Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly

>>"Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know. "

When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.

And think again if you think any large corporation (beyond a few isolated individuals who will not be employed there for long) has any actual concern for your safety, or to get anything right beyond an appearance of safety and plausible deniability for the inevitable harm caused by their dark patterns.

The only winning move is not to play. Don't play and write about how awful it is. Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.

> Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.

Second order effects of this solution are not great either - being outside of the smartphone world means you're... outside. Network effects quickly push you out of social groups without neither you nor the group doing anything mean, it's just group dynamics.

The real issue is the device and services come in a package which cannot be separated or compartmentalized. It's basically impossible to say 'this device cannot access youtube/pornhub/...' because there's a million ways to get around restrictions.

> When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.

Not sure if I want to call it by design.

It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"

Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?

Seems to be a much larger amount of work to design, implement, and support a more-or-less dozen-step customer journey that does NOT work than just implementing a few switches. And that goes even if the switch must be designed-in from the beginning by designing operation for local-only operation.

Surely, implementing a simple block-all-strangers to send-to-bitbucket all communications attempts by accounts not already on the whitelist is easier than all these overlapping settings described?

Unless it is explained how building a much more complex system is easier and lower-cost than a simpler system with fewer controls, the default conclusion is it is intentional.

>>It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"

Even if for the sake of discussion we treat it as laziness, a dark pattern created by accident is still a dark pattern. The customer is no less screwed into doing something they do not want and the company does want.

> Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?

The 29 separate confusing overlapping effects is by design. A single "local only" switch would (so long as that switch is enabled) lock out all manner of potential future revenue and recurring rents, which these companies very much want to see hit the balance sheet.

So the 29 separate confusing overlapping settings is designed to frustrate you to the point that you allow what they want from the start, the ability of the device to generate future revenue (via both of one time sales and recurring rents on rental sales).

YES, Thank you!

>>The 29 separate confusing overlapping effects is by design

>>designed to frustrate you to the point that you allow what they want from the start, the ability of the device to generate future revenue

And this explains why they are willing to do all the extra work to do it.

It is not even close to accidental or lazy — there is nothing accidental about the intention or going to the extra cost to build those dark patterns to screw the customers.

At the end of the day if the MTX group says no, it doesn't happen. Sales is always the most powerful group in an organization, sometimes even overriding compliance if they can get away with it.

>> Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?

Yes, absolutely. 29 separate overlapping settings likely match up precisely to arguments in various APIs that are used. On the other hand, what does local only even mean? No wifi? No hardwired connection? LAN only? Connection to the internet for system updates but not marketplace? Something else? All with a specified outcome that requires different implementation depending on hardware version and needs to be tweaked everytime dependencies change.

Having a separate setting for unconditionally disabling all wireless communication would be helpful. The other stuff you mention can be separate settings if it is useful to have them. (A setting to unconditionally all disable wired connections is less important since you can just avoid connecting it.)

>>what does local only even mean?

Let's start with this: Design the architecture so the core system works fine locally. Features requiring Internet connection are in separate modules, so they can be easily turned on/off, and designed so they are still primarily local.

E.g., store all current status locally and if requested another module sends it to the cloud, instead of cloud-first.

E.g.2, install updates by making a pull of all resources and then doing the update instead of requiring continuous communication.

Allow user control with options to completely shut off, whitelist, blacklist, etc.

Simple design decisions up front to make a software package meeting the user's local needs first, THEN allowing controlled access to the internet, under the USERS' control, instead of designing every feature to contact your servers first and compromising both usability and control at every step.

I’m not sure why some are struggling to understand this. A single "godmode" checkbox would only be possible if every element, the marketplace, the hardware, and the payment rails, were inside one ecosystem. The Switch is Nintendo, Minecraft is Microsoft, the credit card is Visa, and so on. There are simply too many moving parts, making a single killswitch nearly impossible to orchestrate.

That, or an open standard.

Because raging online at evil corporations feels better than facing the complexity of the world

Of course, making one single switch for everything in that complex system is absurd. Which is why this is something no one is talking about here.

We are only talking about the architecture, setup, and options for each particular game.

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