
Dark Patterns - 0xmohit
https://www.darkpatterns.org/
======
merricksb
8 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18722952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18722952)

Also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13116703](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13116703)
(3 years ago)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301378)
(6 years ago)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347543)
(6 years ago)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002625)
(7 years ago)

------
Phemist
One thing I don't understand is why we are calling these patterns _dark_
rather than _manipulative_, or even just calling it straight up manipulation?

I feel like manipulation has a clear meaning for a lot of people, which I
would define as attempts at making you do things against your best interest.
This definitely applies to booking.com's multiple practices of creating
artificial urgency, various website's "opt-in" to their tracker cookie policy,
etc. I don't believe it "weakens" the meaning of manipulation as a term. The
appropriate red flags should be raised when hearing about it.

To me, the term "dark pattern" itself seems like a dark pattern, intended to
obfuscate what is really meant to those unfamiliar with internet lingo. But,
at least the dot org -is-was still available.

~~~
octosphere
It's probably called dark because the user is often 'left in the dark'[0]
about how to use the interface

[0]
[https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/left+in+the+dark](https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/left+in+the+dark)

------
ckastner
It's missing the one that I hate the most: the way Booking.com and similar
sites create a fake sense of urgency.

"9 people are actively looking at this hotel right now!"

Yeah, right.

~~~
smueller1234
Many years ago, I reviewed the code at Booking.com that implemented this (in
the version thar existed at the time, there's many more variants of it today)
and it had a clear enough definition and was roughly what you'd expect it to
be if you tried to design/implement it faithfully but without crazy out-there
amounts of work: "number of detected-as-not-a-bot page views for this hotel
(page) within the last X minutes" where X was, if I recall correctly, "a few"
as in single digit. It was done by consuming a near-real time steam of logs,
such that the X minutes above wouldn't be massively biased by the processing
delay. I'm certain this was reimplemented at least once since because that
wouldn't scale any more to their volume today.

Also, this functionality has received significant amount of scrutiny from some
regulators, so last I looked, there was a mouse over that gave the actual
definition.

That being said, in no way am I trying to convince anyone that it's not a
"dark pattern" or that you have to think it's a good idea on any way. Just
looking to preempt some comment that claims Booking.com is actively lying
about this. They weren't ~5-6 years ago when I read the implementation and I
don't they could've started doing that systematically since then due to
regulatory attention.

~~~
kashyapc
I don't know, still, most people's "psychological setup" isn't wired to handle
this kind of manipulation on a frequent basis, _even if_ "designed/implemented
it faithfully".

It would just make the web a little more serene place if the said websites did
away with these kind of pernicious practices which only induce stress and
agony.

~~~
smueller1234
I'm with you. Weirdly, even though I certainly have an above average
understanding of these tactics, they almost certainly still have a minor
effect on me anyway.

What I was trying to do was to preempt the allegations that Booking is lying
to its users. None of the allegations I'd seen while I was there actually
checked out on that front. I, like most others, severely disliked the urgency
messaging, but as is with ethics discussions, it was never clear cut. I did
not perceive that there was a widespread culture of trying to trick users into
purchasing something they didn't want. For most of my tenure, I managed the
infrastructure department, not product, so was a bit removed. Experimentation
infrastructure fell into my scope, though. We invested significant effort into
both education and countermeasures for things like p-hacking.

------
Etheryte
The video is a good example of why Linkedin's popularity is completely
baffling for me — if a company has intentionally and malignantly mishandled
your information in such a way a number of times, why would anyone want to
hand over even more information? People you connect to, who you know, etc. It
just blows my mind. Luckily I've had no problems with boycotting them, but I
guess it might be hard in some industries?

~~~
sambe
I see it like this: yes, it's a poor website which comes down to semi-
legitimised spam.

However, recruiters already were semi-legitimised spam, and they like LinkedIn
because it's easier/more signal vs noise for them. Employees like it enough
not to quit if there's a potential new job. Signal vs noise is not much
different from dealing with job hunting/recruiters outside of LinkedIn.
Network effects take care of the rest.

------
nagyf
I've been trying to cancel my New York Times crosswords subscription for days.
You cannot do it on the account management page, instead they force you to
talk with their support.

Their recommendation is to use the chat support but whenever I try it says:
"All of our advocates are currently occupied. Please try again soon or call us
now." I also tried to do it in email, of course no response for 2 days now.
I'm not from the US so I don't want to call them on the phone...

Unbelievable that such a big name as NYT does this with their customers, this
is disgusting and I can't believe this is not against the law.

~~~
kissickas
Some credit card companies will handle this kind of thing for you. Just tell
them you've tried to cancel your subscription and explain the situation.

------
philfrasty
The king of dark patterns: [https://www.viagogo.com](https://www.viagogo.com)
(try with any listed event)

(edit: they recently got banned from AdWords IIRC)

~~~
solarkraft
That company is basically built on deception.

------
nickjj
I still remember one of the first businesses I did a contract for in the early
2000s wanted a hit counter on the bottom of their page.

So I put one in but they wanted it to start at 10,000 instead of 0 to give a
false sense that the site was popular. This stuff has been going on for
decades.

~~~
gameswithgo
thousands of years

~~~
nickjj
Yeah absolutely. The diamond industry is a good pre-internet example.

------
ArtofSaf
Another pattern:

When companies slow down their web experience and push their mobile apps,
where users cannot block tracking or ads as easily.

~~~
svnpenn
I think Reddit does this...

The mobile site is absolute garbage.

------
WA
There's one more: Suggesting that you lose benefits in a subscription business
right away, when in reality, they run until the "contract" ends. Culprit:
Amazon Prime. I just checked and they're still doing it (on Amazon.de).

If you try to cancel your Prime Membership, they make it sound as if you lose
all benefits right away, even though I pre-paid for the entire year and my
membership will end with the billing period and not before.

~~~
Latty
If you want to get really evil, combine this with "you need to tell us you
want to cancel in advance or we'll charge you a termination fee". People will
put it off thinking they will lose the benefits, then find themselves on the
line for a fee because they didn't do it earlier (often giving up and
continuing instead).

~~~
asdff
My old ISP had me mail them a copy of my new lease to prove that they could no
longer service my area (let alone my state) to avoid a termination fee. Shit
is byzantine.

------
tempsy
And the “growth hackers” that came to prominence a few years ago that
masterminded these dark patterns are now all VCs.

~~~
19ylram49
Haha. This is true. I personally know a few.

------
nickjj
What about ecommerce sites where they pop up a little notification where it's
like "Cathy from Ohio just bought ..." and then it links you to the item.

Or even worse, you have XYZ in your cart and then suddenly as you browse you
get all of these notifications that the world is buying that same item so you
better checkout soon before you miss out.

You see this a lot on Shopify stores. Here's one app for it:
[https://apps.shopify.com/mps-sales-
notification](https://apps.shopify.com/mps-sales-notification)

I never used it but I wonder how many of those are fake notifications in
general.

------
octosphere
Some services like Amazon make it outrageously difficult to leave their
service. You have to contact support and the link is buried really deep in
their site, you have to jump through serious hoops to leave their service.

There's a great site called Just Delete Me[0] that lists all the services
where leaving / deleting your account is hard and the user is subjected to
dark patterns.

[0]
[https://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/](https://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/)

~~~
justapassenger
Kind of funny to see that Hacker News gets worst ranking there :-)

------
Lio
I'd add unnecessarily asking for a mobile phone number for the stated purpose
of two factory authentication and then using that for privacy mining ala
Facebook[1].

[1][https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/04/facebook-lets-people-find-
pro...](https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/04/facebook-lets-people-find-profile-
using-security-phone-number-2-8800876/)

------
blr246
GMail seems to have opened a vector to amplify dark patterns by placing action
buttons on messages. My least favorite is the LinkedIn accept invitation
button, which I've clicked now several times by accident because I've spent
years using GMail without it taking actions like opening GitHub PRs and
accepting LinkedIn invites.

I can't find a way to disable this feature. Does anybody know how?

~~~
greenhatman
Not sure this is a GMail feature. This would technically be possible with any
HTML link styled like a button.

~~~
blr246
It's built into the inbox view, so GMail is extracting the action from the
message content and placing a button on the row element. Sorry if that wasn't
clear from my initial post.

------
faitswulff
A dark pattern I submitted but was never accepted is clicking unsubscribe in
an email and getting redirected to a page that asks you to check the boxes
that you would like to _not_ unsubscribe from, or to remain subscribed to,
when I expect simply to be unsubscribed from the offending mailing list.

------
bakuninsbart
Roach Motel is a great name, but surely it should be called Hotel California?

~~~
SJSque
Well, a Roach Motel [0] is also something that is easy to get into but hard to
get out of, but the name does imply that you are a roach for getting into
it...

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roach_Motel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roach_Motel)

------
solarkraft
Please call it asshole design.

