What's your take on Twitter's use of Parasitic Dark Patterns? | Hacker News Reader

What's your take on Twitter's use of Parasitic Dark Patterns?

37 pointsmetadat13 comments

Twitter's incessant "Install App" modal dialogue prompt on top of all the content is a form of chronic punishment and user abuse. They also conveniently fail to highlight the added benefit that you'll be forced to create an account once you install the App.

The company should know by now, based on the dozens of previous rejections: I'm not interested! Too much trouble to set a goddamn cookie? Asshole product managers and their precious "metrics" are running (ruining) the show o'er there.

I acknowledge fully: This is only my opinion, maybe you'd be so kind as to enlighten me to a more informed point of view if you disagree?

I'd love to be less angry about this thing, but the unwelcome intrusions are growing ever more prevalent across the web. Soon enough I'll prefer to opt-out from humanity entirely if this is really what what the future looks like. It's truly dumb.

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I hate them too. Especially since there's nothing that their app can do that can't also be done on their mobile Web site, except their ability to collect more of your data with it.

Just wait, it gets worse.

Post in a way their systems do not like, and it will lock your account, then demand you tie a phone number to the account for “security purposes”.

At that point, I just deleted the account and went on with my life.

This happened to me without posting or even liking, retweeting, replying, or really interacting in any way other than following people. I know Twitter has fallen into controversy about bots often, but some calibration of sensitivity needs to be done

Twitter is the worst of the social media platforms. Apart from these dark patterns that frustrate, abuse, and bully visitors into installing the app or logging in, they also force you to reveal your identity by adding a phone number. That’s leaving aside their constant propagandizing of the world via their censorship and imposition of their employees’ moralities on the diverse customers they claim to serve.

We need to convince everyone to stop using Twitter, stop paying attention to those that use it and give it power and credibility, seek regulation to treat it as a telecom utility, and evangelize a new decentralized politically neutral replacement.

> seek regulation to treat it as a telecom utility

This is the absolute wrong approach.

What needs to be regulated are those in the sphere of public influence. These groups (government bodies, media licensees, anyone taking public money but has an account on a commercial third-party social service) should be required to adopt open web protocols to become part of the federated social web.

W3C recommendations exist and they can be implemented by anyone with a content management system suitably powerful enough to run the software.

> This is the absolute wrong approach.

You didn’t actually say ‘why’ you think it is the wrong approach. My ‘why’ is pretty simple. Twitter (and social media giants more broadly) are ubiquitous and virtually all societal communications take place on their platforms. Having the ability to speak on the street is no longer as relevant as having access to these platforms, and upholding the spirit of a free society with classically liberal values requires that ideas have equal access to these platforms. Put another way, social media is the new public square and it must be regulated as such for society to function. Leaving that aside, there is lots of reason to believe social media companies are common carriers already (https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/05/social-media-platforms-...).

As for your technological note on W3C recommendations - I don’t think that’s really relevant. The tech giants are all shielded from competition due to network effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) and their sheer size (access to capital). The network effects are a huge barrier to entry for any competition (even if an alternate product technically works) and the access to capital makes it easy for them to simply copy others’ innovation, which we’ve seen repeatedly. These companies need to be broken up for anti-trust reasons, and they need to be also regulated as the telecom utilities they are.

Why is it the wrong approach? Well, for one, they aren't telecoms and they aren't utilities.

This has been discussed on this site ad nauseam. Feel free to search for the counter argument.

edit: lmgtfy:

https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+not+public+utility+s...

Twitter is telecom because their primary service is to facilitate communication over a network. They are a utility because communication across society is inherently social infrastructure and fundamental to our modern democratic process. Oh and they’re a natural monopoly due to network effects. All good reasons to regulate them heavily.

It seems like you don’t have an actual argument. Deflecting to a lazy google search does not count.

The very first search result Google provides is a comment I wrote myself on this site in 2012. Like I said already, it's been discussed to death.

There is not any new thought here.

I don't owe you an argument stating why Twitter is not and will not ever be considered a public utility.

> The very first search result Google provides is a comment I wrote myself on this site in 2012. Like I said already, it's been discussed to death.

I looked at that comment and did notice it was from you. But like your comments here, you just made a claim that Twitter isn’t a utility without any argument as to why.

> I don't owe you an argument stating why Twitter is not and will not ever be considered a public utility.

If you don’t have any argument to offer then don’t engage at all in the first place. You’re not using HN in good faith.

I don't have a choice but to use the app as I promote my music on social media to connect with people I don't know... Free promotion is getting harder and harder each year.

I have tons of rants concerning Twitter, but foremost, they bury the features that used to block unwanted trends and keywords like mutewords (and still leave the buttons and features up despite their inability to work correctly), they compile a list of what you click on and build a very off target content preference list that limits what you see all the time (even in trending topics), they also send you useless notifications about what others do in order to ping your account if it is dormant, and spam you with emails about that useless activity even when you you disable the setting and click unsubscribe... Twitter also shadowbans and post/follow limits accounts with no warning or explanation (Also for anyone who complains about Twitter or their partner companies), which limits the visibility you have for the life of you account... You end up posting to a brick wall without even knowing it...

It's the baseless and uncreative minds that have led the app/company into the dirt. They killed the real time updates and drove Twitter into a shell of it's former glory and utility. It may not die, but I'm sure there are mostly inactive accounts occupying the space now, and their algorithms are a joke, nowhere near anything intelligently designed, their algorithms now are just applied to make the site look like it is still a dynamic and lively place. That's also why they were stoked that Trump brought attention back to it, and why Jack has resigned long after years without any good company profits.

Someone will probably invent something new that rings Twitter's EOL one day soon, hopefully they don't make the same idiotic and arrogant mistakes...

I don't want to use their privacy-invasive mobile app. Nor do I want to give up my government-tracked phone number on it. Would rather protect my online anonymity than be on a dehumanizing platform with ridiculous censorship. So much simping happens on Twitter that people are walking on eggshells to avoid their accounts from getting banned disguised as political correctness. Which is another reason why I avoid Twitter like the plague.

I would not be angry if you were me. I would find a better platform instead.

You may be able to block the install app prompt using a uBlock filter or similar. An ability you wouldn't have in their app.

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