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Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

I hate those too.

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. :(

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> 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.

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.

> 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?

Yeah well my life would be sweeter if I conned pensioners out of their savings. It's always easy to follow how people explain their unethical decisions - but it doesn't make them an inch less unethical though and people that use your line of thought to do harmful things are scum.

Sign-up popups are annoying, but not inherently unethical. Nobody's on the street because one dev tried to convert people.

We’re not talking about sign-up pop-ups though. Those are an annoying fact of digital life that isn’t _really_ that bad.

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.

If feels to me like estoppel: misleading someone to do something to then use against them later.

It is a tragedy of the commons. My Internet is shittier because other people are trying to monetize it. Same as my back yard and the air I breath.

What I hear you saying is that you're OK with harming others as long as it lines your pocket.

Harming? By asking for an email address?

No, not by asking for an email address. By not asking for the email address until after the user has invested time and energy into things.

That's pure psychological manipulation, and is harmful.

That and not enough pushback from devs. Devs, of all people, should be the ones advocating for their customers.

> Devs, of all people, should be the ones advocating for their customers.

why?

Because we're the ones building the product. If we don't keep our customer's interests in mind, who will?

Don't we all want to make the best product possible?

We want everything for free and we get what we deserve.

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.

No, I'm okay with things not being free, but that needs to be stated upfront.

Consider the “ransom” your notice.

Not really - the market tempts you with free to hook you in. You cannot honestly say that the market has asked for every abusive free product that existed.

Users don’t pay up front.

You don’t get any traction that way.

User behavior is a part of this mess.

Users have always paid upfront for software, until software companies with lots of capital started this non sense. All copies of Microsoft Office were paid upfront. Users are just reacting to what the software industry did.

No, the users definitely play a role here.

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.

Adobe is basically a monopoly and it is well documented that they allowed piracy because it meant that the pirates would become dependent on their tools.

Doesn’t matter how you edited a photo technically, it is still photoshopped.

Yup, same with Microsoft - they won the desktop OS and office productivity markets thanks, in big part, to their tacit approval of individual-level pirating of Windows and Office.

Indie shareware vendors predate "software companies with lots of capital" by decades. The big fishes seldom innovate anything.

Shareware is not SaaS/subscription-based software. That's the bad part, not "try before you buy".

Not really. There has always been shareware, aka trial demos.

Those were only utilities and games, not enterprise software.

Fair, but I don't think this negates the overall point, that people actually paid for software, and it was usually a one-time fee (often with the choice to pay again later for upgrades, or continue to use the old version forever). The "try before you buy" and expiring nature of shareware was nearly always known at the time of download, before investing time in using the software.

It was normal to pay up-front for software until about 10 years ago, just a few years after the 2008 crash where startups decided MRR/ARR was the metric for success

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.

Users do what they think their corporate IT or manager will let them do.

Which, by policy, is often little.

The other part of it is service providers wanting growth from cheap tricks. The mental laziness and expecting to have their cake and eat it too is the same.

At some point there needs to be more than sterns looks to discourage these behaviors.

I met someone once where it later developed that they had begun lying to me from the very beginning.

It ended poorly.

I don't demand anything for free. I'll use it but go ahead and don't offer a service instead, won't bother me at all. User-abuse is not justified by calling usage service-abuse.

@duxup Please don't try to justify this despicable behavior. You're not making the world a better place.

Why does everything has to become paid? The web is large enough that the output delta can be held back by investment rather than pushed by it.

For example the image conversion site can be replaced with instructions how to do it on device.

The faster a web site asks me for an email address determines how fast I bail on even looking at their product/tool, or if I have no choice I put in a bogus email address to get past it, if it is one of those damn forms that sends you a link I use one of the various public inbox/temporary email address sites so I don't have to deal with the attempts to bring me back into the conversion funnel when I was just seeking information.

The site owners don’t care. If something works on 99% of people and pushes away 1%, they will keep doing it.

I'm sure that's true.

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.

Are you saying ransom sign-ups can convert 99% of a site’s visitors?

The actual numbers are made up, but the point is that more people are either signing up or ignoring, than people leaving the site.

Would it be better if I hold off until you scroll?

After all, you’re more engaged then!

I would prefer if you during page load first rendered the most obvious call for action and then, at the exact moment I try to click it you dynamically render another action button at the exact position of the first, bringing me to instead go to the register newsletter form while making me feel extremely enraged, sry, engaged. Happy, no. Engaged (in rage), very much so.

The good news is so many people are signing up for our email!

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.

Side issue but it still amuses me that companies think they can accurately measure email reads. I'm not talking about mass marketers where it doesn't matter but banks, which are required by law to switch you back to paper mail if they think your email address isn't working.

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.

Yeah, it was creepy the first few times Chase bank begged for more ways to contact me "because you don't seem to read our emails" for marketing. So far they haven't threatened to move me back to paper bills I guess cause the email isn't bouncing.

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.

Don't forget to pop-up a full overlay on the screen if I happen to move my mouse outside of the browser rendering window asking me for my email address, so that if I did tab away from the page now all I see is a full screen ad and not the content I was looking at before.

This has been a pet peeve of mine as well. I avoid sites that require logins. I’ve been experimenting with alternate authentication/authorization mechanisms.

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.

I avoid apps that require logins too, unless there's some obvious reason why they need them. I shitcan most new apps I download now because:

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.

Just because a psychological trick works doesn’t mean you must use it.

Have some respect for your users, developers. ‘Cause you’re one of them.

You are new to this "capitalism" thing aren't you? /s

Unless the playing field between the companies are on the same level (reads: dark patters are deemed illegal, and I think it should be!), or you are in some sort of monopolistic industry, to my understanding you will lose to your competitors. I've never been in a situation to implement such patterns, but play these mental gymnastics to give the implementor some benefit of the doubt.

This is absolutely it!

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.

> 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.

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.

All 3 structures you've noted participate in immoral behaviors, some of them far more grave in impact than psychological trickery.

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).

> Which means there's more to the formula;

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.

>> mom and pop shops wouldn't exist

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.

> but play these mental gymnastics to give the implementor some benefit of the doubt.

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.

It is immoral for you and I, but most of engineers and product managers don’t think so. “It’s a feature that’s been implemented by everyone else and it works” would be the argument during its proposal. If the users really opposed to it they would vote with their browser by closing the tab (like I do). It’s like calling “heavy JS websites” as a burden on user, when most of the users, time upon time, showed how they don’t care.

“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.

> And if you lose your job over not implementing a dark pattern, was it a job worth having?

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.

What happened to the idea of winning because you make a superior product? Why is it necessary to play dirty tricks on your users to win? If a market is that saturated, and product so trivial to build that it's hard to differentiate, maybe don't participate in that market?

You'll enjoy this https://userinyerface.com/

>Just because a psychological trick works doesn’t mean you must use it.

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.

It's not really a trick, it's just that the vast majority of freemium users are negative-value.

>Have some respect for your users, developers. ‘Cause you’re one of them.

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.

What does “conversion” actually mean in this context? Does it mean bullshit “growth & engagement” aka the numbers of (mostly non-consensual) subscribers in the spam list going up, or does it mean actual profit?

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).

That's a pretty good question. Ideally you're measuring "paid us money" as conversion, and that was the case for the anecdote I had in mind in the above post: we had a checkout screen with a decent price tag at the end of the flow that we could measure against. We could track the impact of changes throughout that funnel on the bottom line.

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.

If this measurement was done by product or marketing people, my lived experience was that the experiment design was flawed, the conclusions they reach are likely not correct ones.

Yeah it's unavoidable, if you rely on growth (especially if you have a free or freemium service) you need to do this crap (though the author describes the most hostile form of it).

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...

Incentives are fine. Misleading and deceiving people about them is not.

Of course it increases sign ups. That doesn't mean the users like it. And those extra sign ups are almost certainly costing you trust from your users (and potential users). And most of those additional sign ups will probably never use your site again. So other than increasing a metric that isn't actually what matters, and maybe getting someone a bonus or promotion for increasing said metric it doesn't help the business, especially in the long term.

Sure, I absolutely believe that if you create a "ransom" situation, some percentage of those extorted will pay the ransom where otherwise they would not gift you the ransom. That does not imply it's good for your business.

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.

The sad truth is that businesses follow consumers. It’s been borne out through app insights . Consumers need to stop first

Just another example of enshittification, or whatever you want to call it - capitalism placing growth and greed above the health and privacy of the individual.

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.

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