, just not deployed
widely yet.

------
dreamfactory
Not to defend but for context most of this stuff isn't new and just looks like
the direct marketing industry applying their well-honed scammy techniques. If
you look at the old record and book clubs that used to advertise in magazines
it's the same story.

------
Aloisius
I actually had to design one of these dialogs for LinkedIn for the new who
viewed my profile when we flipped it to a tit-for-tat system (you show me your
name and I'll show you mine).

We spent weeks changing the language to be as clear as possible without being
overly verbose. I admit that the first (unreleased) rev probably was a bit
shady, but in the end we ended up with something that's primary goal was to
inform.

I'm super glad we went that way too. Being upfront and clear turned out to be
the way to go. Sure we didn't get instant benefit like you'd get with an opt-
out, but the conversion rates were very good even when we spelled out what we
were doing.

~~~
0x0
What happens if you keep the setting off most of the time, and only switch it
on for a few minutes to check out your profile visitors, then switch it back
off? Would you still stay anonymous (unless others happen to check their
visitor lists in those few minutes?)

~~~
Aloisius
It only starts showing you views since the time you switch from being
invisible to prevent gaming the system that way.

Also, changing your profile visibility setting only affects your visibility on
future visits to people's profile pages, not past visits.

------
nathas
All I'm going to say is that even though it's awful The Ladders have all those
tricks, they're successful.

Not saying the ends justify the means, but I wonder how their business would
look otherwise.

~~~
rmc
Well that's the kinda the point of Dark Patterns? Companies use them because
they work. They are unethical, but they achieve success (in the short term at
least, sometimes long tem). This is why there is law, to level to play in
field so the ethical groups can be not disadvantaged.

~~~
kvcrawford
Except, law is invariably perverted to provide an advantage to a select group.

~~~
rmc
Sure, _bad_ law. I'm not saying law is perfect or flawless. There's a ton of
bad law. We should fix the bad law. Unfortunately making law is tied up to
politics and PR and minefield of stupidity that is.

------
gfodor
If you're making an empirical argument that these techniques provide more harm
than good, you need evidence. If you're making an argument that they are just
evil and if you do them you should have trouble sleeping at night, that's
another argument altogether. I'm not sure which of these two arguments the
article is trying to make, but it's very short on the empirical side.

~~~
tantalor
It's an ethical and aesthetic argument about what makes a good design, brand,
or business.

------
aspensmonster
>"Brand relationships are like human relationships."

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

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

~~~
grey-area
I found this statement confusing at first too, but perhaps the way to look at
it is that most customers do treat their relationship with brands by analogy
to human relationships, whether they should or not.

We get mad at brands, vow we'll never use them again, break up with them, come
back to them, expect them to behave coherently, criticise the behaviour of one
representative as if it were the firm as a whole, demonstrate our loyalty to
them in the hope of reward, and generally treat them as human counterparties
in a relationship. Of course none of this is realistic or justified, but if
you're running a company it's not something you can ignore.

If you're a user/consumer/customer of course, it makes sense to step back and
realise that your loyalty means nothing to a corporation, they are not a
person but composed of people, that they have their own internal goals, and
they are rewarded by shareholders for some behaviour we'd call sociopathic in
a person.

------
JacobSingh
Amazing post. I have a pitch for a startup: It's an NGO which regulates email-
marketing. To receive a certification of fair practices you have to abide by
certain rules.

Users can see a badge indicating that you are a member or not. Eventually
gmail and others will have to add a setting on whether to allow emails from
non-members or not and until then, browser extensions will do the work.

Like?

------
suyash
So what is the final state of the switch be if you want your self NOT to be
tracked or reduced the amount of tracking : OFF or ON ?

~~~
bostonvaulter2
You want it to be ON

------
6cxs2hd6
I thought in the EU you're legally required to do opt-in. You're not permitted
to do opt-out.

How can the UK Post Office do opt-out?

Is this some UK exemption from the EU law?

Or is it the typical government exemption from its own law (like e.g. how
politicians exempted themselves from the US CAN-SPAM law)?

~~~
eterm
Third party must be opt-in, but first party can be opt-out, that's why they do
the alternate "opt-out opt-in" thing.

In fact a lot of companies I've come across do it this way, you see it on
physical forms too.

------
zipop
Or you could be like Facebook and just ignore request to unsubscribe by
hitting their unsubscribe button.

------
lifeformed
Does this site really need to be over 15MB large?

~~~
Skalman
Well, considering 97% percent of the page load is images (average size: 400
kB), and the page contains slides that explain and complement the article...
yeah, I think it does!

~~~
lifeformed
The page renders really laggy for me. Seems like it'd benefit from dynamically
loading in the images, or at least user more compression on the images. Also,
the images have been shrunken to fit the page. They should just be that
smaller size to begin with; you could probably get the page down to 8MB with
minimal loss.

------
hugi
How intentional.

------
kamakazizuru
way too many images - whats the TLDR on this?

~~~
jlgaddis
TL;DR: RTFA.

------
captionobvious
This article is complaining about the steps apple took to prevent guid
tracking but framing it as being done explicitly to trick the user.

~~~
casca
I would suggest that the article makes a very good case for it being done to
explicitly trick the user. Apple particularly gives a huge amount of
consideration for making an intuitive and obvious UI. It's not a big leap to
assert that in this case, they've made it as difficult as they can to opt out
while still offering the choice.

~~~
captionobvious
More than likely it was done to protect the users privacy while keeping the
exact same user experience. The protections were made behind the scenes with
additional options made available to the user, but disabled by default.

The transitions from guid had the potential to break many apps so encouraging
users to disable it would have likely caused many unintended side effects in
addition to cluttering the ui and annoying users with unknown options.

~~~
andybak
I've read this three times now and I'm still not sure I get it...

~~~
e3pi
>I've read this three times now and I'm still not sure I get it...

For about ten years now, every time I use Paypal for an eBay payment, I'm
interrupted to choose a $10.00 off opt-in for setting up credit, I have to
click-thru this every time. By now, I've done this several hundreds of times.

I'm just a fish trying to stay out of their double-trap dark pattern slippery
slope trammel net.

~~~
kwijibob
I've been on google+ since the beginning (2nd half of 2011).

For the whole 18-20 months whenever I have gone to google+ on the web it has
first had an obstacle "Find your friends" page asking me to spam all my
contacts about google+.

It still does it even today. There is no opt-out or "stop asking me to do
this" checkbox. Even though I am an active plus user with posts and comments,
it still treats me like a first timer.

I'm trying to get into google+ but there is no way I'm going to spam my
friends.

That it has been doing this to me hundreds of times for nearly two years is
unbelievable.

~~~
e3pi
Another one. HN subject titles often link to the New York Times. Not having a
subscription and offended with their offensive dark screen blinding pop-up
`dark pattern' `hook' \--free, or otherwise-- I now only read the respective
HN comments.

NYT coverage is usually good, I miss it, but now BBC, Reuters, Guardian, rt,
Der Spiegel, HN, are my primary news feeds.

