Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
blog.devgenius.io
blog.devgenius.io
I wouldn't want to shop on that site ever again, they have no respect for their users.
Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there.
It also happened twice to me that they "double charges" me, with a pre-charge (that is deleted in a few weeks) and then with a real pay, which might leave you without money in your credit card if you have a small credit limit.
However, last time I travel for a extended time (hotel everyday at different place for a month), I found Booking has the best UI after some comparison between all the major players (keep in mind lots of them are from the same company), I still used it.
Would like a recommandation about what to use instead.
Trip.com
Tripadvisor
Lastminute
When I can't find anything, I use AirBnB.
I'm going through the exact same dispute with VRBO (Expedia Group). The apartment that we rented wasn't at all what was advertised, so we left after one night. VRBO first said that because we left voluntarily, there was nothing they could do. After pointing out that we still have our booking as active, they said we need to talk to the owner directly. After pointing out that the owner is just ignoring our messages, they just said that they handle as a middle-man between us and the owner.
After pointing out that the apartment isn't what is advertised, and that the reviews don't even match the property, they said that we agreed to their terms and conditions. I then spend a couple of hours looking at their other terms and conditions, and pointing out that the owner had agreed with these, but that they had broken several of their terms and conditions by apparently using the same listing for multiple properties.
VRBO finally agreed and refunded us their 10% service fee, but claimed that the rest of the money is already with the owner, so we need to talk to them for a refund. (They have ignored us for weeks now)
I'm still baffled that they would handle it this way. First completely dodging any responsibility, only taking some responsibility after highlighting that the owner had broken several of their rules, and only refunding us their service fees. I never paid any money directly to the owner, so I have no clue how the owner will ever refund me.
At this point I don't even really care about the money that was lost, but the fact that both VRBO and the owner are willing to just take my money (1500 EURO), for a single night in their falsely advertised property infuriates me to no end. And I'm doing anything in my power to make their lives as difficult as possible.
My wife provided video and picture evidence of this to airbnb - no support. Hosts threatened to provide negative feedback to her and essentially blackball her with other hosts in London. We provided THAT messaging to airbnb - still nothing.
airbnb's position was "well, if it was bad, you should have left and we might have refunded some of your money". Leave $2k with them, go spend another... $2000 on hotel someplace else (assuming you can even get anything short notice), then hope/pray you get some refund? I think we have waived some chargeback ability because of T&C we'd agreed to (I might be misremembering this). We should have pressed chargeback with cc company. It was horrible experience, and we've not used them since.
This place sounds terrible, and of course it should have had curtains. But the part about facing onto other buildings is pretty normal in London.
Heh, VRBO said the exact opposite to us. Essentially "you should've stayed at the property, but since you left, we can't help you". One of our major complaints was that you had to walk through he first bedroom in order to get to the second. For two adults, that's just a stupid arrangement, and should've been mentioned up front.
I'm now traveling alone, and am paying around $80 a night for a decent hotel. I agree, peace of mind is worth paying for, traveling these days is already stressful enough.
You know this happens a lot when they issue 10% refunds. If it were rare and they cared about customers at all they would refund 100% and deal with the owner themselves. They just don't want to get into the business of talking with renters.
Them issuing a 10% refund just felt like an insult to me. Hence why we're taking it further as well.
[+] Yes they use scare tactics but come on, they're easy to ignore. Who cares it's the only available room and 500 people are looking at it right now and 5 of them are already typing in the credit card details? Not me. If I can't get that particular room, I'll get another one, whatever. (I guess it also helps that we often book ~1year in advance, so we're reasonably confident that we'll eventually find something).
Haha exactly. Two of them have already hit enter! Our service mesh is delaying calling the Stripe API as long as possible in case you want to buy instead!
Which is basically what Emesa (VakantieVeiligen.nl) do. Scumbags, too.
The hotel was very helpful, and we cancelled the booking both from our, as well as the hotel’s side. Nonetheless it took Booking.com days to decide that the refund was legitimate.
Consider yourself lucky. For me it was 20eur take it or leave it, on 500eur loss.
<rant> I consider cancellation/refund policies that end before your arrival technically - a scam. The situation was like that - the apartment was booked with cancellation available 3 (or smth) days before arrival [0]. Upon arrival - the place was cigarette reeking, bedbug infested, with 30 year old completely worn out mattresses disgusting place. Owner says - "sorry - no refunds" [1], booking says - "we talked to the owner, cancellation policy has ended, the reviews are above average" [2][3]. Upon other calls they gave me 20eur. Bank could not issue a refund, because everything was up to policy.
Though I still use booking.com. I learned to ignore those dark patterns, because it's obvious that 1 spot is left for an apartment, there are no more to it :) . I had only 1 horrible experience with them, but had much worse with AirBNB. Booking.com is great to search all types of accommodation and it's often possible to find a way to book directly and for cheaper, so using it sort of as a search engine. </rant>
[0] from my experience it's usually like that, cancellations/refunds until your arrival usually add exorbitant amounts to the price
[1] though owner suggested ordering cleaning services, but that place needed crime scene level cleaning and complete refurbishment
[2] lesson learned: always sort reviews by newest and translate from foreign languages, because newest 3 reviews were horrifying. But I have not read them, because have not translated them, or have not seen them. Because default sorting shows by "relevant", i.e. foreign language reviews are on the bottom and the other sort order is a mystery to me.
[3] it seams that people do not know how to vote in reviews. If you returned from vacation and infested your own home with bed bugs, and had multitude of other problems - do not give 7 or 8 as a review score - give it a 1. Booking.com used those reviews against me - "if it's above 8 - we cannot do anything about it".
The funny part is that you can cancel before arriving, but if you're set to stay multiple days, you can't cancel the other days. Might as well make N reservations instead of 1 with N days.
About reviews: Booking.com didn't allow me to leave a review, since they claimed I could only spend one day at the hotel. Even though they charged me for a week. They are as crooked as it gets.
We had a feeling about this. So we explicitly did not allow them to cancel, unless they refunded us. I had a hunch if they'd cancel, we also going to lose ability to leave a review. On top of that it would allow host of the apartment to re-rent the place for our days and essentially be paid twice.
This is super ballpark estimates, could be order of magnitude different, but the idea is that there is enormous incentive to push people to book, its the same as the example in the article, pushing people to buy. Purely because the pay-per-click is so expensive, you need ROI > 1 to survive.
Those companies are in survivor mode, and anything that is even remotely legal, or can be defended in court, is allowed and encouraged.
Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price.
Companies constantly push the legal boundary.
EDIT: also think about how many times people book per year, maybe 4-5 times in the upper quantiles? so if booking pays 3$ for you, it will take a couple of months until your next booking so they can reinvest your 15% commission to buy other people.
In my country this is explicitly illegal. A good or service must be sold for a certain period of time (2 weeks I think) before it can be used as the pre-sale price.
I've only heard this in relation to physical stores though, not sure how it works for e-commerce.
https://www.lawdonut.co.uk/business/marketing-and-selling/co...
https://www.lewissilkin.com/-/media/files/main/insights/cmi/...
You'll find similar rules in many European countries, though most won't be available in English. This document is, for Denmark:
https://www.consumerombudsman.dk/media/14560/forbrugerombuds...
https://thecai.ie/your-rights/your-rights/pricing/
>Businesses cannot claim that goods have been sold at a higher price and are now on sale for a lower price unless the goods were actually on sale at the higher price for a “reasonable period,” which is generally understood to be 28 days in the three months before the price reduction.
In the UK, that's a criminal offence.
> As a market leader, it is vital that companies like Booking.com meet their responsibilities in this area, ensuring that online accommodation reservation systems are free from manipulative techniques such as hiding sponsoring in ranking, unduly putting time pressure on users or misrepresenting rebates.
> Booking.com has committed to make the following changes to their practices by 16 June 2020 at the latest:
* Make clear to consumers that any statement such as “last room available!” refers only to the offer on the Booking.com platform;
* Not present an offer as being time-limited if the same price will still be available afterwards;
* Clarify how results are ranked and, whether payments made by the accommodation provider to Booking.com have influenced its position in the list of results;
* Ensure that it is clear when a price comparison is based on different circumstances (e.g. stay dates) and not present that comparison as a discount;
* Ensure that price comparisons presented as discounts represent genuine savings, e.g. by providing details about the Standard Rate price taken as a reference;
* Display the total price that the consumers will have to pay (including all unavoidable charges, fees and taxes that can reasonably be calculated in advance) in a clear and prominent way;
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_19_...
It was just an illegal consumer practice.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_...
Reading through the points from the page you posted - I think internally only actions related to that were basically to add more info (e.g. popup/hover or just "on our site") to clarify to people that same as every other marketplace on the Internet ... coughAmazoncough ...
Things we show are just things we know about and have in our "inventory".
And actually after some of those changes - I believe some customers started to complain that reminding them how "X other people are looking at {name of hotel} for your dates" felt much creepier than "X other people are looking at {name of hotel}" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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PS. Only reason I wrote a quoted "inventory" is that unlike physical goods with real stock. When you're renting accommodation - on top of physical rooms, there's extra dimensions due to different dates, meals (because in many hotels restaurant can't support everyone having breakfast, half/full board/meals) ...etc.
> I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned
You were part of a team that cooked up new ways to harm consumers.
Playing the same word games here too is a bit tasteless. When your company is forced to "align practices presenting offers and prices with EU law following EU action", that means you've done something illegal, and you were caught. Nothing else matters.
Though as long as someone doing that is impacting only that person - I don't mind.
However, I would appreciate if you didn't follow taking those bits and pieces you've selected. And then taking them out of context that I've said/wrote them in - re-combining them in ways that would bias others reading just your "curated" version.
It's never too late to reflect on that, and work on making things better at your company, instead of acting surprised that something illegal was called illegal on HN.
Before jumping to further conclusions - I would encourage you to look at actual differences in website before and post that announcement you're referring to. Wayback archive should work - though some of this stuff might have not be shown, or shown differently to bots; otherwise over years there have been a bunch of articles covering persuasive techniques with examples/screenshots of Booking.com.
And then perhaps even ask specific questions based on those observations - and maybe, just maybe someone can answer them without actually breaking the law.
Though since it would be against the law for me to give too many technical and business details (employment contract, regulations related to publicly traded companies ...etc). Only way I can think off for you to get a peak into implementation - would be to become a colleague.
And finally - I will agree with you on that last sentence. It's never too late to reflect on things. That includes not acting surprised (or in denial) to hear that some "big company" you thought is doing bad things - is not.
Oh and definitely keep up with the good fight. Based on news with actual specific details of lawsuits and outcomes (some of which I initially only found about when they were used as examples in internal ethics workshops & trainings). There's a lot of companies out there that should be getting more scrutiny both internally and externally.
Perhaps this may the case for you (it's one of the reasons I refuse to use food delivery apps), but across the general population these dodgy tactics do seem to work.
In my eBay business, at times we've seen a >100% increase in sales during the last 24 hours of a promotion, when the site starts showing ticking red countdown timers.
* search hotel at booking.com
* find that hotel at google
* call them directly, by actual phone
You will get a lower price always. Of course, you need to actually manually call them, which people don't want to do; but it always worked for me.
Quite often I get a lower price or free goodies (ie. a bottle of wine) because I skipped booking.com
* Find them at Google
* Call them directly
* Get a super expensive price and a tip to book online
I had a gf who was able to get a different experience but it always seemed she had to get the manager on the line to do so.
1) you will talk to a human
2) you will be able to talk about particular requests (like - say - higher or lower floor, an additional bed for your child, room with balcony, non standard breakfast, etc.)
3) the dates/times of your arrival and departure will be double checked interactively with the hotel clerk [0]
4) the rate will be double checked and confirmed [1] (besides very likely being lower, particularly if you are going to stay mmore than one or two days)
[0] it is not extremely rare that people make mistakes with the dates, when/if you arrive one day earlier it is usually not a problem (unless the hotel has no vacancies) but if you arrive one day later, that is a "no show", your money cannot be recovered
[1] it happens often enough that people books a double room ( but for one person) by mistake and then is surprised that the hotel asks for a supplement for the second person
I am aware of booking's dirty tools to make you feel you have to book NOW! However, after around 100+ booking.com booking all around the world (including small villages in Amazonia or Laos) I am eternally grateful that for that extra 1$/night or so I get instant support with whatever probleem I had.
Obviously as middle man you take some part of the pie - though idea is that it's worth for everyone.
BTW - it's not that common to meet customer with 100+ reservations. So excuse me for asking - what do you think of the changes in the account area (My Trips)?
Currently I only have the android app (well, traveling again) and I am mostly satisfied with it.
However the web version I always found a disaster. Especially since I had a linked business account too, and the SSO just craps itself into a redirect loop when I try to logout from it.
Everything else seems to be very user-oriented and I am satisfied in general.
(ha, I also happen to know the storage system behind the backend ;-) )
When speaking Vietnamese, you get an extra discount.
https://skift.com/2015/08/10/travel-brands-stop-hate-selling...
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While I can't really give too many details (BTW I still work at Booking - just moved teams).
I did the real time (it's a stream so technically that's "near real time") processing back-end which collects all the "views events", uses anonymous unique user identifiers to make sure it's truly not counting duplicates, bots are also excluded ...etc. And result is a reverse index of sorts.
On the FE side (technically still BE so think backend for frontend) as part of producing message (or not) we literally do a real-time query on that reversed index to be sure that even if looking only at count it's "1" - we want to be sure that it's not you.
As of things like "Only X left" - that's literally how many rooms we've got left to offer to you for the dates you've entered.
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And speaking generally. Booking.com being 25+ years old global company, one can imagine that company is basically constantly under microscope of various regulators and consumer protection agencies. So even if there was someone that wanted to fake this type of stuff (and that would be going against what they've learned in various mandatory ethics, privacy, legal ... training). Well something like that would've been very short lived.
And with so much money on the line - companies (at least those that don't have walled garden ecosystems and such) actually do look into long term effect of things like Marketing/Sales/Persuasion - because they don't want to annoy potential customers so much that they never come back.
Chargeback is the real way to fight such scammy companies. Because, they lose more money than they will make from you. Hit them where it hurts. Lesson learnt. Now, I ALWAYS use my credit card for booking anything online.
- The majority of 'users currently see this project' are looking a few hours back instead of being 100% fake. All of them allow faking the numbers somehow tho. There are plenty of 100% fake ones out there too tho.
- 'xxx just bought' things are usually real too. But also out of context and time. Plus all plugins I've seen allow you to add custom fake ones. Or even have some preenabled.
- While I was looking for the functionality to actually lock products when they are in a cart for 15 minutes or so because we have limited stock I found none of these plugins is actually doing this. All they do is adding a cookie and a fake timer.
There is more, way more. And I learned to avoid shops using any of those fake tactics.
In the end I wrote many of that stuff my own with real data and I don't think users will ever notice the difference :/
If you implemented the "looking at" functionality, are you keeping a connection open to the client (say, via WS) to determine if they are still looking as in keeping the tab open (or opencv with camera access to see that they are "actually" looking hehe), or are you just looking a few minutes back instead of hours?
How would one honestly implement this feature anyway?
There's no need to put any more thought in than that. It's a single design element, and you're not doing a scientific study or collecting marketing data here. This is fine.
Though for really big websites - with millions of users making requests to 1000s of web/api servers spread across DCs in different continents ... It's indeed a variant of what you said.
Analytics can give you confidence to say that X percentile of people spend at least Z seconds/minutes on given page. So you can use initial request + TTL value of Z.
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PS All of the above is at least order of magnitude (if not even bigger) more complex when your page is not simply one physical product, and instead you've got "product x between Start and End dates" since that's millions of products x millions of combinations.
I would go for the minutes if I were big enough, or maybe a 1 hour time frame.
However I opted for other signals that better reflect reality like 'bought X times in the last X days' or 'product is in X wishlists' or 'this product is trending within our visitors'
IMO same effect, but honest and suitable for my size :)
Generally going from those towards the "X other people are considering it", and even further towards "only X left" (on their own, and especially both in combination) puts you more towards different effect of "scarcity". And that's what seems to be more polarizing with people.
Besides majority of people not noticing/caring/etc ("bell curve"). Two opposite camps are where one is really not liking it (especially when they think it's not real and just fake scarcity) and vocal about it. Meanwhile on the other end are people finding it valuable info to know, and they tend to be much less vocal. (Which, yeah - is actually same with just about everything else)
Those that find it valuable seem to be people that want specific things. Not just specific apartment/hotel, but also think of cases like parents with school age kids being limited to specific dates due to school holidays or things of that nature.
The data was stored in a really inefficient way and so the operation took a stupidly long time. I decided to add a progress bar so that people don't think the app is busted (which they occasionally did). Turned out, much of the time spent was on the server's end, so I couldn't track the majority of the "progress".
I had already put effort into the bar, so I replaced the "real" progress tracking with a script that randomly incremented the progress. I tweaked some heuristics until it roughly matched the amount of time the server tended to take but was random enough to not be super obvious.
After the progress bar launched, someone from the warehouse actually walked up and thanked me for the progress bar.
Of course, that's all fun and games. Weird psychological manipulation in e-commerce is horrible.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XMLHttpRequ...
If the server could send data back to update the progress event it would be really nice. Right now though, that can't be done (as far as I know.. maybe there's a way now.. I haven't looked for years.)
I love the author's rewriting of javascript into "human-readable" code[1], while retaining the same visual style as code written in an editor.
It feels like an excellent way of representing what is inside the programmer's mind when writing the code, and I will probably try to replicate it next time I coach a new student.
[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*aXnY3j41mO3AShqSGiYgBA.png
At first it's "comment only" to describe what I'm trying to achieve and then I'm adding functional code in/around it. I find that really helpful, although some might say there's some "comment bloat" in the end, as I often keep the comments, too.
I think its just their editor's syntax highlighting, likely for Javascript. Highlighting numbers in a different color definitely helps, but highlighting a very small subset (I assume only in and of) of random prepositions doesn't really do much.
If you are selling 10_000 items, with uniform demand (just toy example), you need like 3 million unique visitors per day in order to show 'one other person is looking at this item in the last 5 minutes, (24*7)
If I show 1 + random(5) are looking at each item, my competitor has to have enormous amount of visitors to compete.
Sadly, unless its illegal to lie, organizations are disincentivized to do the right thing.
And for the majority of mid to big websites - visitors/buyers will look only at minority of products/pages. Let's say it's like Pareto 80/20 percent principle. Though if not 90/10 - for tourism/travel/flights - because places like London, Paris [France, not dozens of them in USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_(disambiguation)], Rome, Las Vegas, Ibiza ...etc are much, much more interesting/visited than say Anchorage/Alaska.
And unless you've got uniform spread of visitors/customers around the world - which I'm thinking that even Facebook/Google/Amazon don't really have (because Flipkart/WeChat/etc are used more in India/Chrina/etc). You're likely to see a daily (per hour), weekly (per work vs weekend days) pattern /where west is different than Israel and predominantly Muslim countries/ - the min/max difference even within one day/week is easily 2 to 5 times.
All of that is to say that by far majority of your revenue will likely be during workday afternoon in your target audiences time-zone, and from those 10_000 items it will probably be <=100 that are seen/bought by majority of your visitors.
And though there is legally gray area - majority of that tends to clearly be not ethical...
But you know - Elon "promised" self driving cars in just a month/quarter or so - how many years ago? IIRC he even said it would be good, no not good but best investment because such a car could earn you money on it's own ...
Yet neither we got those self-driving cars, nor Elon is in trouble due to those "forward looking statements" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is this even legal? It seems this is used to mislead the customer.
If a company asks me to implement something I believe is illegal I ask for clarifications from a lawyer. Since I wasn't asked to implement this in a "wrong" way, I never looked into it further.
To be clear, I’m referring to an implementation that just uses a number that looks good, disconnected from any sort of metrics.
My educated guess it that only reason it happens anywhere at all - is within "smaller" websites/companies which:
a) don't know better because they are mostly just tech people that didn't heave to deal with big company bureaucracy, they have no legal/ethics team - or (hopefully not big chunk) they do know it's not legal, but count on ...
b) they are small enough that no one bothers to deal with until amount of money company is making suddenly makes it go over whatever amount makes it worth the effort
Why not?
The SEC doesn't take that attitude when they catch people artificially manipulating the frequency at which something is trading.
In the case of holiday and hotel websites, they're selling expensive packages.
Someone I worked with recently put the "X of these sold in the last 24 hours" across a load of product pages as an example of "things we should be doing to increase conversion."
It didn't increase conversion because the target market was all wrong (I suspect it might, for a single click from FB/native ad to a single landing page for an 'on a whim' product). More so, much like this example, it refreshed every time you reloaded the page. If you went back to the product it was a different number. If you HAVE to do this, at least use a cookie or something. The changing number makes the product, and by extension the whole site, look completely suspicious. One of the absolute number one things I want to do on a landing page/PDP is build trust. This falls at the first hurdle.
This wasn't implemented in the UK, but with a little Googling I ended up under the impression it would break trading laws over here.
It seems pretty universal that you aren't allowed to lie to people to make a sale.
When clicking on the 'comments' icon in the article, a sidebar open with the heading Responses (36). I'd not noticed I'd gone offline. After some time, the sidebar updated with There are currently no responses for this story. Be the first to respond. which is incorrect, as there should be 36 responses with the heading still there.
So not only don't have fraudulent counters as mentioned in the article, also provide responses that correctly reflect a state, error, etc, handling the response correctly rather than falling back on an inappropriate default.
You are supposed to play online against other players, but many of these games put you against bots instead. This is evident when you lose internet and the game still runs. The original idea was to first populate the game with bots and progressively replace them with real players as the game become more popular, then developers realized that if they could get away with bots, they didn't need multiplayer at all, just the illusion of it.
Side note: AFAIK, agar.io is real multiplayer, being one of the most popular game of its kind certainly helps. Of course, like in almost all online games, there are still player-run bots, but at least, it is not just JS code running on your machine.
Eh, maybe just have the bots be part of the server software. They're not that expensive. But cool idea.
It's only when hundreds of actual people show up that the machine needs to do any real thinking, and by that point you will turned all your bots off anyway.
Source: I built and run https://joust.life/
It's pretty hard to start game which's fun is based on PvP, yet you have no players
so bots are the way to go I guess
An approach I liked was with some community Team Fortress 2 servers. They kept a constant minimum player count, say 10, and replaced the missing players with bots. However it was clear to see that they were bots, the TF2 client was explicit about this.
well, the lesson for the businesses is ... move this same implementation server-side?
We haven't done the "viewing" one, but we track every "add to cart" and every actual transaction, store them in a backend database and then use this to show badging that simply says "popular" on the top 5-10% of products in a given category, which is based on interactions over the past 24h.
Sure, we could improve it and make it more accurate etc, but I feel comfortable that we did things reasonably properly and it is a true and honest representation of the popular products.
There are SAAS providers that sell this functionality and it's super expensive ($tens to $hundreds of thousands annually) which is an absolute joke compared to how trivial it is to implement.
Crowd selection isn't negative, in fact without it we d just be picking fruit at random in the forest with a good chance of dying of poisonning, instead of chatting online... on a popular forum we think like minded people also frequent, having opinions we suppose we'll be interested in on posts that are ranked by upvotes :p
Just because everyone believes the world is flat doesn't make it so.
At least in school in France we now learn not to blame ONLY the little guy voting out of despair, but also the unfair winners of WWI. Without that crowd deciding together to do something, anything, where would Germany be today ? Hard to be optimistic in 1933. And it drove the WWII winners into building a better post-war reparation program, not only explained by the communist scarecrow but also the lessons of the inception of WWII in Germany: revenge against abject humiliation.
In fact I mostly buy steam games in the popular section to sort out the trash. Each time I choose a niche unfeatured thing it turns out to be random trash nobody wanted... unsurprisingly.
Why do you think your brain wouldnt rank a product with 500 views right now above a product with 3, or be wrong about such ranking ? I think it helps ignore shit, because it's rare you want to buy stuff nobody else wants.
Looking at something and actually buying it are different. If we really wanted to help the customer decide we might want to also show the number of customers that returned the item. Or wait: allow reviews of them ;)
Would it help anyone to see that "200 people are reading xwolfi's comment"? Not really. That's just because there are not many comments yet and says nothing about the quality of it. It's much better to rank comments by votes and let that affect sort order. "200 people found xwolfi's comment so insightful they clicked the vote link" is a much better indicator of quality.
When marketing enables them, the conversion rates increase by a significant fraction straight away.
Looking at increase in real dollars it becomes a hard sell to turn them back off again.
And these are not new either, just old sales tactics, applied to the new context. The pushiness of these counters etc remind me of the Hard sell[0] for example.
Other examples would be:
1) "25 people like you! Upgrade to [dating app premium membership] to reveal them"
2) A client-side JS-triggered countdown timer with the message "I'm reopening enrollment for a limited time"
3) "Only 2 left in stock - buy now!"
I can easily manipulate that number to inflate how many people have played those games, but I'm glad I never did. For one, the comments below that game wouldn't reflect the numbers.
I think people are smarter than you think, and can easily spot inconsistencies of numbers being too big, relative to the engagement on a platform.
- these BS tactics work, very well, for a segment of the audience
- the rest of the audience is not sufficiently offended to do any harm
Although I find it suspicious how all their products have full 5 star reviews.