Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

This version of the dark pattern is specific to Safari, but both Microsoft and Apple have been doing this ~forever with their operating systems' respective "learn about what's new in [OS version]" notifications. Microsoft in particular has been doing this since at least XP. (Source: installing XP thousands of times at a computer recycler as a teenager.) Heck, Ubuntu has even done a few of these from time to time—for a while there was one for Ubuntu One.

In all cases, the way to get rid of these kinds of out-of-box-experience pop-ups is to assent to them, then immediately close whatever presentation window gets opened. The OS here is like a bureaucrat covering its ass—it doesn't actually record whether you fully watch the presentation, it just needs to put a checkmark beside "got the user to open the OOBE presentation" and then stops caring.

Not to say any of this is acceptable, but it's been "a thing" for a long time now, and we should really be looking at the how-and-why of the larger dark pattern here, rather than just this specific implementation.

> Microsoft and Apple have been doing this ~forever with their operating systems' respective "learn about what's new in [OS version]" notifications.

I have a MacBook I keep on the couch for random browsing while watching TV. It's a 2010 vintage one. I once spent an afternoon googling to work out how to shut off the "Upgrade MacOS now!" alerts, that'd link me to a page in Software Update which said "You can't install MacOS (whatever fucking version) on this computer".

(I mean, they can't even get the evil dark patterns right. Surely that notification should link directly to the Apple store page for a new MacBook with a time limited discount code countdown ticking? You know, to increase the sense of urgency and properly flatten the conversion funnel?)

The fun dark pattern now is I can't copy images from Chrome and send them to non-Apple recipients in iMessage. But screenshots and copying images from Safari works fine.

Naturally there are a bunch of threads about it on the Apple forums with no helpful replies, and then auto-lock without any resolution. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252071606

This likely wasn't intentional. But they're sure in no hurry to fix it.

That doesn’t sound like an Apple problem, that sounds like a Google Chrome problem. Which is probably why Apple closes the forum threads.

Eh, probably somewhere in between. I'm guessing it's a .webp being dragged, and for some reason iMessage (as a drag-and-drop drop-target) is claiming to be able to accept those, so Chrome doesn't bother to offer a JPEG representation, but instead just hands over the .webp as is. Then iMessage takes it, and realizes that it does not, in fact, know what to do with it.

The more interesting thing is that iMessage does deliver the image, when it's to an iMessage recipient. Just not when it's to an SMS recipient. So I'm registering my guess for the root cause as: the drop-target content-type capabilities for the iMessage chat window aren't being dynamically varied with the recipient type.

Cell carriers often drop Image sends that aren't GIF/PNG/JPG, so it makes sense that they'd drop WEBP. You could open a feedback report about the issue about not dynamically varying the drop target properties.

This also started with the upgrade to Big Sur. It was fine before that.

Are you sure? I can copy/paste or drag and drop to an SMS recipient from Chrome to messages.

I'm on macOS 11.5.2 and Chrome 92

I can't. Fails every time. I'm on T-Mobile - maybe that matters.

> dark pattern

Just to get the concept a soft introduction, there are people saying we should switch to the term "coercive design."

The reasons for it are fairly obvious, and I'm dubious about the degree to which some prioritize these things. But overall, "coercive design" is actually pretty descriptive, and I figured it's better coming from me than someone who likely consumes a lot of rage-bait and "dunking" fantasies in their free time.

That's not what a dark pattern is. They want you to watch their tutorial thing and they're going to keep bothering you until you at least open it. A dark pattern would be putting an ambiguous label on an opt-out checkbox for phone-home analytics or something.

The pattern here is the marketing / OOBE team of these companies assuming that every new installation maps to a user new to the software, such that "learning to use the software" is an important task to shove in the face of anyone who has a new computer, regardless of how experienced a user they might be.

It'd be easy enough to e.g. disable the "see what's new in [OS version]" pop-up if the user is importing their data from another computer that was already of that same OS version. But code like that doesn't get written, because it'd actively work against the KPIs that these teams are being judged by. They're trying to game those metrics by getting (forcing) as many people to click the box as possible, even when they know that the content does nothing for those users.

That's pretty "dark" — though it's not a dark UX pattern. More of a dark business-management pattern.

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