
Dark Patterns: good for business? - swombat
http://swombat.com/2010/12/19/dark-patterns-good-for-business
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DanielBMarkham
I remember coming across a scam a couple of months ago. I won't describe it in
detail but let's just say that it was an easy way to pick up a $10 recurring
charge from an unsuspecting visitor to a web site. It was so sneaky it almost
got me, and I'm a web programmer and pretty skeptical guy. I imagine it would
get most people.

Once I figured it out I was amazed at the ingenuity.

I would never do that, but hell, I have to admit it was tempting. If you had a
1% conversion rate, and then you used other dark patterns to drive 100K users
to the site? It could run into a million or more dollars easily.

I'm not a perfect angel. I just don't want to live with being the type of
person that had to do that. I'd rather be poorer and have less emotional
baggage. After all, in life you end up doing a lot of stuff you don't like
anyway. No point adding to it yourself just for a few bucks. As long as you're
able to eat, live, grow, and survive, the extra money isn't worth the guilt.

So yes, I can understand why some folks do this. Hell, I know people that do
things like this. I've just decided I'm not one of them.

Ethics, morality, and the law aside, I think this is a personal choice about
who you are more than anything else.

Having said all of that, remember that it's easy to _say_ things like I just
said. Makes you look good. Makes you feel all moral and superior. Many times
it's a lot harder to actually _live_ it. I can say it basically because it's
just inaction on my part. If somebody set it all up and asked me to push the
big red button and nobody would know it was me? Not as easy.

~~~
swombat
I completely agree and, for the record, I am not interested in creating
anything that I consider a scam. However, this article is not so much about
scams and more about slightly shady tactics. Letting people pick up a $10
recurring charge without their knowledge (à la Zynga advertising) is very
different from opting them into your mailing list by default.

Zynga makes a perfect example of one of those businesses that really abuse
dark patterns, btw. And they are surviving the reputational damage just fine,
since most of their users don't seem to care about their reputation, or aren't
savvy enough to figure it out.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I think it's a slippery slope.

I like to think of it this way: I want to do everything to make a "perfect"
site. It loads quickly, it's easy to use, it's clear in its intent, it does
one thing and does it well. As I put together the site, I try to keep it as
clean and simple as possible. No surprises for the user.

These are just good design principles, dark patterns aside. There's also this
huge "don't be evil" new-age kind of feel-good philosophy that folks use, but
to me it's much more practical than that: I want as good a site as possible.

Once you start trying to engineer the user, even if it's in their best
interests, to me the design suffers. And I'm not sure there is a natural
stopping point once you start down this road. At least I can't find one.

My personal feeling is that that there is going to be a huge backlash against
sites manipulating users. Not sure what form it will take, but it's coming.

------
jacquesm
It all depends... 'dark' patterns are used a lot by gambling sites for
instance, they don't care how they get to the customer, as long as they get to
them.

So they'll pay to dollar for really bad stuff such as site take-overs, pop-
unders and so on. All the stuff we hate. But it works wonders for them, they
have the figures to prove it.

Once you cross over in to things like gambling then the additional penalty of
using a 'dark' pattern seems a minor one.

It's a line that you can set for yourself and decide to not cross and play
nice, or if you are very money motivated you can explicitly decide to cross
it.

But once you do, what's next? The lines between 'nice' and 'not so nice' are
pretty vague, but the one between 'legal' and 'not legal' is a much clearer
one and I fear that people that no longer distinguish between 'nice' and 'not
so nice' will eventually be unable to distinguish between 'legal' and
'illegal'.

It all seems to be related to a sense of entitlement, and the people that I
see practicing 'dark' patterns to further their business interests all suffer
from this to a greater or lesser extent.

If you look at how people like Bill Gates and others made huge fortunes on the
back of business practices that are not exactly ethical are perceived you
could easily fall i nto the perception that as long as you make enough money
you'll be forgiven, but that should not be the whole story.

~~~
swombat
A lot of businesses operate at the border of legality. Ryanair is a good
example, as you have pointed out on IRC (see
<http://www.rte.ie/news/2005/0302/ryanair.html>).

I'm not making a judgement as to whether you personally should build a
business that uses dark patterns, my point is that in some lines of business,
dark patterns are a critical survival factor, and if you try to be too "good"
in those types of business you will get trampled by someone who's willing to
squeeze every penny.

------
hugh3
Who cares whether they're good for business?

If you only have one life to live, would you rather go through it being a good
person and slightly less rich, or a complete annoying jerk and slightly more
rich?

~~~
enjo
While I don't disagree, isn't there some moral value in creating a business
that employs folks who can feed their family? Morality is a really tricky
thing.

~~~
hugh3
Not if you do it by being evil. I'm pretty convinced that "don't be evil"
works fine as a strategy for business and life.

