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Comment by brokentone | Hacker News Reader

As the engineer being forced to implement patterns like this that I felt were shady, I can almost promise you that some "growth hacker" or "subscriber acquisition consultant" or "optimization consultant" comes in with case study stats or runs an A/B tool to see various effects. They're likely able to show several percent increase for each of these dark patterns, then management has real dollars to have to turn down. Then I complain that we're violating trust which can't be easily or immediately quantified, and the response is "eh, I see the button, a user will find it if they want it."

After raising the flag too many times without being heard, I finally quit. But is there a more scalable way to protest / stop this?

What about a browser extension that warns when you try to sign up for a service that you can only cancel by phone?

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There are bad people in every profession. Unfortunately marketing seems to have a higher rate of them, and "growth hacking" is probably at 99%. Anyone who concludes a test without sufficient information or consideration for side-effects—or worse, makes a change without testing at all simply because some other growth hacker claims it works—is just eager to claim another win without care for actual business outcomes.

(I say this as a customer acquisition consultant.)

With that said, engineers are notoriously more sensitive to marketing and sales than the general population, and therefore overestimate the negative impact of a marketing or sales tactic.

(I say this as a former engineer.)

Case in point:

I once consulted for a popular NoSQL DB company. When I came along, they were letting anyone download a trial of the DB without providing any contact information—not even an email. So even as more and more people learned about them, the sales team had no leads to sell to.

I set up a test in which a random 50% of people who clicked "Download" would be prompted for their email before the download could start.

We _knew_ the download rates would drop, but that's a tradeoff the company was willing to make to fill up its sales pipeline (and survive). After some discussion and back-of-the-envelope math, we decided that anything less than a 60% drop would be worth it if it meant the sales team got leads.

The test ran for two months. The drop-off rate was just 30%, meaning 70% of those who were prompted for an email went on to download. What's more, the average usage frequency went _up_ for the test group. It turns out the email form was mostly screening out the people with little interest in using the product, who would've only looked at it once or twice and never return.

With all that said, dark patterns and "growth hackers" are a scourge that I wish would go away.

When the goal of the profession (advertising/marketing) is to signal a brand and influence you in ways to override your decision making skills it's no wonder that deceptive patterns pop up.

That's a rather cynical way of looking at... any profession.

"The goal of the app development profession is to take money from phone users."

"The goal of software engineering is to control users' computers."

And so on... Reductio ad absurdum. You can do this to any profession you choose.

Advertising/Marketing is unique in that it doesn't produce any byproducts. It's conceivable, and often the case, that software is developed because it's something useful and fun to do. The same is true for food, rockets, cars, novels, etc. Advertising/Marketing though doesn't exist for any other reason than to promote products and facilitate flow of money.

Marketing is education, and advertising is art, which is fun and useful. You think people work at, say, McDonald's, because they like cooking?

So you lost 30%*x% of sales, to what benefit? Did it hurt you to have window shoppers growing your mind share?

Your story sounds like a classic case of chasing bad metrics like conversion percentage instead of bottom line.

> Did it hurt you to have window shoppers growing your mind share?

Yes. The awareness was growing but sales was not keeping up. It was a business decision to focus more on sales and less on awareness.

The sales team suddenly had 470% more sales leads to work with than the month before, for the price of 30% low-interest downloaders. I don't see how you can think that would result in _less_ sales.

Ask the consultant to perform (or at least implement) LTV measurement across 3/6-months stage. Price sensitive bank-account-checking users will act as a canary, and at least in the Boston Globe case, I suspect tactics like these to increase churn by at least as much as they increase conversion (implying the business will only see benefit for the next N month after consultant).

As for trust, the US case is simple: report it to BBB.

The BBB is a scam. It's a cartel / protection racket that collects rents from their historic reputation. Complaints to the BBB do nothing because BBB ratings are based a businesses engagement with the BBB, not consumer satisfaction!

> Another of these little-known facts about the BBB: “We are not a consumer watchdog.” While the BBB offers consumers many services—lists of popular scams to watch out for and such—the organization’s mission isn’t to have your back. From top to bottom, the BBB is funded by the annual dues paid by businesses it anoints with “accreditation,” which allows the companies to put those iconic BBB stamps of approval on their storefronts and websites. This fact raises obvious questions about an inherent conflict of interest: The organization’s customers are businesses, not taxpayers or consumers. How can the BBB serve as an honest broker between businesses and consumers when it is fully funded by one of these parties? Many argue that it cannot — that there’s a natural incentive to paint its paying clients in the best possible light.

> Whether or not a business is accredited, it can be graded by the BBB. The grading system, ranging from A+ to F, is confusing at best, useless at worst. Business grades are determined by 16 factors, including how many complaints have been filed with the BBB against the business, and if and how the business responded. Notably, however, a business’s grade won’t necessarily be hurt if nothing much comes of a complaint and the customer is left unsatisfied. Rather, all that matters, grading-wise, is that the business responded and made a “good faith effort to resolve complaints,” according to the BBB. This means that a business could have a good grade even if it is the subject of lots of complaints, as long as the business dutifully responds — even in a pro forma way.

> On the flip side, a business that is committed to handling complaints directly with customers in a substantive way, but does so outside the purview of the BBB, will get a poor grade because the BBB is not involved. So a company can have a B or C rating, or even an F, simply because it doesn’t play by the BBB’s rules, which include looping in the organization with complaint responses and providing the BBB with background information about the company.

http://business.time.com/2013/03/19/why-the-better-business-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau#Critici...

Is there a better BBB?

If worse is better then there can't be a better BBB.

Maybe we could have a better business bureau for better business bureaus.

Yelp? Google Local?

Maybe a professional association for software engineers? A few isolated engineers quitting because of this won't accomplish much, but concerted action might.

Get a few counter-examples where this backfired.

Zynga survived for a while but eventually their "gamification-only" games flopped. Similarly, there are examples where real businesses tried to play the "short term online growth at the expense of trust" game and flopped.

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