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this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Yes, dark patterns
People should definitely learn about these, they affect an awful lot of our modern digital environment, not just in subscriptions but all the ways companies try to manipulate our behaviour.
Ever see a cookie popup and "Accept" is a big colourful button, but if you want to decline it's behind a grey "more options" button, then you have to scroll through a dozen different categories and disable them all, then the button has some ambiguous label like "confirm cookie choices" which gives the impression you're accepting them again? That's a dark pattern.
User interface design has long known how to streamline a process and communicate with a user to increase the number of people who complete a certain task, so it's a simple matter of inverting that logic to make a task hard and obscure to reduce that number.
What's honestly surprising is that this is actually illegal somewhere. I didn't realise there was any legislation about this.
Ah, so dark as in evil, not dark as in low light. I hadn't heard of that, but going through the darkpatterns.org website is basically a laundry list of shit I hate.
Yeah it’s a catch all term for psychologically manipulative UI/UX
I like how UX emerged as a dedicated field and profession in my time and then was shortly thereafter used for evil.
think that's kind of the fate of all new things in today's world. if it can be used unscrupulously for money, someone will be doing that for tremendous profit. especially since new stuff usually isn't illegal, Even if it should be.
I thought it was dark as in manipulation that isn't readily visible. For instance, a micro-transaction for a character reskin accompanied by default skins being crap. In Watchdogs Legion all the Londoners you could recruit generally had poor fashion, then money was scant and clothes were super expensive (but you could by more money with micro-transctions).
In one of the Space Quest series, as a joke (black humor in theme with the series) whenever an airlock interface was opened, the mouse cursor started on the Open Outer Door button, so an accidental double-tap was deadly, so dark patterns were known about in the 1990s, though not yet given a name.
Click-wrapped TOS and contracts for software and services were one such strategem, though we're more aware of it today, and more judges are willing to reject contracts and TOS that didn't include a clear, announced disclosure of their odious terms.
I like how Facebook intentionally delays spam reports made via Messenger on desktop. That’s after clicking through excessive prompts (which are more understandable due to the general public’s abuse of reporting features).