Dark patterns from the end-user perspective | Hacker News Reader

Dark patterns from the end-user perspective

arxiv.org

85 pointsskilled12 comments

I think we should start teaching kids to recognize the myriad ways technology is used to steal the most valuable thing they can have - time.

Like when I open Netflix I want to continue watching from where I had stopped, but Netflix keeps jerking around the 'continue watching' section with the hope that something else will catch my attention and I would give my time to them. This kind of bad behavior is just everywhere.

Strongly agree. Firms exist to separate users from their money, time, attention, etc. It follows that digital product organizations at nearly all levels are incentivized to thread dark patterns into their experiences, and healthy skepticism/awareness is a must for anyone spending time in these virtual spaces.

The internet indisputably made my life better growing up, but I had to learn how to use it (and not the other way around) through trial and error. There's no good reason young people today should have to start that learning journey at zero.

> There's no good reason young people today should have to start that learning journey at zero.

I mean, there clearly is a very strong and unavoidable (you could argue it doesn't count as "good") reason why young people today do have to start that learning journey at zero, namely that human brains generally aren't created already knowing stuff, and have to learn it.

But there's no reason to let the early (or non-early) parts of that journey take (or be delayed for) longer than necessary, so that corporations have more opprotunity than is unavoidable to scam, decieve, defraud, and otherwise attack them. (Which is to say I also strongly agree, but don't want to attach that agreement to something with obvious technicalities without comment.)

How would Netflix know that you want to continue watching something vs. finding something new?

Do you feel similarly about retail stores putting staple items in the back rather near checkout?

Consistency is the only thing that matters. You would not be happy if things would shuffle in the retail store every time you go in, would you? Of course, there are things that are shuffled around, but you can always count on fresh-produce, milk, meat and diary to be in the same position for at least months if not years.

>Our results highlight that older generations are not only less able to recognise manipulative attempts, but they are also less aware that their choices and behaviour can be influenced. [...] The combination of lack of awareness and lack of capability makes dark patterns’ effects particularly dangerous for older adults [...] The study results show that an age lower than 40 years and an education level higher than high school diploma constitute a critical threshold for recognising dark patterns

Ah yes, I keep forgetting that over 40 is considered elderly now.

I wonder how much of it is age-related vs generation-related. Those of us in the 'over 40 = older' category, the 'Oregon Trail Generation', who grew up programming our PCs in BASIC and later went on to build the modern web (including inventing all those dark patterns) - will we get more susceptible as we get older? It seems most likely that we will.

And it generally seems that most people younger than 40 are less tech savvy now than 10 years ago. They use phones, tablets, and consoles more and never really needed to understand computers. Yet the study claims they currently do better at spotting dark patterns.

Senescence comes for us all and perhaps we'll all end up lacking savvy as we get older. Even old-fashioned scams often prey on the elderly, and that's not due to tech knowledge or because everyone was naive in the good old days.

The paper suggests that economic incentives need to exist for someone to solve TOS problem, but I wonder if we’re going to see a cottage industry of browser plugins to “fix” the problems described. It’s probably not highly automatable, but I wonder if enough folks could making small efforts could make it work.

Wouldn’t that be a privacy nightmare?

I don't think it's any more of a privacy nightmare than, say, an ad blocker blocking ads or cookie consent popups is?

Though I am skeptical of the parents idea. I don't believe there's a way to fix dark patterns such as "email us/chat with a rep to cancel your services" when the signup process simply consisted of entering your email address and payment details.

California outlawed overly difficult cancellation processes. This can also be done by payment middlemen such as PayPal and Apple App Store.

Something I realized is that the dark patterns change from country for country.

Brazilian websites uses patterns that aren't that common on American sites. All news organizations and all large e-commerce uses the browser's notification and localization API (some ask before trying).

To view the content on those sites, I need to deal with about 5 interruptions. The previously two, plus newsletter, "accept cookies" modal, "special offer" pop-up, "free shipping" sticky window.

And those are >1 bi usd companies.

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