Stamps.com is so scammy. You sign up for a free trial, then get enrolled without asking you into their payment plan. Then when you go to cancel, you can't. You have to call. But guess what? It has weird hours. When you finally do call during their hours it's a machine that you're talking to, not a person.
Ok, so you have hours of when I can cancel...clearly not because you have shift hours, since I'm talking to a machine. So why do you have specified hours?
Stamps.com billed me for 8 months before I noticed they were billing me. I only noticed it because I was doing my taxes. The billing size was just small enough to fly under my radar, but just big enough to hurt a bit. I feel that chose that pricing for that reason.
Anyhow, I saw they were in this story, so I felt I would expand upon their "dark patterns."
I have yet to work out whether "limited hours for an automated system" is a dark pattern, or sheer stupidity.
The most horrifying variant I've seen recently was a government website that kept 9am-5pm hours. No human interaction or real-time events anywhere, but logins were locked after business hours. I'm guessing they didn't want to arrange special downtime periods for changes, and the only alternative they could think of was 16 hours/day of scheduled downtime.
It's a bad day when registered mail would be easier than using the automated system.
Whenever I see a page like that, I imagine there is a guy in a low-rise building in Sacramento. Every day he arrives at work at 9 am, switches on the computer in the corner of his office, and then he switches it off when he goes home. After 20 years he will retire with a pension and move to South Lake Tahoe.
This is how I came to understand the concept of crab mentality.
In Sacramento, landing a "state job" is kinda like winning the lottery because you know you're set for life. What's not to like about a job with no perceived accountability or risk and a perceived loot table that just gets better with time.
The inevitable flip side are all the "losers" of the lottery who have to suffer the vagaries of market forces. What's not to dislike about someone else lucking their way into having all those wonderful things?
There's a strange love/hate relationship with civil service in Sacramento, at least from my own experiences.
> ...a government website that kept 9am-5pm hours...
Sometimes this is done because the "opening times" are baked into existing process, (or in some cases, legislation), and so the digital replacement for the old meat-and-paper process must be subject to the same seemingly crazy time restrictions.
It seems mad, but if you're an underfunded branch of the state, trying to replace a paper-based process with a website, on a staff of junior developers and over-stretched project managers, well....
EDIT: or the process hinges on an aging perl/oracle/Solaris stack, with a pile of cron jobs which process the day's activities overnight. And of course, the definition of a "business day" is baked into the legislation, so the first job needs to start at 5:10 sharp.
Actually the reason usually is parity across digital divide. So those without access to digital services are not disadvantaged by being forced to use business hours, while digitally-enabled get access 24 hours.
Free internet at libraries could've been a way to work around this inequality of access, but the libraries have business hours too
This actually makes a lot of sense. You do 8 hours of business every day no matter what the medium is, satisfy your legal requirements, and say that everyone gets an equal chance in person or online. Then you run your hideous 12 hours of cron processing to clean up the day's mess.
"Makes sense" does not mean "good", but I do understand the madness a little better now...
B&H Photo Video famously won't accept online orders on Shabbat (in the time zone of the business in New York). Not just not fulfil the orders then, but not allow users to place them, either. I don't know how they decided to use only the time zone of the company and not the time zone of the person placing the order, and indeed where they see the desecration(s) of the sabbath as occurring if they didn't enforce this policy. Interestingly, their web site is still online at that time; it's only the online ordering feature that gets disabled.
Ordering involves commerce. Commerce, you paying us for merchandise, is prohibited on the Sabbath. We use NYC time because NYC is our only location. We regret any inconvenience this temporary hiatus cayuses but it is unavoidable. -- Henry Posner / B&H Photo-Video
If you're interested, B&H actually commented on on this thread.
Looks like the Sabbath violation would be on their end, when they take money for a service, so the problem only arises when during their local Sabbath hours.
I work in a gov financial institution, after working hours we have a lot of batch processing to do. Our servers are overworked and there are legal problems about operations date. Sometimes there are some sense behind the madness!
I always assume that any "free trial" where they have my payment information is going to automatically roll over into a paid subscription, and avoid the whole thing unless I already want to pay for the service.
This is kind of like "overdraft protection" used to be before they cracked down on it (somewhat).
If you're savvy or have had it happen before, you know to avoid it, but otherwise it's a financial landmine ("profit center") waiting to be stepped on.
I lost a bank card last week and in the 3 day wait I found $15/month just being casually stolen for no services rendered. One of the so-called subscriptions could only be cancelled on a specific tablet, second service I've seen impose that as a requirement this year.
If you're an HNer and you perpetuate this rubbish please stop and grow some ethics.
Or how about a more general law, saying whichever medium you used to subscribe must also be available for cancellation? That way we also cover the inverse: tricking old people into signing up for someone via phone, and requiring cancellation online (if that is allowed, I'm not sure).
Ha ha. I'm English, so I've never been entirely sure how American lobbying works, but ever since I learned of it I've thought it could be an idea to set up a website (lobby.com) where people could propose laws and people could pledge donations to get laws enacted that they like the look of. If a particular law gets enough pledges to reach a particular financial threshold then the money is deducted from the accounts and a lobbying process is started to get the law enacted.
The thing about dark patterns is that feels like an abuse of the commons. Because of scummy practices like this I am absolutely less willing to explore a site that requests my email, or buy something from a random site (I just see if it's on amazon and buy it there).
For example, a few days ago there was a Show HN about PlateJoy, which sounded really interesting. But, the only way I could learn about it was to enter my email and take a quiz. Now enters the part where the antics of countless other bad actors takes its toll on an otherwise innocent website; I decide it isn't worth the risk and move a long.
Yep, AllTrails recently went with a dark-pattern, want to see any info on the trail? Sign-up. If you don't you'll get a brief flash of the detail page before redirecting to a sign-up form.
This is basically what any discussion on dark patterns i have ever seen devolves into: "a service i use has an interaction i don't like. it's a dark pattern." the whole term is basically a meaningless buzzword now.
requiring an email address to access a service is no more of a dark pattern than requiring payment to access a service. they're taking something of value in exchange for providing something of value. it's only a "dark pattern" if they trick you into providing your email address somehow.
Loading the content then redirecting to or popping over an uncloseable email form is a bait and switch, especially if you are coming from a search engine result.
Also it used to not be this way, there were more details hidden behind the login but the general info used to be accessible with no login, it's only in the recent months that they switched to hiding most content.
It's my impression that a dark pattern is not so much a con, and more like when a ballot is intentionally printed in such a way that a voter intending to vote for Obama is misled and unwittingly marks the ballot for Romney instead, or vica versa.
That does not sound like it's trying to trick you. They're offering something valuable in return for your email address. That is what every startup guru advises companies to do.
Apparently the value wasn't high enough for you to sign up. That's fine. But why is it a "dark pattern"?
> That is what every startup guru advises companies to do.
A lot of things that "startup guru" advise are light shades of scams. A honest business deal is when a customer is given enough information to evaluate the proposal and then gets an option to decide - without influencing - to enter the transaction. One needs to keep that in mind.
In this case - it's what 'throwanem replied - "you can't fairly evaluate the offering if you can't see it until after you've already given away the item of value".
I just looked at AllTrails, and it's pretty clear what the value is - you get to download and print the maps, and use them on your phone.
I appreciate what you're saying about an honest transaction, but "dark patterns" is a useful term that is being diluted to apply to any company that doesn't offer everything for nothing. If asking you to create an account to use the product is a "dark pattern", what do we call moving buttons to capture accidental tricks, getting you to open your contact list with tricky wording and spamming everyone, etc? Surely those aren't the same as "please create an account to use our product"?
Sure, those are worse, but it's a difference of kind rather than degree. I mean, I can download, print, and view offline maps from OpenStreetMap, too. That's free and it doesn't play cheesy games to get my information. Why should I care about AllTrails, which does?
(I feel like I should note that the default presumption here is of sketchiness, not uprightness. Maybe that's unfair, and maybe there are a lot of us out here who've been hosed often enough by bait-and-switch games that anything which smells of yet another one gets tarred with the same brush. I don't think that's an argument against the article's thesis, you know?)
Because you can't fairly evaluate the offering if you can't see it until after you've already given away the item of value (in this case, your email address) in exchange for which the offering is made.
If they are showing one thing to users, and another to search engines, that is expressly prohibited by Google and you can report them. This is what got Expertsexchange.com busted way back in the day.
Most pay-walled newspapers show you some content initially (which is what is getting indexed), or give you X number of free articles before hitting you with it. For others (like WSJ), they offer a "Web" link of some sort that they bury the hell out of, but that technically exists and is visible to users. So people from search engines don't get hit with the paywall, but anyone from social, email, referral, etc. does.
Yes? That is the entire point of this discussion. That just strikes me as a sign-up for more info. Granted I haven't signed up there so who knows if there are nefarious pre-checked boxes and massive ToS agreements, but signup for access to the site doesn't seem malicious.
I really shouldn't ask leading questions, because they are technically equivalent to blaming statements.
What I meant was that "it does NOT matter" whether it's a UX bug or an intentional pattern. The effects can be the same. If a company doesn't have a lot of money to produce a good UX because they spent it all on trips up to Tahoe for a "workcation", and people rely on that software, it's the same damn thing no matter how you look at it.
i.e. a lack of intent is just as bad as ill intent, in some cases.
Requiring someone to log in to use your site or service is not a dark pattern though. There's nothing nefarious going on there. As another poster said somewhere in this chain, if upon signing up you have to give your life away via the TOS, or there's pre-checked boxes signing you up for mailing lists, those are dark patterns. Simply requiring a user sign up is not.
Yes it does matter. A bug or poor design can be fixed, while a dark pattern is intentional. Yes, the end result to the user is the same, but long term the it's a difference.
I don't think Amazon is completely innocent either. I signed up for prime accidentally recently because EVERY time you buy something they try to sell you prime for a year and I guess I misread something. They canceled and refunded after an email, but it was still obnoxious.
Not just the web either. This morning Cortana turned green and said "Oh hey!" in my taskbar. I clicked it and it gave me the regular interface - there was no alert or anything, they just wanted to boost their Cortana interaction numbers for the day. That's wasting my time and making it less likely that I will pay attention if there is an actual alert later.
I can't stand Cortana. I honestly, genuinely don't want to talk to my computer. I realize I might be in the minority on that, but I actually type fast enough and know what I'm doing enough not to need to ask an "assistant" to do it for me. Unless and until my computer is Samantha from Her, I don't need to talk to it.
What's worse, Cortana has ruined Windows search. Searching from the Start Menu is way less expansive and useful in 10 than was in Windows 7. (I never used 8, so I can't comment there.) It's like it's punishing me for not using something that breaks how I want to work anyway.
So, just type then? I use Cortana to set reminders occasionally, but I can't remember the last time I used the voice interface. My PC at home doesn't even have a microphone.
Oh yeah, I do. The problem is that Cortana has supplanted basic search functionality. As far as I can tell, when you type a search in the Start menu you're still going through Cortana, technically (that's why she's always running even when she's turned off from listening to you). Cortana has access to a limited subset of your computer. She can't search things outside your C:\Users\[your username] directory. Regular Windows Search doesn't have that limitation, but to get to regular search you have to explicitly go looking for it now.
So while I used to be able to search for a folder on my D:\ drive by hitting start and typing its name, now I have to either go to the actual Windows Search, or navigate to the folder manually. Even if that folder is indexed in Windows Search, and I have full permissions on it.
I'm not affiliated, but it's a shameless plug anyway because I'm huge fan of it since its Amiga days: Get Directory Opus, that is, download the free trial of the pro version and explore the settings and help files some, and of course, use the search function, too... let's see if you can do without it afterwards :) I for one cannot STAND using windows without Directory Opus after having used it with, it's one of the precious few applications which have been pretty much perfect for a long time, yet keep getting better. Sorry not sorry for rambling, I love this thing.
You're upset that search got rebranded to Cortana? It can definitely search your entire PC. I just typed the name of a script I have sitting on my D: drive and pressed enter and it opened it.
It can't. I have a Super User post [1] that describes the problem in detail. Windows Search and Cortana appear to be two separate things. If what I describe in my post is working on your computer, we should talk... I need to find a solution to this issue and Microsoft Support couldn't help.
Can you tell me - do you have Cortana's voice stuff enabled? Do you have her "learning" about you enabled in settings? Did you upgrade to W10 or do a fresh install?
I'm running the Anniversary Update. Maybe things got better. It also sounds like you might need to rebuild your search index and make sure all the folders you want to be searchable are indexed.
Yeah... I did that, and sfc /scannow, which was also recommended. All the necessary directories are fully indexed. If the Anniversary Update fixes it I'll be a happy camper.
I'm not affiliated with it but Agent Ransack just does search the old fashioned way, but fast. Sear inside files works properly too, without waiting for some sort of index that may, or may not be complete.
I use the command WIN + q which launches the Windows "Search the web and Windows" menu/dialog which I can type a local file name or installed application and quickly open items.
If I type a filename into that little search bar, it shows a few results. If I click the "My Stuff" button at the bottom, it shows me a different list. Neither list is complete. I have to open an explorer window to get a useful search bar.
Pretty much all privacy-related settings in Windows 10 use dark patterns. And they've just made it much harder to disable Cortana in the upcoming Anniversary Update.
Practically speaking, people only need to like products enough to be able to tolerate them, even if they're gritting their teeth in anger the whole time they use them. Many people end up buying things they hate because they don't really have any better options (e.g. virtually every telco, cable company, or ISP). Microsoft would have to intentionally make Windows completely broken, meaning so broken it's very difficult to get even basic applications to run and stay running, before the switching costs would be justified (that is, before people would stop buying it).
In a theoretical world, consumers are free to simply buy whatever they like, and their purchases directly reflect their intent to reward the company that made the product they're buying. In the real world, there is lock-in, there are exclusive vendors, there is employer mandate and inflexible custom processes with dependencies, there are other forces that make it so you almost have to buy certain things. Windows is definitely one of those things that many users feel they practically have to buy, whether they like it or not.
Every vendor of computer products (hardware or software) is trying to achieve this lock-in effect, because it means a lot of easy money, a much more stable and less sensitive income stream.
That's a bit cynical, but even it's true, it has no explanatory power. Specifically, that's not a reason for MS to put time and money into making a feature worse.
Yeah maybe it's an uncanny valley thing. But if it's going to start a conversation it should be prepared to carry one. And if it's going to demand my attention with a blinky green light, it should have something to say.
Experienced this recently with Hello Fresh. The 'Cancel Subscription' button was so hard to find that I had to spend 10 minutes Googling it (the placement had changed over time and was always difficult to find, so a lot of the search results were no longer relevant). You had to click a button to reveal the cancellation link, and it was a tiny line of grey text on a beige background.
Then, to make it better, they started calling me every day after I canceled my subscription.
I was going to recommend them to all my friends and family, but instead I did the opposite -- I told everyone to avoid them and only mentioned the negative aspects of their service.
AOL was notorious for almost being impossible to cancel. I remember when I had Netflix for a while and decided to cancel it was really easy to do so. Although I canceled that alone gave me a positive impression of Netflix.
Ditto to this. I realized I had an unused Netflix subscription, and not only did they cancel it, the rep apologized, said that happens a lot, and helped me negotiate a full refund with no questions asked. I came back a few months later when the Flash came out, re-subscribed, and have been happy turning it on once in a while to watch shows, then back off again when I'm less interested.
It's been lovely. More companies should do this, because it makes me actively want to support them.
I worked for a company that offered a software product that was paid on a monthly subscription. Since a number of the companies in this industry were seasonal, we made it possible within the software to make their own license inactive. No phone call was necessary, but they could if they wanted. So as long as their license was inactive they wouldn't be charged. If they reactivated their license they would start being charged again. They would also immediately get any updates they missed out on while inactive.
Services should be as easy to cancel as they are to sign up for! Too bad that's the exception rather than the norm.
I consider myself a savvy shopper. I pay attention to every single charge, I read the fine print, I keep spreadsheets for "cancel dates" but even I've been burned before. I apparently signed up for auto renewal with magazines.com. They at least emailed me before renewing but I had to call to cancel that and I was on hold for a while. Wouldn't have signed up if I knew there was that annoyance to deal with.
Netflix has always been classy about that - canceling is genuinely easy, and I believe you can cancel rollover on your free trial as soon as you get it. After you leave, it's like one email and then a followup with another free trial 6-12 months later.
I guess selling an actually-good product with few competitors has its advantages.
That was my experience as well. I wanted to cancel because the interface for pausing deliveries was so painful to use that my wife and I often failed or forgot to pause weeks which were too busy to receive a delivery, thus wasting large amounts of money. After cancelling they hounded me with phone calls for weeks. We have since signed up for a competing service (Green Chef), and I have no interest in going back.
The Green Chef cancellation isn't easy either. You have to email them and request a cancellation link.
FWIW, I got terrible food poisoning from one of Green Chef's meals. Always make sure the food is still cold when you receive it, I thought it was "cold enough" but I was wrong.
To cancel Blue Apron, you have to send an email, which then sends you a link to a cancellation page. I can't figure out what purpose that could possibly serve.
AVG had (possibly still does) a dark pattern with their free AV software, and I fell for it once.
I was in the middle of a game when the stupid ad for Web TuneUp[0] appeared from my task bar over the screen. The linked image is exactly how it appeared with the auto-confirm box pre-checked. In a rush to dismiss the ad to get back to my match, I accidentally clicked the OK button instead of the tiny decline.
Of course, uninstalling that travesty was a nightmare.
Then there was the dark pattern (in BitTorrent Inc's official client IIRC?) where you had to check some boxed and uncheck others to avoid all malware. Does Unchecky handle those situations?
The worst thing I've seen is G2A Shield - it takes 10 steps to deactivate it, and each step has the "cancel" button much more dominant than the "continue" button, see: http://imgur.com/a/PUwPC
I can't recommend using G2A on any level. While there may be some reputable "grey market" sellers that take advantage of pricing in different regions etc, g2a seem to be far shadier [0]. (specifically the keys are being bought with stolen credit cards, and the original seller gets hit with chargebacks)
This looks remarkably similar to Audible's unsubscribe flow. I was a member, but I've had less time to listen and increased my podcast count, so I decided to cancel and pick it back up in a year or so.
They ask a million times if you're sure and then offer another million other options (suspend the account for a few months, after which they will automatically charge you again). After you get through that, including a screen warning that you will lose unused credits, they offer a plan that will let you keep the credits you've already paid for by paying them another, smaller sum (I think $10 a year).
What really pissed me off about Audible is that they offered me a special offer after initiating the cancellation process, in a fully automated process.
Maybe other people like that, but this basically tells me that their good customers pay more than they have to, because they are fools that don't complain, possibly subsidizing the grumpy ones. And I find this to be totally unacceptable.
For anybody interested in an Audible alternative, check this out: http://downpour.com
That's DRM-free, high quality audio books at comparable prices.
You only get that special offer the first time you cancel as far as I can tell. But really, nothing about Audible is in any way defensible, I know this because I happily tried to take advantage of that special offer thing.
Yep. I unsubscribed because of less time to listen and being increasingly unhappy with the quality of their narrators (maybe I was just unlucky, but too many poor narrators often having strong unpleasant tones was spoiling enjoyment of too many books).
By the time I got to the end of the endless "are you really sure about this" and one time offer pages I was so annoyed I decided I'd never renew.
I tried to use Uber for the first time yesterday (in Moscow). The car wouldn't come for way too long, so I clicked cancel and thought that was it. I even selected a reason for cancelling. As I was walking home, a driver called me saying that he had arrived. I said that I had cancelled the trip a long time ago. Then the app showed that my trip cost 0 and asked to rate the driver, which I did.
When I came home, I discovered that they sneakily took money for that trip! I complained to the support and they said it's working as intended, but they refunded me... in bonus points that can only be used to pay for Uber, which I never intended to use again after this "experience".
Its a dark pattern that you have to ask specifically to get your money back in the form of currency and not credit. I was actually really surprised about this too when I had to get a trip refund from Uber.
Some of these cases are not only dark patterns, they constitute was it legally known as fraud. If you deceive someone in order to gain a financial advantage, it is fraud. The problem is that going against those gigantic companies is very difficult.
And then others aren't dark patterns. One of the first examples, British Airways, is pretty unfairly called out.
The article says that they imply "cheapest at the top". No, the flights aren't shown "cheapest at the top", and they never imply they are. They're sorted in chronological order.
There is a summary item that says the lowest fare for a booking class that day, but that's all.
" British Airways lists flights that are the second-lowest price as the lowest,"
That sentence makes it sound like they deliberately always put the 2nd lowest price as the lowest every time. It was pretty misleading or poorly written.
I think that's still really stretching. "In fact, it's only the lowest price in that ticket class".
If I saw those boxes across the board, like in their example image, it doesn't take a second thought, it's "obvious" (to me anyway), that those are the "lowest, per class".
Yeah, that's why I described it as an examples of a bad design choice that may be accidental rather than a dark pattern. I do still think it's misleading, though.
I uninstalled Reader when in started forcing UI toolbars to be open an visible every time a PDF was opened even after I'd explicitly hidden them. I haven't looked back either.
I have yet to encounter a PDF that doesn't render correctly in FireFox's built in PDF.JS. I know Reader has additional features but I've honestly never used them. You can easily set FireFox as your default PDF view and you're off to the races.
My only gripe is the PDF icon is now FireFox's icon.
I can show you several form-fillable PDF files which FF does not merely break, but absolutely destroys. Then again, I'm not interested in my Web browser invading my offline activity.
One pattern I've seen recently that's been increasingly prevalent (but I haven't seen discussed anywhere) is of a form where a site gives you two options in a dialog box along the lines of:
Would you like to sign up to our newsletter?
o [[[ OK!! ]]]
o No I'm an idiot and I don't want to save money or hear about the latest job offers that may change my life
(Exaggerated slightly.)
I'm not sure this if this technically counts as a dark pattern as it's fairly transparent but I find it is very annoying because it is an attempt to force a user to state an opinion they probably don't hold if they don't want to sign up for whatever service.
I assume it does work or it wouldn't spread so widely but exploiting people's reluctance to criticise themselves seems quite unpleasant: I imagine this affects people with the weakest self-esteem the most.
I'd be more willing to call it genius if it weren't so popular with sites that can't deliver. Forcing people to click "I don't want to get rich" when your site is pushing crappy stock tips just seems like a way to make users hate you.
I would argue that it's a dark pattern if that's the only way past the form.
A lot of sites using that technique also let you click an X button or click the darkened non-form area to continue. If that's supported, I always choose it as a tiny protest (in hopes that someone actually profiles how click-outs are happening).
If you make users click something obnoxious and self-deprecating to continue, then I'd certainly call that a dark pattern. It's like an incredibly mild version of the cult tactic where you shame people for skepticism.
>A lot of sites using that technique also let you click an X button or click the darkened non-form area to continue. If that's supported, I always choose it as a tiny protest (in hopes that someone actually profiles how click-outs are happening).
I click the X/non-form area because I'm too lazy to read the text and figure out which of the buttons won't lead me to another form/sign me up/whatever.
If they ever start making that X the "haha, got you" I'll have to start paying more attention. That'll suck.
If you're in the UK, ordering a pizza from a chain gives you forms with a ton of these patterns. Like the incredibly misleading 'tick the boxes below if you don't want to receive an email/text message with future promotions' thing.
Or the awkward auto coupon set up, which seems like it was designed to minimise the amount of money people were saving through codes. It's as if they realised "hang on, lots of people are using 30-40% off codes" so stuck a cheap 5% off one in my default. The user then has to deliberately remove the auto applied one to get the better offer, which is something many people won't bother to do. Or maybe I'm just overly suspicious, who knows.
Either way, they make the sites rather awkward to use.
If you're talking about the one starting with a D and ending in ominos - Put all fake data in except for address and pay cash on delivery. In my experience even thisisafakeemail@example.com and 00000 555 555 for phone number works a treat.
I'm happy to see mainstream technews bringing this topic to a wider audience. As I'm sure most HN regulars are aware, we've had many high ranking posts on this topic
Those extra fees at the very end infuriate me the most - it makes comparison shopping impossible. Thats including not giving me a shipping estimate until after I enter my shipping address and payment info. I want to know what I am going to pay before entering my payment details!! Hotel "resort fees" and cable or Internet subscriptions are the worst offenders, I honestly can't believe either is legal.
It actually is illegal in some parts of the world; the EU at least. These kind of hidden fees (for travel, hotels, etc.) are illegal now exactly because you should be able to compare prices, and offenders are getting reprimanded and fined for it.
As someone currently paying a $22/day parking fee at a hotel, I know exactly what you mean. However, in my case it was a booking through Hotwire, so I didn't even know the hotel name in advance.
22 dollars is absolutely ridiculous for parking (except maybe in NYC...) but at least you can opt out of parking by not bringing a car. "Resort fees" are not optional thus should be included with the cost of the room. Same with booking/processing fees when buying tickets.
What about those 'free' WiFi access points that require you to login with Facebook for 'prevention of abuse', and then abuse your Facebook account by posting you were there.
It's essentially another dark pattern. In accordance with the use policy of the Facebook APIs you can't require a like in exchange for something. If you see that, definitely report the offender to Facebook.
Source: I used to be involved with a WiFi company that offered Facebook "login".
Sure, they can make/break their own rules. It's been a while since I've looked at this in detail, but my understanding is the "Like" aspect of it is optional. On that page:
>After checking in, people will be asked if they also want to like your Page so you can continue to connect with them on Facebook.
Of course, if using Facebook WiFi, you do check-in to the location which triggers a host of other "features" within your Facebook account and experience. Similar to if you check-in to a location with the standard Facebook App.
I can see the argument that it's an extension of that experience, while providing WiFi service in exchange for it.
It's a thing. I've only seen it once, at a pub in the countryside where there is no phone signal. I refused to sign in, but then several of my friends did.
I encountered this when trying to access wi-fi on a bus. Here's the website for a company which provides this kind of service in Russia: http://netgowifi.com/en/
Facebook actually offers a "wifi authentication" feature to store proprietors. I ran into an instance of it while in Europe. Haven't seen it used in the US, though.
> Though perhaps the worst class of dark pattern is forced continuity, the common practice of collecting credit card details for a free trial and then automatically billing users for a paid service without an adequate reminder.
The fact that this is even possible makes me feel like I'm in the middle ages.
Oh God, there's a special place in hell for stamps.com.
I did not read the fine print, but made the mistake of thinking that it was a partnership with USPS and did not incur extra fees (like a crazy $13 monthly fee, even if you're not using the service).
By the time I discovered that, I also discovered that you can sign up on line, but you have to cancel by phone (or "being on hold", I discovered it).
* Anything that isn't first class mail can be accommodated by USPS.com, Paypal and others.
* If you mail enough letters to justify a label printer, you can get a better deal on a meter.
* If you hate going to the post office, you can spend the same money that you spend on Stamps.com bullshit to buy a bunch of stamps from the post office, which are now good forever.
My mom fell into this trap a few years ago. The easiest way to disengage: Use a good credit card like Amex. Call twice, hold for 60 seconds, hang up. Dispute the charge. Do this 2-3x.
>* Anything that isn't first class mail can be accommodated by USPS.com, Paypal and others.
Even PayPal does first class mail too! and they allow you to buy shipping for non-ebay packages too! And the rates are better than stamps.com.
I too can't understand stamps.com other than to fool people who don't know better. I signed up for their free trial in order to get a $10 postage scale and cancelled right away. I got to talk to a human who tried to convince me why I needed it. I was like "ebay/paypal/amazon/usps are cheaper."
It used to be common for record clubs, book clubs, magazine subscriptions etc.
Fill in this bank debit form, get two months trial subscription, if you do nothing we'll charge you 14 months for your first year and your trial period. (The more reputable places would give a genuine free trial,but it wasn't uncommon for the trial to be charged).
I wasn't being in the least snarky. If one person wants something that doesn't mean there's a market for it nor did amelius express interest in virtual card numbers. I wholeheartedly share his or her sentiment but I don't have interest in virtual card numbers.
Citibank and Bank of America (and their subsidiary FIA Card Services) are the big ones who currently offer this service and there's a whole host of other third party services as well some big names and some small names.
AMEX discontinued theirs in 2004, Discover discontinued theirs in 2011, reinstated it, and then discontinued it again in 2015, PayPal's Virtual Debit Card discontinued in 2010.
They don't provide much use because you probably would have better luck disputing the auto charge with your credit card company anyways. They don't offer any additional fraud protection and they may not work as you expect. Additionally taking away auto-payment to a service you signed up for doesn't actually cancel the service, you still have to unsubscribe. You may actually still owe them money depending on what you signed up for.
I don't think it's snark, it's just a factual statement that this isn't new. They were pretty common about ten years ago, but I haven't seen any recently.
I used to use them a lot. My favorite feature was that you not only got a one-time number, but you could set a limit for it so you couldn't be overcharged. Great for ordering stuff from shady web sites.
Well, it was my favorite feature until I did that with a shady web site and got overcharged. I called my bank to ask WTF, and they said they automatically padded the limit by 10% because people are idiots and forget to account for shipping charges and such.
I did get my money back after fighting with the scammers for a while. Threatening them with a chargeback tends to bring them to their senses.
This offers an opportunity - a browser plug-in that brings up a warning whenever a known page with a dark pattern is accessed. That would be a useful feature to add to an ad-blocker.
I've been thinking of writing a simple add-on just to get rid of that annoying "Get to Google Faster" box Google puts on every search result if Google isn't your default search engine. (Google is my default search engine, but because I have their tracking blocked, their web site doesn't know this.)
Companies that do this sort of crap may not win much by it in the long run. One of the reasons for Amazon's success is easy order cancellation. That's what makes one-click ordering work. Their innovation was not that you can order with one click; it's that you can easily undo a one-click order. That makes it a safe feature for consumers. Most businesses still don't get this.
Dark patterns need to start winning FTC attention, period. If it's somehow not already criminal to cunt people about, lie and mislead and steal from them on web pages that needs to change too.
People should use the credit card dispute process more often. If a company has made it unreasonably difficult to cancel, or charged money that you didn't actually agree to pay (because they hid the notice too well), that's exactly what chargebacks are for.
I tried that with a so called credit checking agency in the UK called "Credit Expert". These [scumbags] deserve a Dark Pattern gold star. To see your credit score you have to sign up with a credit card for a subscription. They know full well that everyone wants to just make sure that their credit score is ok, not be charged a monthly rate. They tell you it will cost X a month so you try to cancel within the given time. You have to call a phone number- can't do it online. That's also deliberate. You have to wait x minutes on the phone until you get to their cancellations department. I tell them I want to cancel. They say I 'signed up' and cancelled a year before so they are going to charge me the first month anyway. I am forced to accept and I call my bank a perform a chargeback. 2 months later the chargeback is reversed and I'm charged the full amount because the bank apparently investigated and deemed it a valid transaction.
How does Harry Brignull get his dark patterns site covered so regularly? About once a year for the past decade, somebody does an article about it. Weird.
Anyway. I'm a designer and my work has even featured on his site (after he did some freelancing with us - cheeky begger). His implication that people like me sit around trying to making life harder for customers is complete bollocks. We don't. Businesses just don't. It's bad business and nobody would willing do it.
Usually (and I grant their might be a tiny number of exceptions) they have to do things crappily because of constraints beyond their control. It may seem malicious to the likes of a freelance design-and-run merchant like Brignull, but it's not. It can also just be clueless visual designers wanting to make things pretty at the expense of being usable. But mostly it's just hidden constraints.
I did notice that the most common 'trick question' is a setup where "accept our emails" and "accept third-party emails" have opposite checkbox behavior, and it's the same behavior system in every example. My first thought was that it's probably a quirk in some shared service/template, or else regulatory weirdness. Hanlon's Razor and all that.
But the claim that no one is intentionally annoying/scamming customers is a bit of a joke. Good businesses don't, and mistakes happen, but a lot of the entries on that site are obviously, consistently screwing their customers (RyanAir, anyone?) There are, in fact, entire businesses that exist to screw unsuspecting customers with rollover billing, data sales, and opt-outs. Among other things, if you're extracting value from customers once each and they don't know your company name, there isn't any consequence to mistreating them.
Broadly, I see three things on that site. There are failures of design and constraint, but there are also dark patterns (where you're basically sincere, but manipulating people with things like opt-outs), and a fair amount of straight-up abuse (where you have victims instead of customers).
A very small number of people may intentionally sit down to design systems that purposefully trick users into doing things they don't want to do. However, to lump that in as he does with a load of other things that are basically not being done from choice is silly. Yes, they are not 100% good things, but they are not actively malicious either. Intent. Culpability..
Is there such a thing as Yelp for websites where they are scored for their UX with DarkPattern being a scored attribute?
I would love to check a new website against this list, and I would also spend my expensive time to add to this list to report dark pattern websites as they upset me enough to take action.
I'm wondering if there would be any value in an Anti-Dark Pattern plugin? Basically a browser plugin that un-does all of the dark patterns companies use to try and trick people and give you a straight result.
The amount of work put into it may not necessarily be worth it the gains, given how many different websites there are with varying implementations of these patterns.
Make it open source, and the community will probably maintain it. I'm sure that if a list of sites were given, fixes for the dark patterns would be submitted regularly.
> Make it open source, and the community will probably maintain it
… or fill the issue tracker with troubleshooting requests, demands that someone else code something they think needs to exist, long rants about whether something should or should not be included, etc. Open source maintenance is far from free.
It's nice when that works out but it's unfortunately not uncommon to have projects which don't attract volunteers, attract volunteers who have time/interest in fixing one particular thing but not maintaining it smoothly over time, or which simply cycle through people as the cycle of enthusiasm->overload->burnout->resignation repeats.
As a community we tend to neglect this side of things since it's neither a fun technical problem nor something a one-time effort can fix, but it deprives the open-source world of too many good developers.
Or instead, just have a crowdsourced list of dark pattern sites, so that when you first load them, you know right away that it has some sort of dark pattern and can stay aware.
I can chip in my experience for hour of code event. I volunteered to help run some sessions. Most of the things that we did was to give a bunch of website out of Hour of Code website. We made sure that the usage of coding exercise doesn't have to make the users register. Alas, in spite of instructions, many students and parents still were not able to skip the page asking for registration. Of course, some sites were more deliberate to place registration as if without it, nothing is going to happen. They say it is growth tactic. I say it is abusive one.
Some good examples of intentionally misleading web design patterns here.
As a counter, for those looking to create GOOD UI and UX or want to try and avoid unintentionally bad designs, I wholeheartedly recommend this video on UI tenets and traps: https://vimeo.com/168472466
The site itself has a dark css theme. Made reading about "dark patterns" that much scarier. It's actually an interesting phenomenon -- how the experience is changed by the site you read it on.
Ok, so you have hours of when I can cancel...clearly not because you have shift hours, since I'm talking to a machine. So why do you have specified hours?
Stamps.com billed me for 8 months before I noticed they were billing me. I only noticed it because I was doing my taxes. The billing size was just small enough to fly under my radar, but just big enough to hurt a bit. I feel that chose that pricing for that reason.
Anyhow, I saw they were in this story, so I felt I would expand upon their "dark patterns."