Majority of sites and apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscriptions
icpen.org
icpen.org
I've had enough bad experiences with subscriptions that I avoid them at all cost, just to give an example - I subscribed to a popular streaming service because I wanted to watch a movie that was only available on their platform. I immediately canceled my subscription so it would end with current billing month, but to my surprise when I checked my credit card history several months later I've noticed an additional charge that was around 10x what I paid for the one month of subscription! I emailed them and they answered me that "it was some kind of mistake" and refunded me, but it made me realize how dangerous subscriptions are.
Subscriptions should be able to be paid by invoices - you receive an invoice before next billing period and if you don't pay, account is locked, but of course that would give user too much control over their spendings and companies clearly don't want that.
You just need a central tool to manage your subscriptions without all the dark patterns, where you can be sure if you terminate the subscription you 100% won't be billed again.
Also, pay as you go business models are great, but more work for app developers, so there'd need to be a good tool to make that easier.
This is why I like to pay via Apple App Store.
It doesn't matter to any single subscriber if two different countries happen to be in sync or not.
This is the crux of the matter. The laws are too weak. If the law said that that in addition to a refund there was a mandatory $100 compensatory payment due for every payment taken improperly (eg. every payment taken while unsubscription using the same method didn't work) then you'd have a few activist consumers waiting five years, recording the evidence and then demanding $6000. The problem would disappear overnight.
Of course you can take it to a court, wasting countless hours of time and risking tens of thousands in legal fees if you lose.
That's a huge exaggeration. For example in the UK (not in the EU now I know, but roughly the same and I know the system better) you're looking at risking under £200. The loser will pay the fees. If you're certain that you're owed compensation under the law then there's little risk to take.
Source: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/small-claims-court...
So... a bank?
The US's inability to forbid companies from stealing people's money is a pile of bullshit that makes the lives of everybody all over the world harder.
(Or maybe, that's a good opportunity for competing with them.)
But, of course, they don't interact directly with the US banks.
Isn’t that the business model of a lot of businesses these days, specially junk apps and gyms?
there was a famous scene 25 years ago in Friends where one of them wanted to “quit the gym”
These models have always existed.
* Email provider.
* Online Newspapers.
* Heavily online collaborative SaaS.
* MMO games.
The common thread is that the alternative funding model can't usually be a one-time purchase because the product is delivered over indefinite time, which leaves some combination of ads and microtransactions as the remaining viable funding models. Given a choice between the three, subscriptions have reliably produced the best experience for me as a user.
Obviously, I'll heartily agree that subscriptions are overused and abused (I'm looking at you, car manufacturers), but I tend to take a more measured approach than avoiding all subscriptions of any kind. And I would absolutely hate to receive and manage invoices for these things.
> but the convenience of Spotify is impossible to match and I sometimes subscribe.
- Have a list of stuff I want to watch.
- Once the list has enough on it from any one streaming provider (Netflix, Apple TV+, HBO, etc), I activate my subscription on that service, pay for a month, and immediately cancel.
- Use the month of access I just bought to watch the stuff.
- Continue with whichever service "fills up" next at some point in the future.
This method results in me typically buying a month of access on the usual suspect services once per year or so, and I never pay when I'm not actively using the services.
By default the card will be vendor locked, meaning once a company makes a charge to the card then only that company will be able to do so.
That said, doesn’t solve the issue of everyone wanting subscriptions. A few $5-$20 here and there will quickly rival a utility bill.
write an email or a letter. if they don't react, see below
> what if company will continue to charge you even after closing your account? what if they accidently charge you for who knows what?
file a chargeback request
> what if you simply forget you even had a subscription?
well yes, if you can't manage your finances properly to the extent that you miss a regular payment, then maybe you shouldn't use a subscription. or credit cards in general.
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I personally never had any issue around any subscription that I pay for. I would totally understand if you asked for the option to pay by invoice, but personally, I hate paying bills manually, so I'm glad that there are subscriptions for most recurring services.
Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live, has been plagued by undelivered/late mail for many years, to the extent U.S. Senator John Warner personally intervened on several occasions to try to fix it — without success.
After I switched my mortgage payment to automatic withdrawal from my bank account I was so pleased at how frictionless it was that I changed ALL my monthly check payments — Comcast Internet+XfinityTV/AT&T/electricity/water/trash pickup — to automatic credit card payments.
So much better now, plus I no longer need to buy stamps on a regular basis.
In the end I still have too many subscriptions that I lost track of but worst case, I just nuke the account and I'm free of leeches.
You are simply lucky if your bank bounces a transaction instead of slapping you with the overdraft fee.
What country? I'm not aware of any banks that will honour transactions on a debit card with zero funds in my country.
Banks lure you with credit cards and overdraft on debit cards (which in turn turns it into credit). If you can resist that you're in a much more robust position than otherwise.
Transaction types. There are two: a) customer present, b) customer not present. Instant electronic funds transfers fall into (a) and are almost always declined, with the caveat. The caveat: you are overseas, the payment terminal has captured the card details, dispatched them the local/nearest payment processing centre, then something has fallen apart and the acquiring bank (i.e. your bank) could not be contacted. It is a rare situation nowadays, but it can happen nevertheless, and the transaction may be honoured. Most merchants don't bother with it, though, and they will simply produce a «payment declined» receipt instead. But if not, such a payment can send a card account into overdraft irrespective of whether your local bank advertises it or not.
Customer not present. This has i) online transactions (e.g. purchases over the internet) and ii) completely offline transactions. The handling of the customer-not-present-online-internet transactions is done solely at the discretion of your bank. Typically, a random purchase will be declined, but a recurring payment may be honoured. Completely offline transactions are very rare nowadays, but they still can take place, e.g. on a flight when the plane has lost the internet connection – the flight attendant will promptly return, produce a mechanical contraption and take a slip of your debit card, provided the card details are embossed on it. If they take a slip, the payment networks do mandate such a payment to be honoured, and a cheque account that is linked to such a debit card will go into overdraft. It is non-negotiable, independent of the country and is mandated by the payment netowrks.
Personal wealth. Your bank continuously monitors the in-flow of money into accounts you hold with them as well as the expenditure and the class of merchants you spend your money with. Depending on which one occurs first, e.g. you reach a certain income threshold (undisclosed and defined internally – by your bank), you may get the overdraft automagically allowed on the account your debit card is linked to. There are no specific rules as to when it is going to happen and what is the selection criteria for such a thing to happen – it is solely at the bank's discretion.
All this stuff is somewhat obscure, yet it is real and is entirely independent of country borders and the local legislation.
It sounds like you do understand it.
Luckily, I'd been experimenting with privacy.com at the time I signed up, which lets you general card numbers for use with specific services and that's what I used for my Tivo subscription...so I was able to just go cancel that number.
Yup, privacy allowed a company to charge me fraudulently.
Their response was basically: "We have standards for disputes with our card networks and you have no evidence that you didn't purchase this, so we won't be allowing you to submit a dispute."
Yeah, I didn't have evidence that I didn't buy a random charge that I knew nothing about aside from the "retailer" and the dollar amount...
You’re not alone. There is a race to the bottom on exploiting these deficiencies on careless/unknowing/impulsive customers. But there’s a growing number of opposite people like you and me who are avoiding subscribing because we anticipate the dark patterns, and that’s lost business. By the time the marketing departments will wake up to the reality that people avoid subscriptions even if they want the product, they’ll be faced with an insurmountable reputational barrier for entire cohorts of users they will be desperate to convert.
Tangentially, this is related to a beef I have with Apple. Their IAP system as middleman for purchases (but especially subscriptions) is worth a lot and cheap to maintain. I already trust them much more than a random SaaS (might even sign up for NYT if I’m confident I can cancel with a click later). In other words, they’re providing huge value, BUT they refuse to compete on fair terms. Their obsession with the 30% tax have pushed the market to do business outside of their App Store (which reduces their market share and fragments the UX), and even created massive badwill to the point of upsetting toothful regulators. They could have avoided all the tantrums and fighting, made a shitton of money in the long run, increased their market share, if only they hadn’t been stuck in the last decade first-mover monopolistic mindset.
EDIT: The more I think about, the more I realize how good Apple's (and maybe Google/Android to a lesser extend) position is. They're sitting on low-fraud rate one-click payment access with biometric verification, with a verified customer region, prefilled info, etc. They're a merchant's dream, and yet they're scaring everyone away with their short-sighted greediness and erratic rules of engagement. On the open market, an MOR (Merchant of Record) like Paddle lies at around $1 + 4%. Apple could easily add another 5% on top and people would pay for it, happily. But no, they insist on clinging to the past.
> On the open market, an MOR (Merchant of Record) like Paddle lies at around $1 + 4%. Apple could easily add another 5% on top and people would pay for it, happily.
Apple charges almost every developer 15%, not 30%. The only developers who pay 30% are the ones earning more than a million dollars per year through the App Store, for things that aren’t long-lived subscriptions.
15% isn’t quite as low as you’re suggesting, but Apple are a lot closer to that than to 30% for almost all developers.
Originally invented as a convenience feature to free up card users from having to update payment details every time when the card expires, gets lost etc, it has also been abused with nefarious intentions by subscription providers as the only way to stop recurring charges is to contact the service provider which is disinclined from letting a customer go. Banks are bound by card payment networks terms and conditions to honour the recurring charge flag and are not empowered to remove it at the customer's behest.
For the most part, I definitely don't want a subscription since I want to keep the product indefinitely, don't want to deal with recurring fees, and don't want to see stuff that I am interested in disappear (whether it is the rotating licensing agreement for IP on streaming services, or a feature vanishing/moving to a new tier in a software update). Then there are issues with automatic billing, sometimes due to the mistakes you mentioned and sometimes due to hostile terms in the EULA. That being said, one has to be careful with credit card purchase even if they aren't recurring.
Yet there are also products that I don't want to purchase outright. Streaming services are appealing since they offer access to a large library. Few people would be able to afford purchasing everything they use. Even if they could afford it, they may not want to manage an accumulating pile of stuff that they will use only once or twice. While I am thinking of streaming services, I would imagine that the same would apply to software for some people.
Someone mentioned that your suggestion would offer too much friction. I don't really see that being the case. If you're subscription ends on the 15th of the month and you log in on the 20th, they can simple present one-click dialog box offering a renewal. If you don't want stored credit card information (either as a business or as a customer), it looks like the major browsers handle storing credit card information on the client's side. (Note: I don't know how reliable or secure this is since I don't use it, but I have seen the feature in multiple browsers.)
What do you mean by "basically"? You write a mail.
> what if they accidently charge you for who knows what?
Then you write a mail. Businesses are not all that keen on manually resolving issues like this, so they will try to avoid them.
> what if you simply forget you even had a subscription?
Yes, not using the things you paid for seems something you would want to avoid, in one of two ways. This is not a subscription problem.
> Subscriptions should be able to be paid by invoices - you receive an invoice before next billing period and if you don't pay, account is locked,
Why should the service provider hope for your compliance to pay for an already rendered service?
These hypotheticals seem awfully contrived.
"You hopelessly try to get any contact info out of the company's chatbot and fail. If there even is a chatbot. Then you post your problem on the web and submit it to HN and hope it makes the front page."
You are misreading it. Not an email. A mail. The paper variant. And depending on the rules of your country you often want to do that as "registered mail". Again this changes jurisdiction by jurisdiction but where I am from registered mail is useful to show others that you tried to contact them. With regular mail they can just say "so bad, so sad, the dog must have eaten it". With registered mail there is (sometimes and again depending on your jurisdiction) as "assumption of receipt".
> hide any human-observed mailbox behind a quick and sloppy "customer support FAQ with a useless search bar" page.
These are companies. They have offices and staff. The business world runs on official correspondence. The governments and courts for sure don't send them messages via a chat box.
They don't want you to use those channels because it would be too costly for them. But if they truly dropped the ball as the OP's comment implies you can do that.
Plus you can always call you bank and say "hey there is this money taken from my account. I don't recognise it. Can you tell me what is this?" And they will give you how you can contact the counterparty to dispute the charge.
How much $$$ is being fraudulently extracted from you that you're willing to go to these lengths?
I am reminded of a quote from Voltaire:
"I was never ruined but twice in my life. Once, when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one."
>Why should the service provider hope for your compliance to pay for an already rendered service?
1. No one implied that they have to provide you a service first before you pay. OP said "invoice before next billing period". I.e. if you don't pay before the next period starts, you don't get access to the service. I don't see why this is that hard. This purely serves the provider offering the service which somehow wants to put you in some sort of contractual month to month contract as opposed to "pay before you get access" model.
2. You could turn it around: "Why should the payer hope for the service that's already been paid for?" There are contracts and norms for starters. The "subscription arrangement" makes it entirely the payer's problem to cancel the service, or to keep track of it's lack of usage (the Gym membership model). One can definitely argue that it's predatory, and certainly so if it's combined with how difficult it sometimes is to cancel subscriptions.
>"What do you mean by "basically"? You write a mail."
This is never that simple, your hypothetical "they're reasonable and respond to reasonable email requests" is not how it works in practice. Past a certain growth size of the provider, there isn't even an email address you can email that's actively monitored and actioned.
Well.. they're not. I've first hand experienced "what if they accidently charge you for who knows what" as I mentioned in my example and I recall many, many stories on HN regarding problems with subscriptions related to these "hypotheticals". Not to mention that the "what if you simply forget you even had a subscription?" is probably the most common, I doubt most people periodically check their credit cards history and given how many subscriptions an average person have, it's way too easy to forget you've subscribed to something - maybe in a heat of a moment or for "free trial" that required your CC and started charging you once the free trial expired.
I am thinking, particularly of these asset / resource libraries where you try to purchase one thing for a project and they say “hey subscribe for monthly access to all our assets”. That’s never a good value.
This is very possible and fits the spirit of recent regulation towards “making it as easy to cancel as it is to sign up”
This is the same with losing anything of value. It's called a valuable lesson.
For me, the lesson is: use free as in freedom software over proprietary software whenever practical.
This is exactly what I do with my business (RadioReference/Broadcastify). If you have a premium subscription, you can pay with a credit card, but we do not auto-renew subscriptions. We'll simply send you an email 7 days before your subscription is about to expire, and if you want to renew it, you go ahead and submit a new payment.
I've been told by a number of PE firms and others that I'm missing out on significant revenue, and I KNOW that is probably the case, but I just cannot gather enough energy to climb that summit and commit my users to such dark patterns. Even in the face of clear and concise evidence that my revenue would probably increase >20%, I'm more afraid of the loss of customer goodwill, and chargebacks that would occur. I can simply look at my own rage when I see dark patterns that extract money from my pocket.
Sadly, it's one of those things were if your business is in a crowded space of players, the ones that do participate in the dark patterns will earn more money, which leads to more funding, which often leads to winning. So most companies don't have a choice but to foist dark patterns like auto-renewals on their customers.
[1] Net present value [2] of all future payments with a 5% discount rate. 5% is not scientific or anything. This is just a rule of thumb.
So, you hate payment methods not subscriptions
Others have addressed your other points, but this one is where I roar. As a very frugal and paranoid guy, I watch my credit card activity like a hawk - like twice daily. There is no way in hell I'd simply "forget" that I'm paying for something. This idea evokes one of those "how do people live like this" reactions from me.
If there is a transaction against my credit card I don't recognize, an outgoing check i didn't write, a charge that doesn't match what was on the receipt, an interest deposit that doesn't match what it should be, and so on, I know within the day, not within a few months, and can take action.
And the best part is: It's not a lot of work. Get something like Quicken or one of its alternatives, which can connect to all of your bank accounts and credit card accounts at once, and simply hit refresh once a day while you're drinking your morning coffee. You'll find you're much more on top of things just by doing that simple thing.
Or, follow this maze with your mouse pointer until the unsubscribe button in the middle. If you hover-move across a wall, you need to start from the beginning. Good luck!
Is that the kind of thing that a pet chewing on a remote control (or similar) could trigger?
Most laws can be misinterpreted, it doesn't necessarily mean they are useless.
"Ah, my name? I'll spell it out. It's a bit long and difficult to understand through a phone"
"D like the first letter of De…o…xy…ri…bo…nu…cle…ic". A few seconds pass. "You can confirm you got it right? Right, D, D like Deoxyribonucleic, the first word in DNA. That's what you have in your cells. Okay, were was I? Let me start over… What, you are what you say? Ah, annoyed? It'd be easier on a form on your website you know… bear with me…"
It's the equivalent of trying to inconvenience BigStoreCo by harassing a register worker and something best avoided.
- suddenly all low paid workers would miss the same targets, in which case no individual can be blamed anymore
- the madness might stop rapidly because it would make the dark pattern worthless
I sympathize with the low paid workers. I also don't like the fact that by that logic, businesses can just use low paid workers to protect themselves from the consequences of their dark patterns. Like, it's all too easy to go full evil and just put relatable human shields in front so nobody feels like lifting a finger. What are we supposed to do against this?
Of course, it won't happen: the effective way of fixing this would be through law.
Now, while this comment is serious, the previous one was more intended as humor.
You need to know the issue beforehand though.
lobbying/protesting/voting for better consumer and worker protections is obviously the right thing to do, and acting collectively too. Only collective actions will be effective against such tings, most probably.
“You paid them to waste your time, pay us to waste theirs!”
Another difference is that the customer wants something, and the other side can just hang up if their patience runs out.
I unsubscribed to two mailing lists just yesterday. Open the mails, click unsubscribe, confirm. I do remember the old days, though.
Robert Loggia. R as in Robert Loggia. O as in "Oh my god, it's Robert Loggia." B as in "By God! It's Robert Loggia." E as in "Everybody loves Robert Loggia." R as in Robert Loggia. T as in "Tim, look over there! It's Robert Loggia." Space. L as in "Look! It's Robert Loggia."...
They should have to actively ask "are you still using us?" if you aren't using the subscription ending it if you don't get back to them.
B̶r̶i̶b̶i̶n̶g̶ Lobbing.
At all times? So movie streaming subscription services would have to have an unsubscribe button on the movie playback screen?!
I can't see any reason it would not be sufficient to just require an unsubscribe button or link on the account management page.
Selling a version of software that you "own" creates a perverse incentive: charge as much as you can and as often as you can for "upgrades". Back when Photoshop was sold this way, support for the raw formats of new cameras that came out was gated for absolutely no reason behind buying a newer version of Photoshop. Even bugfixes would eventually only be applied to the latest version or two.
And what constitutes a major version requiring a paid upgrade anyway? Well that's completely arbitrary but the company is incentivized to make that happen as often as possible.
Subscriptions technically mean the company can just keep updating the software. There's only one version to support, really. There's no incentive to gate features behind another paid update.
The gold standard for subscriptions is Jetbrains. Cancel anytime. When you do cancel, whatever version you had you got to keep, basically. You got warnings in your email that you would be charged in a few weeks if you didn't cancel. The prices were reasonable. Jetbrains quite literally did everything right.
Then there's Adobe. The subscription prices are pretty outrageous. No warning. Hard to cancel. Easy to get a recurring charge. Adobe, like many companies, seems to have decided that whatever the sticker price was for the standalone software, charge that every year in a subscription.
But before you start waxing lyrical about the halcyon days of software you "own", you've either forgotten or never experienced the shady things software compnaies did to maximize revenue then as well.
Just because there was shady shit back then doesn't mean it wasn't, in some ways, a better system.
Nowadays it's $2.99 a month. If you cancel or miss a payment they lock you out of all your passwords at the end of the current billing period.
Whenever your subscription lapses your 1Password account will instead go into a "frozen" state. While your account is frozen, you can still view, use, and even export all your items, copy your passwords, and even copy items to vaults outside your account.
The only things you won't be able to do while an account is frozen is add new items to vaults, edit existing items, invite people to your family or team, or autofill items in your browser.
Adobe gating new camera RAW formats behind paying for an upgrade was a real problem. You buy the latest Nikon DSLR and Adobe makes you buy PS CS5 for literally no reason other than that.
But bugfixes was a real problem. So a colleague of mine had an old iPhone or iPod Touch. I forget which. He used it for testing. He kept it on iOS 7 (this was years ago) because later upgrades just slowed the phone down. This ultimately became a problem when heartbleed [1] came out. Of course, Apple pushed a fix but that fix required upgrading iOS. If you didn't want to upgrade iOS or couldn't because your device wasn't supported, well you were SOL.
So this isn't exactly the same as paid software but you can in some ways view the phone as buying hardware and the software. And there defeinitely have been cases where bugfixes (including serious vulnerabilities) were only fixed on later versions.
When upgrades are paid, people stick to old versions. This can be bad for everyone. There's an awful lot of botnets, for example, that rely on old versions of Windows and other software that's never upgraded. I suspect this is why Microsoft abandoned paid Windows upgrades because it ultimately hurt them and it was untenable to fix every bug in every version of Windows.
The problem I have with Jetbrains is that they do continuity discounts. If I cancel my subscription because I don't need it for the job I'm doing the next year, I will lose my 40% continuity discount and have to pay a lot more after re-subscribing. So I let my subscription continue for that period instead, but that also doesn't feel right.
I don't know if it counts as a dark pattern but I don't particularly like it.
Props to them for listening to the community but question whether they should be the gold standard given it is still a compromise position.
I believe the pending lawsuit against Adobe is because if you cancel your subscription early for a "pay monthly yearly subscription", you have to pay 50% of your remaining subscription balance.
Okay, but I don't have to buy it. I can more easily move to a competitor. Or, just use the version I bought and be content.
No. You can keep a 1 year older version if you subscribed for 1 year or more.
I don't think software developers not giving me new features and support options for free after purchase was ever shady. Bugfixes maybe is a grey area. Neither of these things are anything close to the level the outright scam dark patterns subscriptions now utilize almost as standard.
At the end of the day it is about leverage. With the old model the companies didn't have much leverage after the sale so there was only so many abuse angles available. With subscriptions there are tons because the customer has much less leverage.
In the digital world FIGMA - Is by far the worst at adding monthly users to your account, without clear indication that it’s happened and they make it incredibly difficult to find where to unsubscribe those users as an Admin
https://www.mw-direct.com/blog/posts/first-class-mail-vs-sta...
At that point, I just took down my mailbox and changed my address on all my bills and such to my work address. This lead to the USPS reporting to HUD that my house was abandoned. That got forwarded to the bank that holds my mortgage, who freaked out. I got them calmed down, but then went through a period of having to explain to quite a few people why I don't have a mailbox. I got accused of being selfish and of being a luddite. I got told it was illegal. I basically was shamed about it endlessly.
After ten years, I finally just put a mailbox back up at my house because my son, who just turned eighteen and was applying for credit cards and such, ran into issues where he couldn't receive them because he had no residential mailbox and the banks told him "tough luck".
I'd guess that FedEx and UPS don't care, but many online sellers (such as Amazon) don't let you choose which carrier they use for your shipment and sometimes choose USPS.
- "FINAL NOTICE" printed on the letter (spoiler alert it's not the final notice)
- Use that paper that you have to rip on either side to open.
- Print the name of your mortgage company and other information to make it seem that they have info on you (all public record). Occasionally they will also print a "case number" which I assume is just some random numbers and letters.
I think the first one I got gave me a spook until I looked at the bottom and saw in 5pt print "we are not affiliated with any mortgage company or government agency, we are a home warranty service bla bla bla". Since then it's honestly kind of humorous to get one and see what tricks they tried to pull.
However, the actual ads for moving companies was great. I just got a stack of 30 moving company post cards, sorted it out by gut feeling basically, and started calling. It was a lot more efficient than google search.
You know it’s all deceptive and fraudulent just by virtue of that they hide it, but also that the companies usually vehemently resist being transparent about the coerced extraction of money, not really all that different than theft. When someone holds a gun to your head you also have a choice to not hand over your money.
Although, over the past decade or so, "credit / debit card surcharge" fees (generally of 1-2%, but sometimes much more) - which aren't included in the marked price - have become pervasive here. And they're often charged (both online and in-store) when there is no alternative form of payment available (either a really lousy alternative - e.g. "pay by bank transfer, but we won't give you the product until the transfer has cleared, which may take up to 3 business days" - or literally no alternative at all, which is supposed to be illegal, but plenty of businesses seem to get away with it). But I guess it's a good sign, that quite a lot of people here complain loudly about such fees - maybe in the USA, the vast majority just resign themselves to it being yet one more gotcha creeping into everyday payments.
* even something as mundane as a grocery shopping involves taxes (different in every state), not included in the price displayed in the store.
* In restaurants it's mandatory tipping
* for food delivery it's tipping, delivery fees, marketplace fee and more
* for tourists it's "yes the trip costs just $15, but see we forgot to mention that to actually see something you need to buy entrance ticket for another $15"
* etc
Only the last one I would call fraud, but nobody except me was angry so I think it's just the way it is.
(And yeah, lobbyists in my country tried to import that law several time claiming it provides better transparency.)
Anyway, you can ditch the first part. If the law requires it, and the business does exactly what the law requires, it's not fraud.
You can't go around demanding that business violate the law, arguing that not doing so is a crime. You can push for it on moral basis, but never on legal basis.
Note requires not allows.
Bonus: why can't I call it fraud if it's immoral but legal?
I've been an American my entire life and I've never gotten used to it. I'm pretty sure the pervasive dark patterns are what is deranging our society to the point where we think electing a conman, genital-grabbing, reality TV star as our president will solve things.
On machines with larger displays you get a long text with the usual fear mongering about not knowing the exchange rate of your own bank and having security of knowing exactly how much will be withdrawn if you pick the exchange rate of the local bank.
I have similar annoyances at holidays, train tickets and flight tickets being advertised at very low prices, but when you want to book that price is only available on February 28th 2025. Any other date is at least 30% extra.
And don't get me started on the costs that are added at the checkout for my local super market. Suddenly I get plastic tax, bottle deposit, bag tax etc. The prices that are used on the shelf are only for club members so I get to pay a little bit extra if I don't have my member card with me. This is for The Netherlands. It can be difficult to know exactly what you have to pay at checkout while shopping.
VAT is a complicated tax. I prefer to get petrol in The Netherlands because despite higher gas prices than Germany and Belgium, it is much easier to get the VAT back at the Dutch tax office than it is with the German or Belgian tax offices. Every country is its own silo.
[1] https://sf.eater.com/2024/7/1/24189966/california-restaurant...
> SB 1524 was a last-minute bid by lawmakers to extract restaurants from the junk fee ban known as Senate Bill 478, which Newsom approved in October 2023.
There is no reason that a restaurant menu should have a mandatory charge on everything shown separately from the prices for the food, other than for restaurants to be able to make prices seem lower than they are.
I'm currently receiving unwanted attention from a credit scoring company, whose sales person said falsehoods about their records about me just to make a sale. I had to go to their office to confirm that without buying a subscription, because while they're legally compelled to give me this information, they don't have to make it easy, so the only ways are appearing there personally or usig snail mail.
In any case when I went there I've met a man who had a poor credit score because a person with the same name and almost the same id number had a court case against him, and someone somewhere made a typo.
Strong case for giving children original names.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/dark-co...
> They generally fall in one of the following categories:
> forced action, interface interference, nagging, obstruction, sneaking, social proof, urgency
It's like if in literally every room you entered on a given day, there was one of those street peddlers who accost you to make you sign a subscription to something or other. Sure you can just firmly tell him no a couple of times and he'll back off, but going through your day like that sucks!
- Price (only Monthly/Annual prices are acceptable),
- Additional data if this is an introductory rate,
- Minimum length of contract,
- Whether the contract auto-renews,
- How to cancel,
- Cancellation period (i.e. 30 days in advance of renewal),
- Any cancellation charges,
What is wrong with saying, we have X number of happy customers? As long as it's true, I am not sure how it is deceptive.
What isn't fine is when you try to book an hotel room and you get nagging messages saying that 2849 other people want to book the same room for the same dates. And of course when you try to unsubscribe and you need to pass through marketing material, with or without social proof.
> Dark patterns involving urgency impose a real or fake temporal or quantitative limit on a deal to pressure the consumer into making a purchase, thus exploiting the scarcity heuristic. Accordingly, such dark patterns may also be referred to as scarcity cues or claims. Examples include low stock and high demand messages or a countdown timer to indicate an expiring deal or discount.
As with “social proof”, the author mistakes lying (dark) with marketing (legit).
They are.
> Testimonials and user feedback usually display positive reviews and lack any negative experiences, or details on services or products. Furthermore, the online environment makes it difficult to differentiate between genuine and fake testimonials.
Testimonials in particular feel harmless to me. They've been used for centuries, they're obviously fluff but people understand that, and they don't attempt to coerce or trick you into making a decision, they're just giving you positive data points the same as any other marketing blurb. If you include testimonials I'm not sure how you can exclude any text at all.
I'd say that social proof is only a dark pattern if paired with another dark pattern (urgency, outright lying), in which case it's not really a dark pattern in its own right, is it?
It is when it’s faked¹ or biased² which happens mighty frequently. I’ve seen websites posted to HN which blatantly used AI profile pictures and AI generated text for the testimonials. That is the norm, not the exception.
¹ Not real people or testimonials.
² Only showing the 3 positive reviews out of 100 negative.
Companies are just people, a collection of people selected often to engage in rather evil, sneaky, and hateful behaviors in many cases, including the gaslighting about “hate” that many engage in as a means for manipulating an increase revenues … “we are about love … so you will give us more of your money.”
What doesn’t surprise me is that this is one of the comments.
Yes, we all intuitively expected this, but so what? Seeing it in a study with real numbers has value. The study isn’t just a title, it contains a lot more information.
This attitude of crossing your arms and saying “we all know this, it’s how the world works” is a specific kind of giving up which only empowers the bad actors. You’re engaging in the exact attitude that ensures nothing ever changes.
However a lot of companies have discovered keeping customers happy is hard/expensive and so they instead look for ways to trick you into paying more now knowing that either way you won't be back once/if you figure out they don't care to keep you.
I've even gone a step further with multiple bank accounts. All of my income goes into an account that doesn't even have a debit card attached to it, and I only allow a couple of sources to even ACH out of that account (like my mortgage). I manually move money out into accounts I use for spending, bills, etc. (not that hard, with tools like Zelle)
However if you try to unsubscribe and discover it is too difficult calling the credit card companies and ask them to stop payment can get attention - credit cards companies have consumer protection and they can make things difficult for those making unsubscribe difficult.
On a serious note, might work well as some sort of community effort.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
> The Network operates under an anually [sic] rotating presidency. On 1 July 2024 the Federal Trade Commission, United States of America, assumed the role of the 2024-2025 ICPEN Presidency.
The place I buy my laundry detergent from now wants a subscription in return for 20% off so now I have to subscribe every time I purchase it, and then unsubscribe. Or be the sucker who pays 20% extra for it.
Where are people learning not just how to design them, but that there's no ethical impact to subjecting people to them?
Here is one example: https://sam.hwr-berlin.de/en/vorlesungsverzeichnis.php?p_id=...
It's all about incentives and the incentive is to make money.
PE firms, investors, the founder, the employee with stock options. The world runs on making money and subscription businesses are one hell of a cash cow.
Get a life!
What is that?
Linking works by linkbacks and other factors, there are specific organizations that reverse engineer googles alogorithms and there's an entire industry dedicated to hacking who gets listed on the first 1-3 pages of googles search results. AKA you can pay an SEO company to tell you what you need to link to get your webpage/company to float up the list of google results when people google for certain keywords. You have to understand there is big money in exposure.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-...
Just see what google pays to be on apples iphone, thats a tonne of money, and we can be certain the bean counters have run the numbers.
No, not everyone, and it’s important to not think that way and just give up. According to the report, they found no dark patterns in 24.30% of cases. That’s almost a fourth, which is nothing to scoff at. That fourth should be rewarded with our business while the remainder are shunned.
so sick of these bottom feeder apps praying on users forgetting that they are subscribed so they can keep extracting life-essence from your empty husk of a corpse
:)