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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

This dark pattern seems to be spreading. Amazon recently pushed out an update to their (beta last I knew) web app that allows you to use their smile.amazon.com charity donation through the app. But in order to turn that on, you have to turn on all the notifications the app has, including their rather constant pushes of "deals I may be interested in". They're holding you hostage to their notifications because "it's for charity!"

Not that this is news, but clearly Silicon Valley has no intention of retraining itself in any manner. Every wheedling trick in the book will be used to track you, up to and including holding arbitrary charities emotionally hostage.

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Amazon finally exceeded my tolerance for slimy behavior last year, and I let Prime lapse. The amount of time and energy they have put in to making it hard to compare prices in their own goddamn store was enough by itself; behavior like this is motor-oil icing on the garbage cake.

I had to readjust a few common purchases, but I was far less habituated to them than I thought I was. Having to actually pay attention and look meant I found cheaper options. And I never cared about Video or their other goofy add-ons.

Still handy for pricing data-points when buying elsewhere, though.

Yep, let Prime lapse a year or two ago as well. Moving my business to other companies now.

What competitors are you using?

Walmart.com has stepped it up recently. Still a long way to go, and I doubt their intentions are any better, but competition is healthy.

I also like to use boxed.com for quite a few bulk items that one might otherwise find at Costco. And compared to Amazon, I have found some competitive pricing at Smart & Final for other items I used to purchase online.

Glanced at boxed.com. Is there any way to see what they have without logging in?

As much as Amazon seems to be throwing their mud in consumers' collective faces, the Waltons are 100% not better people and Wal-Mart's entire success is based on exploiting low-wage workers and subsidizing your workforce through social programs.

That's like trading arsenic for cyanide.

At least you aren't getting stories about Walmart workers having to pee into bottles like Amazon workers.

Last year I spent 5 months cycling through the US. Walmart was the one place I could consistently find healthy food such as fruit at low prices.

Many other retailers have specials prices on fruit that only apply to loyalty cards holders. Obviously they track their customers.

I'm fascinated that you cycled through the U.S. Did you happen to write anything about your travels that you're willing to share? I'd love to hear your experiences seeing America.

http://cycleblaze.com/journals/burgers

I met hundreds of people and most of them were so generous with food, accommodation etc. Some even tried to give me money.

I'm late to get back to you - thanks for sharing this. This is so extensive and exactly what I was looking for!

Nothing seems like a 1-1 Amazon replacement but buying stuff from actual online stores has worked out pretty well for me since I research products too much before I buy anyway.

Same. Also, Target and Walmart free shipping usually ends up being 2 or 3 days for me whereas it seems Amazon now intentionally delays free non-Prime shipping to make Prime more attractive.

Prime shipping has only about a 50% 2-day delivery hit rate for me. Sometimes I order a Prime product and get it in 3-5 days. One time it was about 8 days. In most cases, delivered by the Amazon U-Haul trucks with people who pop out, toss your package against the door, then pop back in.

Amazons search is TERRIBLE! I'm beginning to think sites that don't just let you download the catalog and search it yourself are probably trying to hide something. Amazon being the prime example of that.

> I'm beginning to think sites that don't just let you download the catalog and search it yourself are probably trying to hide something.

You know what would be a great feature? Letting you prioritize different categories, in relation to each other- on AliExpress, "fist sort by price, then by shipping arrival date" would be incredibly helpful- I'm totally willing to spend a bit more to get stuff here 20 days faster, and searching through everything for that is a PITA.

Their music app is actually great, because it automatically shows lyrics for songs while they're playing. You get 2M songs with Amazon Prime, but the full library costs the same as Spotify/Google Play/Apple Music/Tidal/Pandora/etc. You can also scroll through the lyrics, and click the lyrics to seek directly to that part of the song.

I think the ad-tech industry has tapped into what can only be called -- and no offense to anyone here -- "virtue signalling." There's no doubt studies done on this, hence the new "controversial" sort of nature of some of the advertising. Who knew that Gillette and Nike were so interested in social issues, and not a bottom line PNL result. In the same way, perhaps, Amazon marketing teams found some research to suggest that same "heart-string tugging" mechanism can be combined as a "sweetener" to get you to do things you otherwise wouldn't do -- like subscribe to "buy this too" notifications.

It is not a very conspicuous signal. I don't know which one of my friends use Amazon Smile. I don't think the dark pattern would work well if Amazon Smile was only social signalling. Seems to me it relies much more upon the fact that actual money is given to charities. Pretty gross of Amazon to add unrelated self serving conditions to such giving.

I think the question is whether we would prefer Amazon Smile to exist as it is or not exist at all.

Even if there is a forced advertising aspect, it makes the world better.

That line of thinking is what let Jimmy Savile run amok for decades.

what you’re pointing out is corporate social responsibility (CSR), which emerged decades ago. it’s an extension of branding, which advertising, among other marketing tools, supports.

virtue signalling is on the consumer side, where consumption of the brand has the (positive) side effect of showing how with it and magnanimous you are.

in any case, i also don’t see how it applies here (as sibling commenter points out).

Interesting, it's always good to know what the technical lingo is in these things, it helps us understand how the marketing minds think.

yes, it's interesting.

the prius is a prime example of virtue signalling used in marketing classes: honda was puzzled at why its civic hybrid wasn't selling while the prius sold like hotcakes, until it realized that the prius, with it's unique body styling, signalled virtuous environmentalism, while the civic hybrid, with it's standard civic styling, had no (additional) virtue signal.

I hear it's (also?) called 'woke' capitalism.

> Silicon Valley has no intention of retraining itself in any manner.

Historically, no industry, once became major, intended to retrain itself to be more positive to the society. If any improvement happened, it was forced from outside.

So who was forcing the many famous Victorian philanthropist industrialists to build their railway and model villages, with free schools, hospitals and more for workers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_village

I'm not seeing the philanthropy. They were trying to obtain effective workers without being destroyed by angry outside forces:

> The Swing Riots of 1830 highlighted poor housing in the countryside, ill health and immorality and landowners had a responsibility to provide cottages with basic sanitation. The best landlords provided accommodation but many adopted a paternalistic attitude when they built model dwellings and imposed their own standards on the tenants charging low rents but paying low wages.[3]

Also: Company Towns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

That was definitely for their benefit of their workers rather than the greater society, and on the whole doesn't seem much different than the larger Silicon Valley companies of today.

Take Facebook for example. They have a large utopian-esque campus for the benefits of their workers. In this campus they have bikes for getting around, free bars and restaurants (and an ice cream shop), an on campus doctor, bicycle repair shop, and in fact have somehow managed to convince CBP and USCIS to visit their campus to conduct Global Entry and Visa interviews instead of the workers having to travel to an office.

Couple this with the free employee shuttle buses for employees to travel from their homes to the campus, and it seems very much like the "Model village" you described.

EDIT: Here is a link to an article (with photo tour) of their Menlo Park campus: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-disneyland-inspire...

> and in fact have somehow managed to convince CBP and USCIS to visit their campus to conduct Global Entry and Visa interviews instead of the workers having to travel to an office.

Not to detract from your point, but this is a common service for employers above a certain size-- not some shady negotiation. My last few (not even close to FAANG) employers have all offered this perk.

None of these things are shady. The parent was just using them as examples of companies trying to make their employees' lives better as a means of helping to retain them.

I'm not trying to suggest it's shady, but it's clearly an employee perk that is not available to society at large. It's another effort by the company to make an "exclusive" community that benefits their employees and as a result helps retain talent for as long as possible. None of it is a philanthropic effort as originally suggested.

And these exist mostly to keep workers on campus, so that they don't need to go home as much.

Mostly God, e.g. Titus Salt is listed in that article

"Salt's motives in building Saltaire remain obscure. They seem to have been a mixture of sound economics, Christian duty, and a desire to have effective control over his workforce. There were economic reasons for moving out of Bradford, and the village did provide him with an amenable, handpicked workforce. Yet Salt was deeply religious and sincerely believed that, by creating an environment where people could lead healthy, virtuous, godly lives, he was doing God's work."

Now, God doesn't exist, so as an external motivation he's a bit of a problem, certainly it doesn't seem to make _more_ sense to cite a non-existent God as forcing Salt to build this village than it does to credit it to his basic humanity.

> Now, God doesn't exist

Do you have a definitive source for that?

The burden of proof is not on him. It is on you to prove that he does.

This is true, by virtue of the fact that industries cannot have intentions, only incentives. Incentives can re-align based on many forces: social, environmental, political, all of which underlie the desire for everyone to keep their jobs and/or keep their stock price high enough fill their retirement accounts.

If the "tech industry" can be considered a single entity, it appears that the incentive re-alignment is happening from all these forces at once.

That improvement forced from outside is called "Disruption".

The disruptors will eventually be disrupted.

Without pointing a finger, but onsidering the (so-far) lost potential of this new medium - once so promising, now the dismay of so many ... it has become 'Sellout Valley'.

On the website I always found it quite interesting that the "if you shop on smile.amazon.com its for charity" pop-up does not contain any link to the current page on smile.amazon.com; even the domain is plain-text. You need to type it in manually in the address bar.

Anytime I see something like that I can automatically conclude that they are fundamentally unserious about the initiative.

Computer Science does not have the same heightened degree of Ethical Concern that exists in other sciences. E.g. genetic manipulation of human embryos is highly scrutinized, and action is taken when behavior that would corrupt future generations of humans is identified. Not so with CS.

CS Ethics is muted, often conflated with Corporate Ethics whose "Greed is good" line seems to have won out above other ethical mantras.

I wouldn't call these issues matters of computer science. They're just marketing and consumer psych, and they've existed as long as businesses have.

The only difference now is that computers have enabled a level of efficient manipulation that wasn't possible before.

This is about corporate ethics. Just because these corporations happen to make use of computers doesn't make this a computer science issue.

Yet, computer scientists implement these systems, while being fully aware of the consequences.

If hospitals order doctors to do $BAD_THING, they protest. If an advertisement company orders computer scientists to implement $BAD_SYSTEM, they just comply.

I believe the biological sciences have a higher degree of ethnics training than the other science fields, if only because most academic biological research requires oversight by an ethics board.

Other fields of science do not have the same heightened degree of Ethical Concern as biology, and many have less ethics training than CS programs.

For example, when I was at university, the CS program required that the students take a course in ethical topics related to computers. I believe that was due to ACS or IEEE accreditation requirements.

The physics program had no similar requirement for their students.

Somewhat more sinister, I think, is that they added a TTL on the Amazon Smile opt-in. Now, you must re-opt-in every 90 (I think) days.

Fair bet that this small change substantially hurts the effectiveness of this charity and drives a whole bunch of money back to Amazon.

Does Prime also require a re-opt-in every 90 days? oh....

Amazon used to remind me when I wasn't on smile.amazon.com back when I used to go to www.amazon.com instead sometimes. Testing it right now, it doesn't seem like they do this anymore. :(

Prompts to use Amazon Smile do still appear. It's just that the reminders don't pop up every time you visit a non-smile domain.

Haven't seen any 90-day time limit as the parent comment mentions.

Not just amazing Samsung is constantly bugging you to sign in with a Samsung account and that apps like galaxy store REQUIRE access to contacts and sms. Just to download an app..

I have never been bugged since I've set up my phone and disabled the bundled apps I didn't need. Galaxy S7 with Oreo.

Same here. Samsung does not impose anything on you especially if you don't want to use their services you are free to ignore or uninstall those apps. Theres no black UX and theres excessive notifications about transgressions like accessing mic or camera in bg.

Besides all that the android permissions system is broken on a verbage level. contacts permission is often only needed for login, like authentication but also grants permission to scrape data. so you end up with little visibility into what data you are giving up.

People end up rightfully fearing apps asking for contacts and calls and location services, when the apps just need access to some api that is bundled under vague unbrella terms like location services

Huh? Are you talking about adding a shortcut to smile.amazon.com to your homepage or do you mean the actual native app? I can add a shortcut (on iOS) to smile.amazon.com but I don’t see why that would ever send me a notification. The native iOS shopping app has no option I can find to default or even select smile. Am I missing something?

Also what does Amazon have to do with SV?

It's the native app, albeit in beta, so you may not have it yet. You can turn on smile functionality in the app, but you must turn on all notifications.

"Also what does Amazon have to do with SV?"

Amazon is part of metaphorical Silicon Valley. So's Microsoft, for instance. Metaphorical Silicon Valley is too large to fit in literal Silicon Valley.

Is IBM included in metaphorical Silicon Valley? What about Expedia? Or Concur? Seems very arbitrary. Is metaphorical Silicon Valley only applicable to negative actions of tech companies or does it apply to all big tech companies? I searched for “metaphorical Silicon Valley” and didn’t see anything relevant.

Also how did you get into this beta and where is the actual option? Is it under notifications? I’d prefer to use the native app and still use smile.

I didn't do anything in particular to get the beta; the offer got pushed to me.

As for SV, the inability to draw a rigid, precise line around a phenomenon doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Life's fuzzy.

So when you say SV Company you mean high-growth technology leveraging company that puts profit first?

I’m honestly struggling to understand how you apply SV to a company that is not physically from SV, or at least very nearby.

Silicon Valley isn't just a place, it's a mindset and set of values. I deal with "Silicon Valley" businesses in London. It's spreading.

Not sure why you're making such a big deal about this.

I’ve honestly never heard the term used that way. It still seems very confusing.

Curious how you would define the set of values. Microsoft has dramatically different values from Google, so much so that Google's company values were in many ways explicitly a dig at Microsoft.

How would you distinguish them now?

Amazon was founded on Kleiner Perkins money. That's Silicon Valley.

>Is IBM included in metaphorical Silicon Valley? What about Expedia? Or Concur? Seems very arbitrary. Is metaphorical Silicon Valley only applicable to negative actions of tech companies or does it apply to all big tech companies? I searched for “metaphorical Silicon Valley” and didn’t see anything relevant.

Right, and while we're at it Goldman Sachs shouldn't be considered part of Wall Street. They're headquartered on West St after all!

Goldman Sachs is obviously a “Wall Street” company because they are based in NYC and participate in the financial industry.

Amazon, Microsoft, Concur and Expedia are all headquartered in Washington State which is nowhere near Silicon Valley. Similarly IBM is headquartered in New York.

My question is what makes a company outside SV a “SV Company”. This usage of the term is new to me so I am attempting to get a more complete understanding of the meaning.

just being a tech company.

thats it.

NYC had Silicon Alley. Utah has Silicon Slopes, London, Seattle etc all harbor "SV-style" companies which mostly are internet services with clients.

Its not a confusing or uncommon term especially because theres a lions share of these cheaply made internet services being created left and right in silicon valley and beyond.

Is it too hard to take the charitable view that by "SV Company" they mean "internet company?"

Yes because not all "internet companies" have the same culture as companies from the South Bay area.

Not all South Bay companies have the same culture, either, so maybe the category should to be adjusted, and to me, I think the actual category is internet companies, which I think are more congruent in their goals than they are if evaluated by geography.

Amazon was founded on Kleiner Perkins money. That's Silicon Valley.

I would define a Silicon Valley company as a venture funded startup that leverages tech and has a set of ideologies that is usually left leaning American, usually values growth over profit, usually is fine with taking the law less serious if it's in the way of growth or profit, usually has elements of hacker culture, ...

... or any company that started out this way, which is why Microsoft can be considered to be a SV company.

Except that Microsoft didn't take venture money until right before IPO, has always valued profits over growth, and has sort of the antithesis of hacker culture. (See eg. Bill Gates' famous "Open letter to hobbyists".)

They aren't because they don't have the new tech prestige.

I'd say Amazon is on the borderline, IMO.

IBM is especially confusing because they actually have offices in SV.

As do Amazon and Microsoft. For that matter, "Detroit" (as a metonym for the auto industry) also have offices in Silicon Valley - Ford Greenfield Research is near Stanford, GM Advanced Technology in Sunnyvale, and GM Cruise Automation in SF.

When it comes to multinationals, physical location matters little - Google employs thousands of people in NYC and Boston and has offices all over the world.

in this context, "silicon valley" is used to mean the tech industry, and everyone here knows what the comment means.

it's as if you're complaining that somebody referred to "wall street" during the discussion of an investment bank because they're actually located in CT.

That and their notices "hey you look at this" are just a bunch of shit products that I have no interest in.

Amazon's Prime Day and other efforts to sell me low quality garbage products are such a turn off. I don't typically think of Amazon like Wall-Mart but they sure as hell are trending that way.

Amazon is not based in Silicon Valley, do you mean consumer tech as an industry?

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