It’s a beautiful term, like doublespeak. For some people, it’s hard to define manipulative, because it must carefully exclude all the things that we ourselves do that is manipulative.
Like imagine all those people working for the S&P 500 companies. Amazon, Apple, Disney, Home Depot, AT&T, whatever. Things they do? Neither manipulative no dark pattern.
Automatically transitioning from a free trial to a subscription in the App Store? Bright pattern! Essentially unmoderated reviews on products and mysterious badges? Phone locking? Even Disney Channel runs ads, they’re just called Movie Surfers and it’s only cross promotion in the world’s largest media business.
Dark patterns, that’s for things that make money but are not S&P 500. People will debate if something Google does is dark or bright but booking.com? I mean fuck them right? Nobody is defending some business that isn’t growing their pension or hiring their kid, but we’re talking about it not because it offends our morals but because it makes a bunch of money.
Then there’s just day to day stuff that we do. For some people, it can’t be manipulative or a dark pattern if we personally do it. For example, generalizing about people of a different ethnicity than us. Or considering an argument won so long as the last word spoken agrees with us. “That’s not manipulative,” you’ll say. Fucking exactly! We can’t see how things that we ourselves sometimes do as manipulative, and litigating that on an Internet forum is fucking stupid so fuck me.
Many things are manipulative. Commerce and relationships could fall apart if we attached that moral quandary of taking advantage of people via a difference or misrepresentation of knowledge, and it’s easy to say that’s okay so long as it’s not you who’s the victim. It’s a bipartisan evil, really, and it can be found everywhere. Maybe that means manipulative is meaningless. So here we are: dark pattern, not manipulative.