Hacker News Reader

Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many people actually register that there are two buttons at the bottom? It's very obvious to power-users like us since we're used to

  [ Accept ]     Cancel

at this point, but I can only imagine the borderless design for the secondary button originating from a dark pattern.

View on HN

The entire iOS operating system works that way now.

I dislike it. I think buttons should be buttons. But this isn't a special case, so unless you consider every instance of two buttons looking this way a dark pattern, this one isn't either.

Personally I find it subconsciously mirrors how we interact with classic HTML.

A button posts, a link gets.

As a step in the device setup, the button infers some form of enablement or configuration while a link is perfect for skipping.

That's a reasonable perspective that I hadn't considered, and probably makes even more sense to people who barely used/use desktops in the first place.

I still don't like it! But I also never had any trouble using it. Except Apple Music. Don't get me started.

> unless you consider every instance of two buttons looking this way a dark pattern

The entire point of this pattern is to guide the user into a "default" option so using it for anything where the user is suppposed to provide informed consent is a dark pattern. The only places where it is not a dark pattern is where default choice actually aligns with the interest of the average user and I think that is hard to argue for a choice whose purpose is primarily to be allowed to better manipulate the user into spending more.

That pattern may be reasonable for "Are you sure" kind of requests for actions that the user explicitly wanted - because then there really is a sane default; we expect the user didn't click on some button by accident. But it's not reasonable to portray questions that are asking the user to agree to something they did not explicitly want; that's just trying to trick the user to make the annoying popup go away by clicking the big button. There's no sane default here, so none should be preselected (and ideally, the layout of confirmation dialogs and agreement dialogs would not be identical in the first place).

It's a dark pattern, and I really doubt it's accidental.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com