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.
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.
Emails on the other hand can reliably fetch prices/be put to use.
Apparently the value wasn't high enough for you to sign up. That's fine. But why is it a "dark pattern"?
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 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"?
(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?)
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.
Sure, it could be darker. But when you see a bit of a crummy pattern you usually walk away instead of checking out just how bad it could get.
"A Dark Pattern is a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things."
Simply making a user sign up to use your service is hardly a 'carefully crafted trick'.