Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

I thought you could opt out of that without cost when you change the address? I always remember that being an option.

I imagine there is some kind of confusing opt-out dark design, but as someone who instinctively always opts-out every time, and who is usually not tricked by UIs, I still found myself inundated with unwanted spam mail.

Of course, the only honest tactic would be an opt-in, but that would destroy the revenue the feature makes...

> Of course, the only honest tactic would be an opt-in, but that would destroy the revenue the feature makes...

This would destroy a lot of companies..

This does beg the question, if your company relies on dark patterns to get people to sign up for your service to survive, why should it be allowed to continue to operate? Seems to me like the market is speaking

Killing those companies is the point. You may as well object that bug spray is bad because it kills cockroaches.

I usually get modded down for this, but that's why I insist MailChimp, etc. is a spammer. Most of what they send the recipient never explicitly asked for. Anybody who sends out more automated mail than they have incoming transactions is spamming. Any email that doesn't reference the exact transaction that authorized it is spam.

Yes, many companies are built on dark patterns and could not exist honestly.

https://www.darkpatterns.org/

There was an opt-out and multiple pages worth of confusing "opt-in" options selected by default. I painstakingly went through and skipped/declined all of them. But I'm still receiving my "moving gifts".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com