Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
iamvishnu.com
iamvishnu.com
On the other hand, I've been adjacent to the decision to add them before. You're under a lot of pressure to increase conversion in your onboarding funnel, so you test out moving your email capture up a bit in your conversion flow (ie to before you deliver results) and it works! Conversion increases throughout the funnel! So you keep it.
Dark patterns like this persist because they measurably work. Some people (you and me) get extra pissed off, but we're in the small minority relative to the people who sign up at an elevated rate. :(
I think this is the fundamental problem. Too many people trying to increase conversion in their onboarding funnels, crowding out people who want to put interesting stuff on the internet for purposes other than farming people for money.
Which is a beautiful way to live life.
Until you quit your job and build some indie thing and try to make money and fuck, that’s difficult.
And you’re broke. And you worked really hard on this thing. Turns out ‘farming people for money’ = ‘paying rent’.
And you realise, shit man, if I make it a bit worse according to my ethics and taste, I’ll actually make money. And I won’t have to go and take some other job.
And I’ll be sad that this is how humans work, but it is how humans work, and am I going to change that or just tag along for the ride?
We’re talking about creating a flow and perception that you can use a thing built around an assumption that you then intentionally change at some next step. It’s a breakdown of an implicit contract you create with the user, for the purposes of farming data, getting more signups, increasing conversions, or whatever else. It’s just dishonest.
A few years ago a family member contacted me about this very thing. They had found a nice looking website to accomplish a thing. The website had published pricing for packages of their service, and provided a “free” sample. Except after you spent all the time to get that free sample running, you couldn’t actually use it without paying.
That's pure psychological manipulation, and is harmful.
why?
Don't we all want to make the best product possible?
The web is a brutal place for everyone.
I’m not a fan of these choices but we as users demand a lot for free and sites are going to do what they can to try to survive.
At some point there needs to be more than sterns looks to discourage these behaviors.
You don’t get any traction that way.
User behavior is a part of this mess.
Enter the subscription model, holding your tech hostage for periodic payments and predictable cash flow
It’s not a coincidence that MTX happened in gaming at the same time, post 2008. Before then it was horse armour in oblivion.
Remember how it became a meme to just pirate Adobe software because they were so bloody expensive? Well Adobe wants their earnings, regardless if their desire is justified, so Adobe and the rest of the industry changed gears to a model that greatly inhibits piracy and, at least in theory, reduces the upfront cost a customer has to pay in exchange for a higher cost over time.
Doesn’t matter how you edited a photo technically, it is still photoshopped.
Which, by policy, is often little.
For example the image conversion site can be replaced with instructions how to do it on device.
It ended poorly.
But I am fairly sure we live in the world where when something works on 3% of the visitors and the previous thing works on 2.6%, the company does the new thing. That's nearly 20% growth!
Meanwhile, 97% reject their service.
It’s a major reason why I created https://prose.sh to explore what’s possible. We don’t require an email and only ask for it on https://feeds.sh because it’s an rss-to-email notification service.
Read only websites and write SSH apps are pretty congruent to the HN bubble.
There’s an added benefit that only people that can open a terminal can create an account.
1. They insist on a login for a utility that clearly runs locally on my phone.
2. They require permissions like location or contacts that they clearly don't need.
3. They start sending me upsell notifications once an hour, forever when even once a year is too much. I know I can turn off notifications but it's a PITA to do it manually every time I install a new app.
After all, you’re more engaged then!
The bad news is for some reason email reads and click through just dropped off a cliff, is like the emails no longer arrive or something.
The reason you think I'm not reading my emails is that my email client doesn't autoload images, and I keep it that way because it turns off a malware infection vector, you dim bulbs.
I've noticed over the last couple of years in particular that more and more emails coming in are image based only, with no plain text or even alternate text so that if you won't load images you can't even tell what the email was about. Yeah those I never read.
Have some respect for your users, developers. ‘Cause you’re one of them.
In the marketplace, only results matter and companies that deliver them displace those that don’t. In this case, result mean profit or at least conversions.
The same was true for banks who were over extended on risky loans in the late aughts. If you didn’t do that, you were criticized by analysts and Wall Street for being too conservative, and anyway look how much these other banks are making. And by the government: you’re being too stingy with loans to the buyers who need them most.
Were this the unalterable truth, mom and pop shops wouldn't exist. Companies who invest profits back into themselves would not exist. Public companies who pay living wages wouldn't exist.
But they all do.
Which means there's more to the formula; and that formula can include things like respecting their users.
Do you believe businesses/people out there have the intention to disrespect their users? Most often, that's not the case. Hence, we need regulations to combat good intentions gone awry (and most certainly bad intentions).
Yes: the market isn't 100% instant and efficient, so here and there, the kind of companies you describe can survive, for a while. Some are in the process of being outcompeted. Others survive in the cracks, not worth even considering to compete with, the same way you're not competing for food with ants. And some just pretend to be nice.
Point being, GP's statement is true in general - it's the overall behavior dictated by the economic system. "Reality has surprising amount of detail", so there are always exceptions to any rule or pattern, but they don't invalidate the rule: those exceptions survive because they're rare - they won't grow in amount to replace the regular case.
Why not? Mom and pop shops can (and often are) be more profitable than any other business that would serve that market.
>> Companies who invest profits back into themselves would not exist.
Why not? Investing in your own business can be very profitable if you have good ways to expand your business.
>> Public companies who pay living wages wouldn't exist.
Why not? Public companies can't pay workers less than those workers demand.
No.
Using psychological tricks to get people to act against their best interests is immoral.
“But if I don’t implement it, someone else will.” That’s merely a justification to make you sleep easier at night. Let that someone else do it.
And if you lose your job over not implementing a dark pattern, was it a job worth having? If they’re willing to let you go for refusing to a task you view as immoral, they aren’t worth your loyalty in the first place.
Not everyone can afford to lose their job over their principles. It's a sad state of affairs, definitely. This is what we get for allowing employers to have so much power over us.
“Let your employer fire you” argument also doesn’t sit well with me. Like this is not some hardcore feature that will be tasked out to some principal engineer with decades of experience that can find a job easily. Some recent grad will be just labeled as “not a team player” and sidelined. If we want a fair game, we should demote these kind of features (and stuff like 20 clicks to cancel your subscription) in one way or another.
No, they're not, not for most devs. Most devs don't use the stuff they produce. They're just hired guns, building something they're told to make. If they refuse to implement what they're told, they'll be fired for insubordination.
Your hand is forced if the other guy uses it and blows past you.
Reality cares not for niceties, and good people finish dead fucking last. You need to balance being a good man and an evil man to win or even just survive.
I could definitely see it working for the first case, which is all that your typical product/marketing person needs to justify their salary thus why the practice is popular, but I wonder if this actually ends up translating to actual profit (whether the spammed people end up buying stuff they wouldn’t have otherwise bought, and whether any prospective buyers that would’ve converted otherwise were driven away).
But I have seen other decisions made based on proxies to "paid us money." Eg we find that X% people who perform action Y wind up paying us money, and for really long funnels it's easier to get statistical significance for action Y than for "paid us money." And so we make some change, find that it increases the rate at which people do action Y, and declare victory. We try to keep in mind potential downstream impacts (like loss of trust), but it's hard to argue a vague, potential downside against a solid, measured number sitting in a google doc in front of you. I suspect the phenomenon you call out is somewhat common.
The business models of the web trap everyone within these incentives in order to be competitive - everyone hates it, but moloch demands it [0].
To escape it you have to escape the business model, to do that you have to escape the incentives, and to do that you have to boil the ocean and hope it works out [1].
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
[1]: https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...
Besides putting the business in a negative light for the new convert, I imagine a subset of those would feel more entitled than before. I probably would - if I had to give you something to convert my picture "for free", I would definitely feel entitled to good results. I would be far more likely to complain/badger customer assistance in case of insufficient (for my needs) results.
It works because it's manipulative and most people don't have the context to understand. Some may think they now have to sign up or they'll lose something.
"Preying on the uninformed and less tech literate" works, sure, the same way basically every other scam works, by pressuring people to do things they normally wouldn't.
Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually decide not to purchase from them. They'll then start spamming you without your consent a day later.
Ransom sign-ups belong in the same tier of horrible.
Modern downloadable software does this too. You download a "free" partition manager or "free" PDF converter, or whatever "free" - you install it, get through their wizard/main workflow to do what you want, but then it says "oops, sorry, you have to pay for this!"
Anti-consumer stuff it all is. What a shame software and websites like this are allowed to exist.
Or, grab a free image editor (https://www.getpaint.net/ is popular for Windows), open in one format, save in the other.
That’s why. And also because sometimes it just works. I’ve done some packet-level work recently and wanted to decode text. The tools I’ve used were some online converters, not iconv or base64. Because experimenting with their modes adds mental overhead even if I more or less can use them without man. Choosing from-to and pasting text into a textbox takes no brain capacity.
25+ years ago, when internet wasn’t very accessible, there were multiple simple windows apps to do small things like this. Now they are online, but open source and new apps world in general never figured out that users still need it - simple, discoverable, easy to use tools. I’m not gonna scroll through pages of magick options and (in case it just works based on .ext, which I also should re-figure out from the lack of such option) try to remember if there’s -i and -o required for input and output.
I have optimage and imageoptim on MacOS too and they are good enough at this point.
It is in modern operating systems. Maybe not Windows, but modern operating systems like macOS have it built in.
You can do it a number of ways, including using Automator, Preview, or even access it from the Finder. I did it about 30 times today.
Select file > right click > Quick Service > Convert
The most comprehensive solution is to download imagemagick.
That's the whole point, they want you to be invested.
Long live native desktop software (FOSS and perpetual licensed proprietary)! SAAS-ified desktop apps and subscription software can’t disappear fast enough, if you ask me. I think most of it will, besides the big players (Adobe and Autodesk), because it relies too heavily on traffic from Google (slowly drowning in SEO spam).
I disagree. I've been very intentional about the places I work and have managed to build a successful career while never implementing a dark pattern.
"I was just following orders" is not an excuse. Take responsibility for your actions.
Part of my success in this has been being more selective in the job search so that I'm not working at such a company to begin with.
I'll note that jobs which don't behave ethically with regards to dark patterns, also tend not to behave ethically with regards to their employees. If people care more about making money than doing what's right, that tends to be pretty pervasive in their behavior.
That said, I realize there's some privilege implicit in what I said.
But that likely isn't the reality of the situation. If you're employed in software in the West it is very unlikely that your children are on the verge of starvation. Much more likely is that you might have to accept a slightly lower standard of living to work at companies that behave ethically, and I'm not particularly sympathetic to that.
Hell even in your example, there is a difference between some programmer who tells themselves this and some person who raises a stink; suddenly doing unethical shit slows you down, costs political capital, and approaches being more trouble than its worth. Fewer shit things will get done because there will be less energy to pursue them.
I'm not even suggesting you go out and be some citizen activist - just be normal. You'd have feedback for other kinds of stupid idea.
What we really need is some kind of Hippocratic Oath for Software, that we all agree to and can collectively use to resist this shit. Not going to happen, but one can dream.
Why spitball about a "Hippocratic Oath" when the ACM code of ethics exists?
You could promote the one that does exists instead of dooming that nobody will write or follow such a standard.
People are literally committing suicide because of code software developers write. Not for ICE or despotic regimes, but for Facebook.
Now I'm not sure a ransom signup pattern reaches that level, but the idea that dark patterns can't reach that level isn't in evidence. While the impact of a piece of software you write on a given individual is usually small, a decision made in software has the power to reach many more people than a decision made by a doctor about a specific patient.
Software developers need to take responsibility for their actions and stop blaming their bosses or society for their actions. What we do, does matter.
But with the Fediverse we now have a graph that is resistant to this. I'm not aware of anyone building a reputation system on top of it, but this is something I expect will develop in the future. The system's opinion about a particular data point would then be personalized based on the people you say you trust to indicate that information, combined with the people they say they trust, and so forth.
Any such protocol would be labeled as evil, filthy socialism.
Unfortunately these patterns work great so they will never stop. As more dark patterns are “discovered”, we’ll see the web becoming more of a dump.
You see it every day, successful websites and socials become successful thanks to these pattern, not in spite of them.
This experience reminds me the “normies” use the internet very very differently than techy people and it explains a lot of the weird quirks on the web.
We are at the mercy of the lowest common denominator which happens to be a majority
But I much prefer the former to the latter; pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? Whereas I won't give out my phone number under pretty much any circumstance (and don't have a spam-only number).
I used to, but I've since taken to just not signing up to things instead.
SEO experts and conversion seekers need to become very afraid of their sites getting on that list.
Of course then the problem becomes vetting the people who add sites to the list and making sure they're not just trying to shitcan their competitors. And ensuring that the maker of the plugin doesn't sell out and take $$$ to remove a site from the list.
If those problems could be solved I'd pay $5/month for such a signal-to-noise improver for search results.
Thank you.
I won't touch services that do such things.
I suppose it brings awareness to the tools too if credited properly. Ezgif is one converter I've used a few times, and one of their info pages lists all of the CLI tools they use on the backend. That was quite handy to learn that gifsicle existed, something I was not aware of before.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
TV companies, please don't show me advertisements instead of the TV show I want to watch.
Car dealers, please tell me about all the expensive feeds and add-ons before I agree to buy the car.
Phone companies, gyms, fucking everyone, please tell me about the $50, $150 "sign up fee" in addition to the $X a month cost.
etc.
I mean, good luck guy. You are a human on a planet run by humans with all the power imbalances that implies.
Now what if it were _my_ business...
The complaint isn't that an email address was asked for, it's that the ask didn't happen up front. Having someone spend time doing something and then asking for an email address before giving the results is the Bad Thing here.
I don't think the author would have complained if the email address was asked for prior to him starting to actually use the service.
It's like I install a brand new text editor software, spent some time to write a story, and when click on the "save" option, it asking for the payment - that's dishonest and shows that there can be more such dishonest behaviors in the future. But if the same software asked me for a payment upfront, that's totally understandable. Or, if it said upfront that "this is a limited demo, you can save documents up to 150 words, and if you have to save larger documents, you need to pay", that's being very straightforward to the users.
The web would be a very different place if people felt OK paying for the value brought into their lives by services that are free today. I also feel that in that world, this would not be necessary.
So, the state of things is the state of things... :/
I believe to contrary. A lot of services paid-only doesn’t have a decent customer support even and subpar product while registering billions in profits. We can always assume “what-if” about paying, but if it was very easy for getting people to pay up, we’d have way too many subpar things and standards would be bottom the drain. I like that services work up their standards and people interested will be very happy to pay. See kagi search, fastmail, google/fb ads, netflix, all vps hosting. If you offer some good value, you’ll get paid, if you are dubious, paying will just increase the bottom line and promote bad behavior from vendors.
Imagine I spent a lot of time writing a story in a brand new text editing software, and when trying to save the document, it asking me to pay to save the file!
Couple of days later the company CEO emails me back. First he apologises (bonus points to a Canadian), promises to fix the cart abandon logic, and offers to ship me 2 of the things I was going to buy for free.
They will hopefully arrive this week
Far too many businesses are being run by people completely out of the loop.
Emails, especially from the CEO, are legally binding.
And then you abandon the cart, because it doesn't make sense for you to pay $50 for shipping.
But then you get those emails 'you forgot something'. No I didn't.
This one is paid, but I’m at the point where $140 for 3 years “standard” package is fine by me. Not to mention I can actually call someone if I have a problem, instead of getting blocked by google for no particular reason without any recourse. I don’t have a huge social media following that can get me special treatment.
There may possibly be free options that allow you to proxy/mask emails, but I’ve not explored that.
Another useful service is privacy.com, which in a similar manner let’s me create proxy virtual payment cards, setting limits and redacting cards. This kills the possibility of a malicious business like a telecom still charging me for something and having the bank still allow it to go through when they shouldn’t. Now my credit union is pretty good so far, but there are a lot of banks that will happily fuck someone over without a care.
It’s nice having no mean _No_
I know I should probably get off of gmail, but it's a really good service for my needs.
It's also reasonably priced and there's no limit for those email addresses since it just captures every email sent to my domain.
Downside is I can't send from those addresses but that's generally okay for me.
Now I just mark any marketing email as spam and let the email service automatically move all future emails to spam.
Proton has SimpleLogin after buying it, but then they own me forever as much as the next company, with the caveat that they can raise fees. Just your username and (ridiculously crazy, 26 character) password isn’t good enough anymore-“oops, we need to send you an email before you can log in” is rapidly becoming normal.
I do something like that too, but I have my own SMTP server. It doesn't use + it is just an entirely different email address for each one.
I can also easily send from any address by the -r switch.
Fastmail offers this feature, and I think 1password might. The `+` tag should be possible with any provider, `me+hn@example.com`
Of course now you have to have a way to keep track of what email you gave to what company. I usually do `firstname_company/website@` to make it easier to remember.
Edit: Hit me with the downvotes, I don't mind, but I also enjoy hearing about why my perspective might be wrong. From where I sit, I can imagine that plenty of people annoyed by these kinds of email harvesting patterns also don't know enough to employ the kind of method described here. I feel like that's a solution, but not one that can be prescribed to the average joe.
You can explain this feature of gmail/fastmail to a reasonably technical person in 5 minutes, where 'reasonably technical' means that the person understands the concept of mail folders. Sure, it might not work that easy for your grandma, but I'm reasonably certain that most people in the developed under 40 fall in that category.
Not at this moment, but we're getting close
More and more often, Safari offers to fill in an anonymized email address for me when I fill out a form.
It's not detected and offered 100% off the time, but is improving.
Even my wife has started using it, and she is not a techie.
You can get a tad fancier and automatically mark mails without + as spam (only works for new addresses, obviously) or use a dash as separator (if your mail provider supports it). This won't block a targeted attack, yes, but it's usually sufficient to filter a lot of low quality spam and to identify companies that sell or leak your data.
Sure, stripping out everything after the + isn't specified in the RFCs, but I know of zero public email providers that allow + in email address AND treats them as separate address (eg. foo+bar@example.com is a different account than foo+baz@example.com).
>You can get a tad fancier and automatically mark mails without + as spam (only works for new addresses, obviously)
Sites that reject + in email address preclude you from doing that.
I cancelled Prime about a year ago - delivery sucks at my location with their logistics and I just don't want to deal with it. I still occasionally order some things that are hard to find elsewhere, I just ship it to an address where things won't be immediately stolen.
And after the huge "subscribe prime" interstitial with the tiny "not now" button, they still add prime to the order, not as a regular line-item, but as something you have to hunt around for to remove. They're cramming, just like telecom used to.
Amazon is awful if you have the temerity to fail to tithe them as they believe they are due. Fuck them.
Granted, Amazon has much less need for that endless stream of marketing email because they're already the de facto first choice shop. It's a lose-lose game if you're a conscious consumer and both want to support a non-Amazon monoculture for internet retail but also don't want to have to yet another drip feed of marketing email.
Ideally there'd be competition among email service providers to recognize the modern landscape of CAN-SPAM compliant but entirely unsolicited and unwanted email and provide user tools that aggressively bin non-transactional email and penalize senders that send 10 "transactional" emails for a single interaction ("here's your confirmation! here's a shipping update! here's another shipping update! are you satisfied with your purchase? leave a review!) as shadow marketing.
Either they're knowingly doing this for brand reinforcement reasons or are honestly clueless and don't recognize that a single email that links to a continuously-updated order status page is preferable. I figure mostly the former, but either way there are limited mechanisms to encourage vendors to make judicious use of email.
There is a lot of cheap (and even free) APIs that can accurately guess when you enter a fake e-mail! A place I worked previously used several of such APIs and generated consensus among all to determine if a signup would be allowed and eventually only focused on “must be a gmail” because few of these APIs decided to ramp up prices post COVID-19.
And, you're polluting the database of these cowboys by using it. Win-win
During checkout, they have a checkbox asking if you also want to receive promotional emails. It's annoying that this is checked by default, but I can tolerate it to some degree since I still have the ability to opt out.
I always uncheck it. Always.
Almost without fail, I end up receiving marketing emails from these companies. (And not just followups from my purchase or even review requests, which would be bad enough.)
I never buy from those brands again.
If so, it's almost definitely Shopify.
I know what checkbox you're referring to, and another fun thing is that if you use PayPal (or, I assume, another non-credit card payment method), it bypasses the "Sign me up for promotional emails" checkbox entirely... but it still checks it for you.
So if I check out with PayPal I have to select the PayPal option, sign in to PayPal, confirm, then in the store's checkout page go back a page to manually uncheck the box. Drives me crazy. Unchecking it beforehand does nothing.
My assumption was always that there are two separate systems at play, and once your email is entered, it gets put into some sort of cart rescue campaign..which sends...promotional emails.