This sort of belief (that corporations do extensive testing and tuning of language) seems quite widely held, but I've never seen much support for it.
I've frequently seen claims that Amazon must have "A/B tested and painstakingly tuned" the company name, whereas it was really just the founder's whim after watching a documentary, and never received any testing of any kind.
Employee #2 at amzn.
But sure, that doesn't count because I got out before the company hit 20 employees.
I don't doubt that large corporations with heavy technology dependence engage in what you're describing to cover some aspects of their operations. I do doubt that is covers all aspects, and in particular, I very much doubt if amzn A/B tested the language described in the GP for the purposes claimed by the parent of my comment.
EDIT: Given the comment @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29374358 I should probably just accept that for amzn at least, I'm just wrong.
There is not some painstaking language optimization designed to trick users. But there is not a filter for clarity either, so the A/B testing naturally favors "dark patterns" - it's not malicious design, it's just unintended consequences, and gives the impression that Amazon et al are deliberately hostile when they are really just ignorant
Could there be such a thing as "meta-malicious design?" Bad consequences aren't executed directly, but conditions are put in place that cause the emergence of bad consequences.
I suspect, if AI ever does away with Homo sapiens it will be by convincing us not to breed by changing our incentive structures.
I think it'll be by just sitting back and waiting a few decades :)
The sci-fi tinfoil hat interpretation of this: It's already here, or at least its cronies and enablers, and the plan has already been put into effect.
— John Stuart Mill, 1867
For instance, I was in charge of design for a mortgage lender's web site. I begged my manager to let me try (for lulz) an A/B test replacing the photo of the woman call centre operator next to the quote form with a photo of a Labrador retriever wearing a headset (you knew he was a professional because he also wore glasses and a necktie). The dog form consistently outperformed the woman by 19% but we had to roll it back after a couple of weeks because.. well.. dog.
At any given time, a single engineer might have a couple of A/B tests running. That's the single biggest engineering change I have seen in the last 20 years.
A/B tests are now crazy simple to set up; just click a few buttons and decide how much traffic to send. The major con is that it leaves a lot of dead code behind when the best of N A/B test arms are launched; the (N-1) unsuccessful arms stick around as dead code.
I’ve run splits for everything from background colors to copy changes. If product management anticipates some facet could influence outcome, then it will be tested.
I recall integrating with a beta AWS A/B testing sdk back in ~2015 (may be off on the year) and I'm certain that some the examples in the docs were along the lines of, say, testing two different wordings for a label in your app and measuring the change in engagement. But that's not inherently nefarious, it's just analytics. They ended up shutting down that SDK and the web dashboarding for it IIRC.
Now, A/B testing for the purpose of tuning languages towards deceptive dark patterns? It's harder to prove, but I think it follows that if they're A/B testing other changes, there's no reason that deceptive changes wouldn't also be A/B tested as a matter of course.
I obviously can't speak to this case in particular but for pieces of text that are part of the core user flow (not necessarily true in this case), I'd be shocked if A/B tests weren't going on at any large company.
But the initial amzn logo was picked merely on the whims of the founder and first two programmers. It was never focus-grouped or evaluated by anyone else.