This is a bit longer than I would have wanted to spend writing about Adobe billing practices, but oh well.
Is it the most manipulative dark pattern in e-commerce? Hardly--there are plenty far more vicious--but it's still an attempt to prime a would-be subscriber to focus on the annual, billed monthly and play on their understanding of the word "monthly" by using it in both options.
"Annual, billed monthly" is set in smaller italicized type right under the actual price of US$59.99/mo on the main pricing page[0]. You've now been primed to focus on the $59.99 price. Only when you select a plan and a modal pops up do you see that there's a separate monthly option available from the annual, billed monthly option that's been helpfully pre-selected or a third annual, prepaid option.
The point is to quickly shepherd subscribers through the payment process. The user sees the $59.99 option they expected is pre-selected, so most hit continue and move on. If they look beyond the price in bold to the plan descriptions in smaller italics, well, there are literally decades of eye tracking studies showing users skim websites rather than carefully reading every single word. The price in bold draws in the eye, the word "monthly" is present so the user catches the word, and then they move on to the continue button.
Adobe could have easily labeled the plan Annual, billed in 12 installments or even Annual, billed in monthly installments to better differentiate the two options. They didn't for a reason. The word "monthly" comes with certain expectations. Using it for both the actual monthly plan and the default annual, billed monthly plan allows those expectations to bleed over to both.
While it mentions a fee for cancelling after 14 days, you'll find nary a mention of what that fee actually is until you track down a legal page[1] that isn't linked to any point during the payment process up until the sign-in prompt (I didn't bother creating a new account to look beyond that). At the very least, it's not present during the stage when you're still relatively uncommitted and somewhat more likely to notice any more onerous terms were they present.
Finally, there's an option for a 30-day free trial of Adobe Stock. I'd have sworn it was pre-selected a few years ago, but I may be mistaken on that. If it was, then at least that's a change for the better. Anyhow, did you notice how it's on a 30 day trial period whereas the normal plan has a 14 day cancellation window? Let those deadlines fall to the back of your mind for a week or two, and will you remember which is 14 days and which is 30? There was no reason why Adobe had to use 30 days for Stock or only 14 days for their other offerings. But it adds to the confusion, and that's the entire purpose of a dark pattern. Stock is also an "annual, billed monthly plan," but nowhere in the checkout process is it mentioned that Stock also has a large cancellation fee. That's hidden in a separate part of the Subscription Terms page.[1]
Adobe could easily just choose to settle for a straight-up monthly payment plan with no bullshit and completely sidestep recurring--but largely toothless, given the state of most alternatives to their software--criticism over their billing practices. They could eliminate the dark patterns and make their plan selection and payment process more transparent. They don't, presumably because those patterns generate more revenue than the lost goodwill they create is worth. That goodwill is diffused, and even if people grumble about it online, it generally doesn't rise to the level of leaving.
>but it's still an attempt to prime a would-be subscriber to focus on the annual, billed monthly and play on their understanding of the word "monthly" by using it in both options.
Do you think "$500 biweekly" car ads, or "$2000/month" apartment rentals are the same?
>"Annual, billed monthly" is set in smaller italicized type right under the actual price of US$59.99/mo on the main pricing page[0].
I might be sympathetic to this reasoning if this was a $2 coffee or something, but $60/month is nothing to be sneezed at, and I'd expect buyers to read the very legible text under the price tag. Otherwise, this makes as much sense as complaining about supermarket price tags that show "$4" in huge font, and "/lb" in small font, claiming that it misled buyers into thinking an entire package of ground beef costs $4, because the $4 price tag "primed" them or whatever.
>While it mentions a fee for cancelling after 14 days, you'll find nary a mention of what that fee actually is until you track down a legal page[1] that isn't linked to any point during the payment process up until the sign-in prompt (I didn't bother creating a new account to look beyond that). At the very least, it's not present during the stage when you're still relatively uncommitted and somewhat more likely to notice any more onerous terms were they present.
Okay but if you read most complaints, it's clear that they're not even aware that such early termination fee even existed. There's approximately zero people who were aware the termination fee existed, found it too hard to figure out what it actually was, but somehow still went with the "Annual, billed monthly" option.
>Finally, there's an option for a 30-day free trial of Adobe Stock. I'd have sworn it was pre-selected a few years ago, but I may be mistaken on that. If it was, then at least that's a change for the better. Anyhow, did you notice how it's on a 30 day trial period whereas the normal plan has a 14 day cancellation window? Let those deadlines fall to the back of your mind for a week or two, and will you remember which is 14 days and which is 30? There was no reason why Adobe had to use 30 days for Stock or only 14 days for their other offerings. But it adds to the confusion, and that's the entire purpose of a dark pattern. Stock is also an "annual, billed monthly plan," but nowhere in the checkout process is it mentioned that Stock also has a large cancellation fee. That's hidden in a separate part of the Subscription Terms page.[1]
This feels like grasping at straws. If we're going to invoke "people might get two numbers confused with each other", we might as well also invoke "people can't calculate dates properly, and therefore a 14 day cancellation window is misleading because they think 14 days = 2 weeks, and set up a cancellation reminder for the same day of the week 2 weeks afterwards, not realizing that would be just over 14 days and thus outside the window".
It isn't grasping at straws because confusing or misleading people is literally how dark patterns work.
> Do you think "$500 biweekly" car ads, or "$2000/month" apartment rentals are the same?
The rentals make it very clear what the contract period is and what the penalty for breaking early is. Those terms are also tightly regulated in most jurisdictions for exactly the reason that they are prone to abuse.
> I'd expect buyers to read the very legible text under the price tag.
Given that the text fails to provide details about the fee is this even a valid contract to begin with? On multiple levels there's clearly been no meeting of the minds.
> if you read most complaints, it's clear that they're not even aware that such early termination fee even existed.
Isn't that a strong case that it's an unfair practice?
>The rentals make it very clear what the contract period is and what the penalty for breaking early is.
On the billboard or in the multi-page rental agreement that they send for you to sign? How is this different from than the ToS/fine print on adobe's site?
>Given that the text fails to provide details about the fee is this even a valid contract to begin with?
It's probably buried in the fine print somewhere, which courts have generally held to be enforceable.
>Isn't that a strong case that it's an unfair practice?
No, the legal standard is "reasonable person", not whether there's enough people bamboozled by it to raise a ruckus on reddit or whatever.
I can only speak for myself here but I have never had an interaction with a new (to me) landlord where I was later surprised to discover what the rental period or early termination penalty was. Every one of them has gone out of their way to verbally specify the length of the term in addition to requiring me to initial it on the contract.
I have had plenty of other issues with borderline dishonest landlords but mutually understanding what was being agreed to up front was never one of them. The issues generally came later when they tried to get out of or add additional things without my consent.
> It's probably buried in the fine print somewhere, which courts have generally held to be enforceable.
People elsewhere in this comment section reported that they checked and claimed that it is not found anywhere directly linked from the sales page. You generally have to specify the terms of a contract up front, before it is signed.
> No, the legal standard is "reasonable person"
It isn't conclusive, but I think it makes for a strong case. The more people who are confused by it the stronger your argument that it is confusing to a "reasonable person" becomes.
> I might be sympathetic to this reasoning if this was a $2 coffee or something, but $60/month is nothing to be sneezed at, and I'd expect buyers to read the very legible text under the price tag.
In some things, expectations are made to be disappointed. This is one of those.
We know that people use all sorts of cognitive shortcuts to make processing their environments easier. It doesn't matter if you're smart, dumb, foolish, or perfectly average. It's just how our brains have evolved to function, and companies have been consulting with industrial and organizational psychologists for decades to help them optimize their marketing and business strategies to maximize the chances that those shortcuts play out in a way that breaks in their favor. Before I/O psychologists, companies tried to do the same by guess and trial and error...and they stumbled upon lots of strategies that were later confirmed by psychological experiments.
Cereal boxes marketed to children have cartoon characters whose eyes are drawn looking down so as to appear as if they're making eye contact with kids walking down the cereal aisle.[0] There are all sorts of "tricks" commonly used by salespeople selling things to sophisticated buyers who are capable of recognize them for what they are. Why did pharma reps take doctors to dinner and give them cheap pens and swag? Or consider the success of psychological pricing[1] and how those strategies somehow manage to be successful despite it being commonly accepted wisdom that odd prices (i.e. $1.99 instead of $2) is a marketing gimmick. We know it's a gimmick, and yet, it still has an impact on our buying behavior.
Yes, the text is there below it, but the whole point of a dark pattern is to manipulate a large enough percentage of buyers/users in a way that generates more revenue than is lost due to any frustration or annoyance created by the same patterns. Most people skim through websites, pluck out key words, and continue on. We can bemoan people for not reading the fine print, but that's not going to change the behavior.
As for the beef metaphor, per unit pricing can absolutely be used to trip up would-be buyers into buying a bit more than they planned. Not because the foolish shoppers don't know any better, but because mixed units usually require a bit more cognitive engagement. Grocery stores absolutely recognize that and benefit from it. On the other hand, you can't really sell beef in a way other than by weight, so it's the opportunity for abuse is much more limited.
> Okay but if you read most complaints, it's clear that they're not even aware that such early termination fee even existed. There's approximately zero people who were aware the termination fee existed, found it too hard to figure out what it actually was, but somehow still went with the "Annual, billed monthly" option.
Sure, because Adobe purposely hides information about the fee. That's one of the dark pattern at play. In the absence of that information, users will insert their own expectations to create meaning. If there's a fee, we'd expect it's probably a reasonable one (even if we have countless examples in our lives of how fees can be anything but reasonable). Does half the annual cost of a subscription seem reasonable to most people? Would that be most people's first guess? Probably not. I might not have been clear about this in my original comment, but there are multiple dark patterns at work here.
> This feels like grasping at straws. If we're going to invoke "people might get two numbers confused with each other",[...]
That particular dark pattern is less about people confusing two different numbers with each other when they're directly in front of them, so much as it is about giving you two different numbers to remember two weeks after you've made your decision and gone on with your life. Literally nobody on the planet is going to keep the free trial or cancellation period as a mental priority over the course of two weeks, so it becomes little more than a random thought at the back of your mind. At best, you might jot it down or set aside the receipt until closer to the deadline. The pattern's purpose is that, if you think of the cancellation/trial periods at all, the numbers will be easily conflated. Think about the times in your life when you've asked yourself something like did I see/do/hear [insert thing] last Monday or was it Tuesday? and weren't quite confident in your answer.
Dark patterns doesn't have to trip up all subscribers or even most of them. But if it trips up a some of them, well, Adobe isn't going to complain about the opportunity. Multiple, more subtle dark patterns together can work just as effectively as one particularly vicious one. They can even be preferable, in that they won't piss off your customers nearly as much, either on their own or as a whole.
A bit of common sense and understanding would go a long way to eliminating half the complaints you hear about HOAs.
If you know the tree is going to immediately start dying, you're just going to find the cheapest, least healthy sapling at the nursery. Had they let you wait until the tree is more likely to survive, there's a better chance you'd be willing to spend a bit more to buy an older/larger sapling that'll look better and provide more shade from the start. Plus, the temporary tree slowly dying would probably be less visually appealing than an empty spot for a few months.
There are reasons why we plant street trees: improved aesthetics, increased home value, shade along the street and sidewalks, traffic calming effects, etc. By ignoring the reason behind them and just focusing on checking the box, your HOA was just begging for some malicious compliance that undermined the benefits of the replacement tree.
I'd expect the original agreements that were put in place--both the ones with the subcontractors as well as the purchase agreements--are quite strict on what you can do with the plane. Trying to reverse engineer software (the policy was that no one gets access to the original source code for the F-35[0], at least back in 2009) is probably a no-go under those agreements.
The original article suggests that Ukraine may end up having to replace the electronic countermeasures hardware to get around this in the future, so I'd expect any attempts to "un-brick"/work around the lack of support will eventually be along those lines, even if it results in some performance degradation.
No matter how they approach this, it's going to be a horrifically difficult and expensive task.
> Trying to reverse engineer software (the policy was that no one gets access to the original source code for the F-35[0], at least back in 2009) is probably a no-go under those agreements.
the UK made access to the source code a condition of purchase, and the technology transfer agreement was signed
in a hypothetical scenario where the US federal government falls under the direct control of a russian asset, I imagine this would end up in our allies hands reasonably quickly
> I'd expect the original agreements that were put in place--both the ones with the subcontractors as well as the purchase agreements--are quite strict on what you can do with the plane. Trying to reverse engineer software (the policy was that no one gets access to the original source code for the F-35[0], at least back in 2009) is probably a no-go under those agreements.
We're talking about Europe being able to protect itself from a potential Russian invasion despite the US bricking their F35s, and your argument is that they'd have to bend or break an agreement?
I don't think that's a big hurdle, in that eventuality.
It's not really accurate to say that we can't go back to the moon. Setting aside the fact that there have been a number of successful unmanned lunar missions in recent years, whenever your point gets made, it usually glosses over why people make that claim.
The immediate answer is that we simply weren't interested in supporting major new manned missions. Manned spaceflight in general requires serious, ongoing political support across administrations. At the height of the space race, public support pretty much never rose above 50 percent in the United States.[1] The literal high mark was 53% immediately after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the moon, which is honestly mind-boggling to think about. We've completely white-washed the existence of serious political opposition[1] to the Apollo program that plagued it from the beginning to the end because--looking back--it seems almost absurd, as if the very idea that half the country had no interest in going to the moon is an insult to the American psyche.
It's honestly amazing that we managed to follow up with the Space Shuttle at all. The STS program was shaped by a great many compromises NASA had to make in order to elicit political
and military support. John Logsdon's After Apollo is a wonderful read on the subject.
Anyhow, it's not like we can't go back. It's not like orbital mechanics changed on us at some point and now we're all stuck in LEO. It's just a political choice, and we can make a new one whenever we want. It's just hard, in large part because we don't have the cold war and constant fear of imminent nuclear war to push the program through congress.
Beyond the political, to go back means redesigning everything that was done for Apollo. That's not a slight on American engineering or manufacturing capabilities. Everything--from the Saturn V, to the lunar module, and the countless pieces of equipment that helped get both where they needed to go--was designed for the manufacturing capabilities and techniques of the 1960s. You can't just grab the plans for the old Rocketdyne F-1 and start building them anew. The welds alone[2] represent a fundamental shift in capabilities and thinking. Common CAD design and analysis programs would have had Apollo engineers singing in the hallways in joy once they got over the shock.
They took what they had, and they made it work brilliantly. Change that context, and they would have designed a different engine, and the same goes for everything else.
It's interesting how the “scientific we” is used for “we... go to the Moon”, where most folks seem to be referring to the USA? Or the subset of nations with capable space programs, excluding China? But the people writing, “we”: are they engineers working for NASA, or parroting the P.R.?
Because I personally haven't landed on the Moon, and I don't plan to, but “we” is typically assumed to include the speaker.
I'm beginning to suspect that those who perpetuate the meme of “we never landed on the Moon” are coyly defining “we” in a restrictive way that excludes the astronauts who did. “We [our family in California] never landed there!”
Cheap word-games. See also, political slogans designed to be misinterpreted and energize the base.
> That's why all this stuff is backed up to an iron mountain.
When one of your threat vectors is a massive ball of nuclear fire right on top of the federal government in DC, your offsite backup policy is going to be absurd overkill by the standards of any other organization on this planet. That doesn't mean it's flawed.
> ...many of the people in charge don't even know how to use a website. Now for the first time, tech industry people have the opportunity to help run these computer systems, and you're afraid they're the ones who'll be incompetent and accidentally break everything?
Are you honestly suggesting that the people who built these systems, maintained them, and updated them to reflect often significant changes in rules and regulations over the course of decades somehow don't know how those systems work? If they were so damned clueless, those COBOL systems would have sputtered out and died decades ago. The fact that they've continued to run for all this time is practically prima facie evidence that the system works just fine by industry standards for that kind of legacy code.
No doubt there's plenty of stuff buried in the codebase that bugs the hell out of the developers working on it, but you get that with any complex legacy code. It's the nature of the beast. Do you think there's nothing in Google's monorepo that some of their engineers don't quite like but doesn't rise to a big enough issue to warrant refactoring right now? Any other FAANG company? Or large tech company in general?
You're writing as though a bunch of junior developers--and that describes pretty much all of the publicly known DOGE employees so far--are wizards who can just waltz right in and magic up a better solution just because they're from the "tech industry."
Setting aside the unlikely chances that those juniors--no matter how skilled or talented--have any experience with COBOL, mainframes, or even just decades-old legacy code, is anyone going to suggest that something like the federal government's payment system isn't defined by an immense amount of complex business logic so as to comply with legislative requirements? It's not something you just start playing around with.
I can't think of any tech company that would take a junior developer, toss them overboard in the middle of the freezing Atlantic, grant them sudo access, and tell them to do whatever the hell they want with critical systems before they drown and--somehow--take the ship with them. Worse yet, those juniors were chosen for ideology fervor and/or purity, so what happens when the normal review processes and experienced senior developers are pushed aside because they're in the way and part of the "deep state conspiracy" that doesn't want them to "[fix] the government" as you put it?
Not only is that a recipe for disaster for the company itself, it's a damned good way to take an otherwise talented junior developer and permanently ruin them. Instead of mentoring them so they can work well as part of a team, you're basically creating a toxic working environment that's going to turn them all feral. By the time they crawl out the other side and the public hears all about what they've been up to, what company is going to be stupid enough to a developer with "DOGE" on their resume? Beyond that, you're conflating a whole bunch of different issues here with federal software contracts and IT, while putting the tech industry on a really peculiar pedestal.
Besides, if the goal is to discover waste/fraud/abuse, the obvious answer is to hire a bunch of forensic accountants and let them dig into everything. Those are the people who actually find that kind of stuff, and they're incredibly skilled at their job. If it's there, given the time, they'll find it. But it's a slow-going process, so we instead see a bunch of engineers focusing on random transactions so they can ask themselves (1) "do I like that one?" and (2) "do I think it's legitimate?" because it's faster.
That's not exactly how you fix anything, least of all a country.
I'm not questioning the reliability of their systems but the content of their databases.
The DOGE workers are already legends in their own lifetime, having saved $55 billion, and they haven't even gotten started. That's like 20% of Google's yearly revenue, all in a few weeks, and without needing to write petabytes of code in a monorepo.
I don't think it's accurate to mentally model these payments as though they were counter intuitive algorithms in a deeply embedded software system. Waste fraud and abuse can be painfully obvious. So it's not the complexity of the problem that has prevented it from being solved. It's the political cost. Senior people have spent a lifetime accruing political capital. They're afraid to lose it. They're only going to spend political capital if they get something in return. They know and have cultivated relationships with the people who will be unhappy if particular instances of waste get solved.
So it makes sense that Elon is unleashing his crackerjack juniors.
It's common enough that a bigger percentage of normal people than you'd think probably find themselves using it on sites at least occasionally (Reddit, etc.), even if they don't consciously think of it as Markdown or know all the particulars of the syntax.
The GitHub-style editors are nice in that when a user sees the syntax directly when they press a formatting button in the markdown-toolbar-element, it makes associating a hash symbol with a headline or two asterisks surrounding a word with bold text pretty straightforward. In that sense, they teach you through using it since the syntax is fairly simple for the basics for someone seeing it the first time. Use it a couple of times, and you'll skip touching the buttons--at least for the basics.
That said, I think a Writebook-style editor[0] mentioned elsewhere may have some advantages for people with less computer experience, but I don't think a straight GitHub-style one like this is bad in those circumstances. It's quite good, especially if you pair it with some instructions (whether they be in a modal or whatever have you).
Or that they just weren't very good business people. Their understanding of climate change back then was good enough to have a damned decent roadmap for how things were going to play out over the next fifty years. They were capable of projecting what was going to happen, the likely regulatory changes that wold be needed to mitigate climate change, and how that would affect them.
One would expect the average CEO would literally kill for a roadmap of the future. They had it, and more. Exxon, ARCO, and others even made early R&D investments that helped pioneer terrestrial solar power, not to mention their extensive R&D capabilities more broadly. Sticking with the metaphor, they had the map and some of the most important tools for the journey ahead.
Fifty years were long enough even a financial moron could have developed a long-term transition plan that avoided stranded assets and massive losses. And they--and their people--weren't financial morons. Hell, much of their capital equipment and facilities investments had expected lifespans of a similar length. They had everything needed to create the mother of all soft landings.
Hell, they could have engineered an outcome where they came out well ahead. Being able to rebrand yourself as the company that chose to sacrifice itself to save the world buys you a hell of a lot of goodwill you can leverage for subsidies in Washington. We’d have paid them for it and thanked them for the privilege.
It couldn’t have been that much harder than convincing an entire political party that the problem didn’t exist. Oil companies convincing the public they were shitty companies that needed to be reborn? If they focused on the dying part of rebirth, that wouldn’t have been a very difficult sell even back then.
Only someone who failed upwards could have been gifted a hand like that and still manage to choose the worst possible path for both the world and their own company. All they managed to do was delay the transition and make it more expensive for their company and the world.
> Being able to rebrand yourself as the company that chose to sacrifice itself to save the world buys you a hell of a lot of goodwill you can leverage for subsidies in Washington. We’d have paid them for it and thanked them for the privilege.
This seems to be incorrect. Given my estimation of the current political climate, if you sacrifice yourself to save the world, you will be dead and then someone else will destroy the world anyway while you're not there to stop them.
When was the last time the government paid someone to save the world?
> This seems to be incorrect. Given my estimation of the current political climate, if you sacrifice yourself to save the world, you will be dead and then someone else will destroy the world anyway while you're not there to stop them.
Probably, but look at it from the 1970s. The environmental movement was at its greatest legislative power, the major federal environmental legislation passed at the time was often bipartisan since environmental issues weren't nearly so neatly ideologically coded as they are now, and you had a bunch of high-profile environmental disasters that kept the issue at the forefront of politics. You also had energy crises throughout the 70s. All of that severely undermined public trust in the industry.
Despite their horrible public image since then, the fossil fuel industry has accomplished a great deal politically. They managed to convince an entire political party that climate change doesn't exist despite decades of research and ever-increasing amounts of evidence. They've fended off greater legislative and regulatory oversight repeatedly since then. And while we may not be paying them to "save the world," we're still giving them a great deal of subsidies in the form of tax benefits, consumer incentives that end up increasing the usage of their products, and the massive gift of not taxing their significant negative externalities. So we are, at least, paying them.
Put simply, their lobbyists have always been skilled, as evident by their accomplishments despite the decades-long reality that the majority of Americans don't much like or trust them. So is it really that much of a stretch to expect that they could have gotten significant federal support for a clean energy transition that started back in the 1970s and was gradual enough that it didn't shock markets and the consumers? Or that, if they were able to secure subsidies and preferential tax treatment to extract fossil fuels, that they couldn't do the same for not extracting them?
Anyhow, if I didn't make it clear enough, the sacrifice would have been entirely symbolic. Exxon, for example, would have always survived the transition. It's just that their brand would have undergone a sort of phoenix-esque rebirth: Exxon the oil company would have gradually faded out of existence, while Exxon the renewable energy company came into existence at the same time. It would have been a marketing and PR message, but unlike with the attempts at greenwashing, the fossil fuel side of the company would have actually faded away. The message would have even been truthful in a way: it would have been a serious sacrifice of sorts on their part.
It's just that it could have been a sacrifice that didn't actually cost them much--and had they played their cards right, it might have been one that let them come out ahead in the end.
> It's also a type of fraud which is fairly easy to detect. If a car is recorded as driving just 2000 miles per year, yet freeway cameras detected it driving 100 miles every weekday all year, open a fraud case.
Sure, but why bother? That would involve a ton of overhead and server time for a system that's still going to miss a lot of travel, thereby limiting revenue. I question whether the added expense of that kind of surveillance system would even recover enough revenue to break even. The same goes for mandatory GPS reporting devices, plus the civil liberties issues associated with such systems would make passing such a tax even more difficult.
Most countries have some sort of annual safety/emissions inspection, so any mileage-based tax could just use the odometer readings from the inspection. Sure, a mechanic could falsify paperwork, but how likely is that when it'll eventually come to light? If you want to sell the car, you're going to have to eventually admit the miles you hid so that they match the odometer reading at the time of title transfer. That means you're going to have no choice but to pay the tax eventually.
No need to try and build a more perfect mouse trap.
Nah - you get citizens to self report odometer readings annually, or use annual inspections. And you employ a few people to run your 'fraud team' which will use CCTV to catch fraud, and auto-mail out letters with fines.
15 peoples civil service salaries = $1.5M say.
They will contact local car park owners, municipalities and states who have ANPR cameras, etc. From each, they'll get a spreadsheet of plate no, date/time and camera lat/lon. Many police departments already centralize that info to search for stolen cars etc.
They'll then run the whole lot through a python script to make a database of plate num + annual mileage. They'll then compare that to the self-reported mileage and investigate any underreporting.
Assume that this is implemented in the USA, and 1% of people fake the odometer by 50%. Assume the tax is 5 cents a mile. Total vehicle miles traveled is 3e12 miles, and assume we can easily detect 30% of offenders, due to them driving long distances on highways, and fine all those detected 3x the fraudulent amount. Total takings: $337M.
Which has its own unexpected bug in that the extended deadbolt can damage the wood frame and/or trim. Or perhaps the sensor you use to determine the door's state (open or closed) is positioned on the hinge side in such a way that it's triggered when the door is kept open with the deadlock extended. It's close enough to closed that the sensor gets triggered, and you--I can't help myself--open the door to the possibility that your system falsely represents the door as being both closed and locked.
This stuff can be hard, and sometimes, you just have to refactor later on instead of trying to nail down every possibility for the model, despite trying to figure out likely issues in the near-term. In which case, the goal is to keep in mind that data models will eventually change over time, and consider how that knowledge might change what you're writing now to make that process less painful.
> Which has its own unexpected bug in that the extended deadbolt can damage the wood frame and/or trim.
It doesn't. The data is correctly representing the state of the system. Your "bug" assumes a lot of things about the environment, any of which may or may not be true depending on the specifics where the system is running.
> Or perhaps the sensor you use to determine the door's state (open or closed) is positioned on the hinge side in such a way that it's triggered when the door is kept open with the deadlock extended.
Again, an implementation problem. The sensor was installed in a way that's incompatible with the underlying system. Can it be fixed by changing the data model? Unlikely. In fact, I don't think it can be fixed at all. If the sensor lies, there's nothing the underlying system or the data model can do about it, especially if it's a binary sensor like the one described.
If the deadbolt was installed in such a way that it never crossed into the door frame but rather only moved inside the actual door, would you consider it a bug in the lock, the deadbolt, or simply bad installation?
Is it the most manipulative dark pattern in e-commerce? Hardly--there are plenty far more vicious--but it's still an attempt to prime a would-be subscriber to focus on the annual, billed monthly and play on their understanding of the word "monthly" by using it in both options.
"Annual, billed monthly" is set in smaller italicized type right under the actual price of US$59.99/mo on the main pricing page[0]. You've now been primed to focus on the $59.99 price. Only when you select a plan and a modal pops up do you see that there's a separate monthly option available from the annual, billed monthly option that's been helpfully pre-selected or a third annual, prepaid option.
The point is to quickly shepherd subscribers through the payment process. The user sees the $59.99 option they expected is pre-selected, so most hit continue and move on. If they look beyond the price in bold to the plan descriptions in smaller italics, well, there are literally decades of eye tracking studies showing users skim websites rather than carefully reading every single word. The price in bold draws in the eye, the word "monthly" is present so the user catches the word, and then they move on to the continue button.
Adobe could have easily labeled the plan Annual, billed in 12 installments or even Annual, billed in monthly installments to better differentiate the two options. They didn't for a reason. The word "monthly" comes with certain expectations. Using it for both the actual monthly plan and the default annual, billed monthly plan allows those expectations to bleed over to both.
While it mentions a fee for cancelling after 14 days, you'll find nary a mention of what that fee actually is until you track down a legal page[1] that isn't linked to any point during the payment process up until the sign-in prompt (I didn't bother creating a new account to look beyond that). At the very least, it's not present during the stage when you're still relatively uncommitted and somewhat more likely to notice any more onerous terms were they present.
Finally, there's an option for a 30-day free trial of Adobe Stock. I'd have sworn it was pre-selected a few years ago, but I may be mistaken on that. If it was, then at least that's a change for the better. Anyhow, did you notice how it's on a 30 day trial period whereas the normal plan has a 14 day cancellation window? Let those deadlines fall to the back of your mind for a week or two, and will you remember which is 14 days and which is 30? There was no reason why Adobe had to use 30 days for Stock or only 14 days for their other offerings. But it adds to the confusion, and that's the entire purpose of a dark pattern. Stock is also an "annual, billed monthly plan," but nowhere in the checkout process is it mentioned that Stock also has a large cancellation fee. That's hidden in a separate part of the Subscription Terms page.[1]
Adobe could easily just choose to settle for a straight-up monthly payment plan with no bullshit and completely sidestep recurring--but largely toothless, given the state of most alternatives to their software--criticism over their billing practices. They could eliminate the dark patterns and make their plan selection and payment process more transparent. They don't, presumably because those patterns generate more revenue than the lost goodwill they create is worth. That goodwill is diffused, and even if people grumble about it online, it generally doesn't rise to the level of leaving.
0. https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
1. https://www.adobe.com/legal/subscription-terms.html
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