Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

It is also one of these things where the first to do it gets the advantage.

If you are the first to do the "only 2 rooms left" trick for example, you will get the full results before people get desensitized. But people will get desensitized everywhere, not just on your website, so if a competitor tries to pull the same trick, he won't get the same effect as you did. If fact, it may be time for you to roll back, to make competitors look bad for using the now well known and ineffective trick you invented. And if it works long term, then you get a head start.

View on HN

Yup, this "poisoning the well" effect is real, and it's blatantly uncompetitive - which is why it's so important for regulatory agencies to step in and act fast and hard so that this "first mover advantage" is eliminated.

The problem is, regulatory agencies are slow as molasses and courts are overloaded with crap, which means by the time the process is done years later, the companies have long since switched to yet another sleazebag tactic.

Why? The tactics burn themselves out.

I don't want government agencies involved in dictating the minutia of acceptable UI design for a private website.

Businesses have brand reputations. Just let people vote with their wallets. That won't discourage all dark patterns, but is preferable to a world of over-regulation.

Businesses, particularly in oligopoly/platform scenarios, don't care about brand reputation. Just look at Meta - they don't even care about billions of euros worth of GDPR fines, it's all priced in.

There's no point letting "people vote with their wallets" when companies have monopolies or near-monopolies due to network effects - and these shitty tactics work, so their most effective competitors are practically forced to use them to compete.

See also: Google, Amazon, etc. The laissez-faire voting with wallets approach has failed time and again. It doesn't seem to discourage dark patterns at all. I'd love to use companies with less infuriating interfaces but they can't compete.

I'm not too concerned about over-regulation. I don't think there's much innovation possible in the renting rooms to the public space; the biggest change I've seen recently is in more dark manipulation of customer behaviour. However, perhaps there's an alternative to having governments regulate UI design, like requiring 3rd-party API access.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com