Dark Patterns Hall of Shame
darkpatterns.org
darkpatterns.org
I'm wondering if the phrase itself is also designed to be understood by the fewest number of people possible, in addition to being hidden?
I've heard it very infrequently and usually with some US context in the conversation.
Later the meaning of audit branched/changed, and one common modern sense of the word is to do a thorough examination of something, comparing results against specification. I speculate that it first became a technical specialized legal term (in a context where it was originally still about a hearing in court), and then mutated as it filtered back out to people who didn’t know the word’s origin.
The "audit" in "audit an academic course" (meaning to attend the course without obtaining a credential) branched from the original sense of the word.
I assume the close button functionality is not controlled by the ad framework, but developed and maintained by the mobile developers behind the app. So the mobile devs should be able to make the functionality more user friendly, if they wanted to.
I guess it's all trickery to make people more likely to accidentally click ads, but it's really annoying. Sometimes I wish I would be able to pay a small amount of money to remove the ads, but this is often not even possible.
It wasn’t necessarily to increase clicks, but more so to prolong time on page, and sneak in more ads in between their browsing.
When we were done jamming all this in, our boss took a look at it and said ‘increase the time before the buttons are visible, and show one more ad as well’. Relentless.
Tracking the user and showing syndicated content/ads is more profitable than just charging them a flat fee for many businesses.
The user experience did not matter at all to the stakeholders.
Or, block ads system-wide. There's an app called Blokada, and you can also use the DNS-o-TLS support ("private DNS") to do that.
Very bad.
Reminds me of a time I was in their Seattle book store maybe six months ago and overheard the person at the register telling every customer they “qualified for a free audiobook” and that he’d get them all set up.
At no point did he mention that the customer was being subscribed to Audible or that they’d be eventually charged for the service. I can only imagine the discussions up the food chain that made this retail employee feel like this was alright. I shudder thinking about how many people are probably being charged to this day because they simply never noticed (I doubt I would!)
Gross gross gross.
It doesn't work like that. The management give the workers mandatory sales targets, possibly with a bonus attached. The workers find that the targets are nearly impossible to meet, but it's much easier if they omit some of the important details. Sales go up and management all pat each other on the back. Nobody in management has a difficult conversation or even imagines for a second that they are anything other than a good person making the world a better place.
I cancelled amazon prime and stopped shopping there, and this one of the reasons. The site is increasingly filled with such patterns.
Try and buy something without prime and it offers it to me on 2-3 screens, including the shipping screen after you've already told it no to prime.
Ostensibly someone might change their mind, but to me it looks like trying to get accept clicks out of customers who don't read the screens just click buttons.
>Reminds me of a time I was in their Seattle book store maybe six months ago and overheard the person at the register telling every customer they “qualified for a free audiobook” and that he’d get them all set up.
I would never go back to a place that gave me an in person audible commercial.
The plus side is Amazon is really good about refunding - I had kindle and music trials that I thought I cancelled, go for almost a year+ and they refunded the entire subscription.
The amounts of $9.99/14.99 are small enough that it's noise on the credit card amount, and it's all auto pay to pay in full anyway. So unless you do quarterly audits, you won't catch it.
http://termsandconditions.game
If the creator is here anywhere - thanks for the inspiration!
Doesn't change that sites shouldn't be able to block right-click, but it's a slightly easier work around than installing an add-on.
To my surprise, the next charge was to be for the whole year. After contacting support, they explained to me that the first month was oferred as a trial, to test things out, but that they do not offer monthly prices otherwise.
Let me put that again, they displayed monthly prices on the signup page, charged the monthly fee for the signup, but it turns out that they actually signed me up for a yearly plan and they do not offer monthly plans at all.
I don't know if they still do it and they offerred me a monthly plan after I complained about it.
It could all be replaced with a single button labelled "stop tracking me".
[X] Doubt
All the incentives are in place for them to find novel ways to abuse the user's privacy. Their share price, which they have a mandate to maximize, pretty much depends on it.
50M is a drop in the ocean for Google; they can justify amounts that are orders of magnitude larger than that as a cost of doing business.
Isn't the ad-based business model of this unicorn itself a dark pattern? Or aren't we yet at that stage, and consider "Read the legalese of the privacy policy, and either continue or move on" good enough?
There's opportunity to use open-source, self-hostable Airtable alternative, such as NocoDB [0] or Baserow [1].
As for darkpatterns.org itself. On the Hall of Shame page there are 5 trackers, and on the landing page (due to YouTube embedding) there are 8. But the site lacks a Privacy Policy AFAICS explaining this. Arguably a site about Dark Patterns could be a shining example of not using them, and I think it could well be tracker-free without major concessions.
The website is built using webflow, which is a very reasonable choice for someone who wants to run a website who is not also a developer. Embedding or linking to content on third party services like youtube, twitter or airtable is not an unusual thing to do.
The website has no revenue model, and has been provided free of charge since 2010. Though it's not perfect - it would after all be preferable to entirely javascript-free - it's had a tiny net positive effect on the web.
You suggested using NocoDB instead of airtable. NocoDB was launched 3 days ago.
[1] Manually opting out that is, I‘m blocking trackers on DNS level and via browser plugins.
For my part I find that totally reasonable. What cookie banners try to negate is the fact that most people just don't want to be tracked.
I'd definitely argue against that. For a hot minute they were truly terrible, with occasionally hundreds of tickboxes (Looking at you Techcrunch). Now 80% of sites I go to seem to use the same provider, which has a primary "Accept all", but rejecting all is usually a matter of clicking 3-4 radio buttons and a secondary "Confirm choices" button.
That's still pretty damned dark pattern-y, no doubt, but it's light years better than my previous options of either accepting or accepting.
GDPR should require all websites to have their cookie settings under a standard icon in the top row of the screen, which you could scrutinize and tweak at leisure. As it stands you have one shot, short of clearing all cookies.
> Google Calendar has trained me to think that a Google Meet link on the invite is probably a mistake.
> That one decision has completely ruined the GMeet brand.
> Doing bad/dark UI patterns to pump up usage numbers might be good short term but an awful long term decision.
What is this referring to?
Same thing for google mail.
Sometimes I wonder if it's crappy design or because they would prefer default settings (notifications etc)
Irony.
Isn't the ad-based business model of this unicorn itself a dark pattern? Or aren't we yet at that stage, and consider "Read the legalese of the privacy policy, and either continue or move on" good enough?
There's opportunity to use open-source, self-hostable Airtable alternative, such as NocoDB [0] or Baserow [1].
As for darkpatterns.org itself. On the Hall of Shame page there are 5 trackers, and on the landing page (due to YouTube embedding) there are 8. But the site lacks a Privacy Policy AFAICS explaining this. Arguably a site about Dark Patterns could be a shining example of not using them, and I think it could well be tracker-free without major concessions.