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Comment by dstick | Hacker News Reader

Urgency, social proof and scarcity are dark patterns? Isn’t that online marketing 101?

Yes. To both questions.

Online marketing isn't clever or innovative, it's just using all the tricks that people wouldn't put up with in a face-to-face sales environment. 20 years ago when I bought my first car the salespeople used things like "I've sold 5 of these today!", "I can only do that price right now!" and "If you don't buy today you'll have to wait 8 weeks". Those pressure selling techniques are one of the reasons people don't like car salespeople, and why car showrooms are a bit different today (eg Tesla). Exactly the same things happen online though, and it's awful.

The fun part is that you can flip that pattern around, at least for car buying.

Whenever it's time for me to buy a car, I first decide exactly the model I want, then research all the sellers. I call them all at once and tell them I'm buying this particular car TODAY and inform them that I'm in touch with 8 other salespeople. Except that I'm not lying, and most of them pick up on the seriousness and actually make an attempt to compete.

Bonus: do this on the last day of a quarter and you sometimes get salespeople who are trying to meet their quota.

Urgency and scarcity is so often manufactured that I can definitely see this in the dark pattern side of things. As well, whether or not there really is only 3 left, they chose to add the messaging as high impact alert messaging and it's definitely intended to be coercive.

All marketing is intended to be coercive of course, but I think you land in dark pattern territory when your coercion is no longer related to the value propositions of your product. Saying "You need this TV because it has great definition!" is just selling your product. But saying "You need this TV because TIM bought one, we only have three left and this deal runs out in 9 minutes!" is just plain old bullying someone into buying, regardless of what the item was.

Often enough too, TIM didn't buy one, there is a backorder of 1000 units being delivered this week, and the deal will just start again after the current ticker finishes.

Correction. The deal will start as soon as they refresh the page. These guys aren't smart enough to keep track of the timer state across visits.

I get where you’re coming from, but I think legitimate scarcity or urgency is ok.

If there truly are 3 items left, that is a legit fact that matters. And it’s context that I had in retail. Likewise, sales do run out.

That said, online retailers don’t seem to need to meet any true in advertising standard, and they are mostly full of shit.

There is no more legitimate scarcity or urgency anymore. This also was discussed here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20269376

I found the information on airline websites rather accurate (n seats left at this price). I guess this comes directly from how it's stored in the back end booking system (0..8, 9+ seats per booking class)

On legacy carrier official websites, not OTA or LCC like Ryanair.

Before or after buying the ticket? If I already have paid and check in online I can pick the seat. But then it is too late already.

If you mean before you bought the ticket, then I don't know. Maybe they are the last ones to be honest here... But I would be surprised if they were

Also, you can get a subscription from a website like Expertflyer and see the backend inventory from Sabre or likes.

Yeah - Booking.Com stresses me out every time I use it. It’s the worst culprit I’ve seen in this category.

Faking urgency and scarcity (and faking social proof, I guess, but IANAL and I haven't read about cases) is illegal in Germany, thanks to the law on unfair competition. The thinking is that the best product will win if you eliminate unfair practices and lying in marketing is considered an unfair practice.

The downside is that companies are supposed to enforce the law on each other, it only goes to court if they disagree. If everybody in a certain industry does this stuff, nobody has incentive to force them to comply. Consumers, clients etc do not have means to enforce it, though a handful of special associations ("Verbraucherschutzvereine", literally consumer protection associations) have been given the right to enforce it on behalf of consumers.

> Faking urgency and scarcity

No need to fake it, you can just make it up. “this discount only valid on this special day”

And you make a discount and you take it away after that day. There’s both your urgency and your scarcity. Neither was fake.

It won’t get you new buyers but it’s a great way to nudge people who were thinking of buying anyway over the edge.

Sure, a shop can do what you describe even in German laws - every now and then.

However, if you do it systematically, if you offered that "special day" discount also yesterday and will offer it tomorrow then it's de facto the regular price, telling that it's valid only today is literally a lie, violates false advertising law (which goes into detail on how discounts can be advertised, so simply gaming it with definitions doesn't wowrk) and would get your store fined so hard for lying to customers.

Yes, misleading people to drive them over the edge works, that's the whole point. If it didn't work then we wouldn't care, but since it does work we as a society have chosen that we don't want that and merchants aren't going to be allowed to use such practices.

If you produce only 50 of every product, they will always be low on stock and consumers will always be about to lose the opportunity. This is typical behaviour and retailers are increasingly designing business models around the idea. I am not sure if the German law has anything against producing a large variety of products in small quantities.

I doubt that this would matter unless you're not planning to produce more than 50 and then decide to add another 50, as you would with book editions - most products aren't produced in parallel, you'll typically get batches shipped. I'm fairly certain that you'd be asked to publish information about expected re-stocking if you publish stock counts.

The same goes for advertising & only having few items. For example, supermarkets that advertise a special offer need to have "reasonable" amounts in stock - you can't say "new iPhone X only 10 Euros" to draw in buyers and then just have two in stock.

The fake urgency is if the discount is available every day. And that's generally considered misleading advertising in the UK at least.

If you want an example: https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/j-sainsbury-plc-a17-404229.ht...

Rotating a price between £4 and £3 every 21 days was considered to be misleading.

It is marketing 101. These are things that have been talked about in "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini. The examples used in the book to illustrate these concepts are from across the 20th century.

Yes, when the user has not chosen to get that information. How about users being able to toggle social proof on/off?

I was about to say something similar. About half of the "dark patterns" on that site strike me as completely ordinary persuasion techniques. They're "dark" only if you think that the art of sales and marketing itself is "dark". (The other half are legitimately skeevy.)

Well, it is. Ask yourself, would if your friend tried to pull these off with you, would you be friends much longer?

Reality may be shades of gray, but the simple gold standard of transactions is still "exchanging currency for value at a price point optimal to both parties". Under this standard, all these techniques are dark.

The price point of optimization is determined by the available, or lack of, information at the time of the decision - what both parties believe to be true (for whatever reason).

Yup. And providing less than maximally accurate information to the buying party is what makes a potentially fair offer a dark pattern.

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