Ask HN: How does it feel to be a dark pattern programmer?

[anticristi]

I just cancelled my Amazon Prime membership. I took 5 confusing steps to achieve that. One click too much and I would have reactivated it.

I always wondered, how does it feel to be the programmer who wrote that code? "It's my job, I don't care." "My boss made me do it." "We are simply educating the customer on making a better choice." "Well, we all have bills to pay."

[bfhrhrh]

Worked in an e-commerce agency that catered to MLM and direct sales industry. I was there for a year before I could not take anymore. They referred to their clients as scammers and their clients’ customers as idiots with too much money. They asked us any and all ways to prevent users from canceling subscription in Magento. Then asked us to make it hard for customer service team to cancel a subscription via internal portal. We had access to financial records in Magento and customers tickets. It was sad to see that we kept charging people for months after they opened their initial ticket for cancellation.

We programmer tried to tell ourselves that we are just doing our job. Sometimes, only way to feel better about ourselves was to believe in bullshit that customers are are rich spoiled housewives with nothing to do. 90% of our end users were females.

I stayed a bit too long, but now I work for a major tech company and it seems we are still using dark patterns except society has accepted these dark patterns as price for free access.

[muzani]

I've quit jobs, argued with bosses, and turned down contracts over it. Dark patterns are hardly the most unethical thing in a startup. Often you're aware of the company lying to investors, faking traction, selling features that aren't working, testing risky things in production.

I think it's just another work perk though, to be able to work on something less unethical. And like other work benefits, it attracts better people.

[carmen_sandiego]

Maybe I’m too far gone, because that doesn’t seem very dark to me. But to answer the question:

  - I buy into the idea that distribution/retention can often make or break a product.
  - I personally find almost all sales and retention techniques annoying. 
  - Since it works, and I’ll have to implement some form of it, I don’t see much difference in which specific form it is, unless it’s really obviously scammy.  What’s the difference in annoying people when they unsubscribe vs annoying people with Facebook ads?  As long as they ultimately have a choice whether we get their money or not, it’s the same to me.

I can honestly say if you gave me the choice between extra retention pages vs sitting through video ads for example, I’d take the former without hesitation. So are ads a dark pattern? I’m sure some on HN would say so.

[uberman]

I would say a little of (1) and a little of (2). Not that I make my career as a "dark pattern" programmer. Just that from years of experience, I can say that I am happy to let product owners/stakeholders make these types of decisions without me trying to "bike shed" them.

[PragmaticPulp]

I guarantee you the decisions behind what you're describing are not coming from the programmers. This is the realm of product managers, UX designers, and other decision makers.

Adding a few extra steps to your Amazon Prime cancellation isn't great, but it's not exactly worth throwing shade on fellow programmers somewhere who were tasked with implementing the designs as decided by the employer who provides their paycheck.

[anticristi → PragmaticPulp]

Indeed, but it still must be meah that you ended up being "that d00d" that implemented yet another barrier to exit. I can already imagine a beer conversation with friends:

A: What did you do this week?

B: I operated an appendix to save someone's life.

C: I sold a home to a young family.

D: I added yet another layer of frustration to users trying to cancel their membership.

[hutzlibu → anticristi]

" I added yet another layer of frustration to users trying to cancel their membership."

You probably have to tweak your language to match marketing speak.

So, you did:

"implemented a rich UI specifically aimed at the difficult group of unsatisfied customers, to convince them of keeping their membership"

[carmen_sandiego → PragmaticPulp]

It just depends on the org. Some places let engineers make these decisions, and some places like that also have OKR/KPI/whatever structure that encourages dark patterns.

[proc0]

Why dark pattern? It seems it's like online sales, something a person would be doing back when you had to tell someone you where terminating your membership with anything. It's just now all online, and IMHO a few screens is better than answering someone's questions, granted it can still be annoying.

[anticristi → proc0]

Honestly if someone was this insisting IRL, I would start feeling harassed. "D00d, just cancel my membership and leave me alone."

[Nextgrid → anticristi]

The difference is that IRL you can escalate the situation which means the person on the other end is incentivized not to let the situation escalate (a visibly pissed off customer isn't a great sight for other potential customers), thus they're unlikely to be as pushy.

[1123581321]

It feels like being an evil wizard.

[anticristi → 1123581321]

Do you have personal experience with such tasks?

[mssundaram]

I would guess that most programmers who writes such code don't consider it as dark pattern work - they may have a vague inkling that it's not the best, but probably have many rationalizations about why it's fine.

[iordachej]

I deleted my Amazon account last week after trying to find the list of services I was subscribed to, like S3, ElasticSearch, etc. You would not believe how frustrating that is.