Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

This post lists three examples of dark algs/UX.

However, the second and third examples are speculative. They might be a result of an algorithm, or they might be a result of stupid policies, or they might be a result of operational errors. Who knows? Alleging that it's a "dark algorithm" sounds cool, but it isn't really damning without evidence.

So we're down to one example of actual dark UX, which doesn't make for a particularly strong allegation. I wish the author had taken just a little more time before publishing to collect a few other authentic examples.

That said, I know from my own experience that health insurers' online portals tend to have horrible UX, because it is not in their best interest to have great UX. Just yesterday, I had to fill out a form indicating that none of the five members of my household had other insurance or were Medicaid-eligible. There were a total of 10 checkboxes I had to check. After checking each one, I got a loading indicator and then the page refreshed, so I had to scroll the page back down to the next checkbox. It didn't prevent me from filling in the information, but it definitely made it needlessly tedious.

It's further concerning that he appears to have written his own example code for the speculative dark patterns, presenting it alongside real code from insurer websites, which I found misleading at best and downright deceptive at worst...

... at best.

And then, like, criticize the code quality it as if it came from them for design choices that _the author_ made?

> So, my laugh cry scenario here is that they statistically set/just have variables in the code base that say claims spanning a certain amount of time are denied. E.g.

WTF, you wrote that code!

Well! That's rather ironic I'd say.

He is pointing out the arbitrary nature of the algorithm the workings of which was determined through research. The psuedo code is obviously not the point. The reader would have to either be ignorant of the discussion to make this mistake or intent on blurring the discussion.

Agreed. If my goal is to trick people into not submitting claims it would be pretty naive of me to disable or hide the button.

'oh i'll just give up and eat the $X,000 charge because I cannot find the submit button?'

Yeah right. The only thing that would do is add to your expenses tying up on-call tech support.

which fulfills the prophecy that healthcare is expensive because large call centers must be created to support all the people who aren't smart enough to submit their claims online, which in turn either raises taxes or makes the taxes go towards a call center and not care.

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