How to Design for the Modern Web
medium.com
medium.com
I also really hate how the article takes these obviously _good_ examples of dark patterns and makes web developers feel bad for being web developers, just because some web developers are made to employ these dark patterns.
Developers can just refuse to build awful websites that are user-hostile and violate privacy. We're highly paid professionals. We can just say "no."
If given the choice between a paid website that offers some information/service and a privacy invading, popup spewing site that's free but has what people want, 99%+ will choose the latter every time.
So people pay in inconvenience/annoying experience instead of actual money, we are after all using sites that presumably offer us some value and expecting to get it all for free, but every site, every page cost some about of money to be built and a majority of people who built them will want to recoup that cost somehow...
So I am frankly quite happy to build most of these features, they are how people actually earn a living from their sites.
The presumption that a website must offer value otherwise it wouldn't have any visitors, is false. Some websites just make people unhappy and anxious, but they are addictive (and engineered to be addictive) so people keep coming back regardless. There are no rational consumers, and if you design the web (or society at large) under the presumption that people are perfectly rational you end up with a sad dystopia.
Content is being produced at such a rate that there is absolutely no reason to be concerned that crummy websites that use unethical practices go out of business. Good riddance, I'd say.
Like I say - perhaps it's a generational thing, perhaps it's just me, but I'm not going to just passively go and do something which is going to make me feel bitter and resentful.
Seriously, try it. Be honest and straighforward with the people you are doing work for and tell them that <annoying web thing> is probably going to be detrimental to the users of their site - and detrimental to the numbers of users of their site. In my experience, the people you are doing the web work for appreciate honestly felt, straightforward, blunt opinion and advice - and the ones who don't appreciate it aren't worth becoming bitter, self-loathing, and resentful for.
The very fact that one might start to feel bitter, self-loathing, and resentful, is your mind's way of saying to you "now hang on a moment, you know doing these things is wrong - you need to reconsider".
If more developers started to give some good, honest, and blunt feedback on these dark patterns to the people who desire them to be included in their sites, then that would in my opinion go a long way towards these dark patterns being used less - although that probably won't stop the more cynical site owners because they'd be more inclined to cynically use dark patterns anyway, but hey at least you tried and also you might wish to reconsider doing work for them in the first place, in favour of better clients.
I've reached out to many sites though that what they're doing is distracting and annoying but the only response I've ever gotten to that was that they would hire and I could do it better. Yeah right, as if they'd let me remove all the popups.
That it can't be chalked up to ignorance seems even more damning to me. If your work necessarily causes "a huge amount of self-loathing" maybe look for another job? I currently work as a web developer for the first time in my career and thankfully no one tells me to do any of these things.
> I also really hate how the article takes these obviously _good_ examples of dark patterns and makes web developers feel bad for being web developers, just because some web developers are made to employ these dark patterns.
I don't feel bad reading this, and I don't feel that the article was made for me to feel bad about being a web developer.
It's also not only a matter of web developers being told by their superiors to make their sites shit. I've seen plenty of 1-man business websites that throw up huge modals after 30 seconds asking me to subscribe to their newsletter. Plenty of them throwing social media buttons at me, practically begging for me to share it somewhere.