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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

If a site shows me a special offer (e.g. an extra 10% off) when I'm about to abandon my cart, that's OK with me. Just like if I'm walking out of a store because I didn't get an acceptable price, and the owner calls to me as I'm passing through the doorway.

If the alert says something untrue or misleading (last day of sale, virus on computer, 1000th visitor) that's deceitful.

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I would have preferred getting a good offer to begin with. That just reveals to me they were not offering their best before, which is kind of deceitful in itself. Why would I trust them to give me a good deal afterwards?

Plus, it incentivizes having to threaten to cancel a deal to get anywhere near acceptable terms. Fuck that.

It's not deceitful to improve your offer during the course of a negotiation.

True in broad, general sense.

But basically off the page as regards to the specific UX patterns under discussion in this thread.

The UX pattern I'm talking about it the one at the top of this comment thread.

This one:

"when someone tried to leave the site, bring up a popup to offer them a deal or otherwise encourage them not to leave"

Right - which is an extremely narrow subset of "changing your offer during the course of a negotiation". Meanwhile it has other intent-blocking attributes for which the "deceitful" label quite justly applies.

In other words: in the Venn diagram of the two buckets - the measure of overlap is quite small.

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