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Comment by hungryforcodes | Hacker News Reader

“Real pain PAS (pain - agitate - solve) is a common copywriting technique used to increase conversion. Most landing pages touched on the pain they were addressing, but only 1 in 15 agitated or amplified the pain with emotional language and vivid imagery. The ones that did this well created much more powerful landing pages that moved me to explore the solution.

Fix it: Agitate your visitor by painting a vivid picture of the pain using emotional language, stories and visuals.”

How is this not a dark pattern?

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> How is this not a dark pattern?

It's common for potential customers to have a need and a problem but not understand their own need or problem. The customer's lack of understanding of their problem doesn't mean they don't need the product ("wow, I didn't realize I had cancer/bad breath/incorrectly spelled words on my website - thanks for helping me understand I need chemo/a toothbrush/a spell-checker" or "I knew I couldn't spell but I didn't realize it was making people leave my website without reading the content, thank you for helping me understand I need a spell-checker") so sales activities often involve helping the customer recognize a problem as a problem and as a problem they face. This is particularly common in enterprise sales where the sales reps tend to function as expert consultants who have much deeper understanding of the problem at hand than the organization experiencing the problem, because of the scale and complexity of the problems and the reality that each organization ideally solves the problem in question at most once but the sales reps are involved in helping dozens or hundreds of companies identify and solve the problem. If you want to call all sales activities "Dark Patterns" that's your choice, but the word "sales" has served us well for hundreds of years, as have "advertising," "marketing," and "branding."

Dark patterns are not "anything you don't like"

I certainly don't like being manipulated and "agitated" online, it's true.

That's just marketing 101, as used for centuries.

A dark pattern would be luring them in further with something like "the one thing you need to do to fix your conversion rates", but with a link leading to a list of 10 things, with that one thing at the end or even not there at all.

And number 6 was going to surprise me! (AVOID!)

Why would it be?

There is nothing sinister in it. Probably 100% of people do the same in every day conversations in one or another way without even noticing.

Well, a lot of beauty products sell themselves by making people feel ugly, security products by making people feel fearful, and so on.

Some people find that perilously close to breaking someone's window then charging them to fix it.

> security products by making people feel fearful

People should be fearful. The lack of fear is allowing people and corporations to get hacked everywhere.

Though I work in cybersecurity (though not for a cybersecurity company), so I may be a bit biased.

They don't make people feel anything, all they do is show some pretty picture and a people do the rest themselves.

Should pretty images be considered shady marketing because of this? Probably no.

It should be. But I guess when the revenue of the entire freaking planet depends on manipulation, people start to accept it.

Dark patterns are:

a) UI

b) explicitly designed to mislead or confuse you into conflating things

This is simple persuasion, not deception. It's also not UI.

Not heard of PAS before but it's a stalwart of UK politics for those in power presently. Bonus points if you actually cause the pain, I guess.

If this was a dark pattern then almost all of sales is a dark pattern.

The user is feeling the pain, you are amplifying it.

Yes it sound stupid but it's only about evoking a feeling the visitor already has.

Here's some examples - they are everywhere

https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1391668206755106816

I've done sales engineering, and usually the way I closed deals was by honestly finding solutions to client problems, not by dramatizing them.

Perhaps it's the use of the word "agitate" -- but it does seem manipulative.

This is necessary because people don't appreciate how bad a problem is unless you sensationalize it for them.

For example, if I say 'your DKIM records for your email are setup wrong, so there is a chance someone can send spam using your email address', nobody will pay for an hour call-out to fix it.

If I say 'your email Exchange server has been configured incorrectly and there's no authentication on your outbound emails so you can easily be hacked', people are more inclined to fix the problem because they more easily understand the severity.

So what you are saying is every salesperson ever is a dark pattern proponent?

Yes? That's pretty much my experience.

Not all sales is the used car guy trying to pull a fast one on you. Any decent sales experience is party A understanding the needs of party B and providing a solution that both parties accept. Good sales leads to both parties being happy. I say thank you to the grocery clerk because I want to give them money for food and they say thank you because they want my money. I'm happy to be eating.

If they could, approximately all sales-y and marketing people would be happy to make 7 billion people pay them 20 quids for a pound of horseshit.

So would I, the difference is they are regularly paid to try and do it.

The grocery clerk isn't trying to market anything to you, they are merely handling a transaction.

And yet there is a good chance that almost everything about your visit to that grocery store was steering you to increase the amount you spend while there. On the other hand, if the store didn't put things you might want to buy out on display, no-one would be able to browse, which a lot of people enjoy and/or find useful. So where is the line between unfairly manipulative and simply showing what you're offering and inviting someone to buy it?

Reminds me of the "World's Best Cup of Coffee" scene from elf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUPDRnUWeBA

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