Stamps.com is so scammy. You sign up for a free trial, then get enrolled without asking you into their payment plan. Then when you go to cancel, you can't. You have to call. But guess what? It has weird hours. When you finally do call during their hours it's a machine that you're talking to, not a person.
Ok, so you have hours of when I can cancel...clearly not because you have shift hours, since I'm talking to a machine. So why do you have specified hours?
Stamps.com billed me for 8 months before I noticed they were billing me. I only noticed it because I was doing my taxes. The billing size was just small enough to fly under my radar, but just big enough to hurt a bit. I feel that chose that pricing for that reason.
Anyhow, I saw they were in this story, so I felt I would expand upon their "dark patterns."
The thing about dark patterns is that feels like an abuse of the commons. Because of scummy practices like this I am absolutely less willing to explore a site that requests my email, or buy something from a random site (I just see if it's on amazon and buy it there).
For example, a few days ago there was a Show HN about PlateJoy, which sounded really interesting. But, the only way I could learn about it was to enter my email and take a quiz. Now enters the part where the antics of countless other bad actors takes its toll on an otherwise innocent website; I decide it isn't worth the risk and move a long.
Yep, AllTrails recently went with a dark-pattern, want to see any info on the trail? Sign-up. If you don't you'll get a brief flash of the detail page before redirecting to a sign-up form.
I don't think Amazon is completely innocent either. I signed up for prime accidentally recently because EVERY time you buy something they try to sell you prime for a year and I guess I misread something. They canceled and refunded after an email, but it was still obnoxious.
Not just the web either. This morning Cortana turned green and said "Oh hey!" in my taskbar. I clicked it and it gave me the regular interface - there was no alert or anything, they just wanted to boost their Cortana interaction numbers for the day. That's wasting my time and making it less likely that I will pay attention if there is an actual alert later.
I can't stand Cortana. I honestly, genuinely don't want to talk to my computer. I realize I might be in the minority on that, but I actually type fast enough and know what I'm doing enough not to need to ask an "assistant" to do it for me. Unless and until my computer is Samantha from Her, I don't need to talk to it.
What's worse, Cortana has ruined Windows search. Searching from the Start Menu is way less expansive and useful in 10 than was in Windows 7. (I never used 8, so I can't comment there.) It's like it's punishing me for not using something that breaks how I want to work anyway.
Pretty much all privacy-related settings in Windows 10 use dark patterns. And they've just made it much harder to disable Cortana in the upcoming Anniversary Update.
Experienced this recently with Hello Fresh. The 'Cancel Subscription' button was so hard to find that I had to spend 10 minutes Googling it (the placement had changed over time and was always difficult to find, so a lot of the search results were no longer relevant). You had to click a button to reveal the cancellation link, and it was a tiny line of grey text on a beige background.
Then, to make it better, they started calling me every day after I canceled my subscription.
I was going to recommend them to all my friends and family, but instead I did the opposite -- I told everyone to avoid them and only mentioned the negative aspects of their service.
AOL was notorious for almost being impossible to cancel. I remember when I had Netflix for a while and decided to cancel it was really easy to do so. Although I canceled that alone gave me a positive impression of Netflix.
That was my experience as well. I wanted to cancel because the interface for pausing deliveries was so painful to use that my wife and I often failed or forgot to pause weeks which were too busy to receive a delivery, thus wasting large amounts of money. After cancelling they hounded me with phone calls for weeks. We have since signed up for a competing service (Green Chef), and I have no interest in going back.
To cancel Blue Apron, you have to send an email, which then sends you a link to a cancellation page. I can't figure out what purpose that could possibly serve.
AVG had (possibly still does) a dark pattern with their free AV software, and I fell for it once.
I was in the middle of a game when the stupid ad for Web TuneUp[0] appeared from my task bar over the screen. The linked image is exactly how it appeared with the auto-confirm box pre-checked. In a rush to dismiss the ad to get back to my match, I accidentally clicked the OK button instead of the tiny decline.
Of course, uninstalling that travesty was a nightmare.
The worst thing I've seen is G2A Shield - it takes 10 steps to deactivate it, and each step has the "cancel" button much more dominant than the "continue" button, see: http://imgur.com/a/PUwPC
I can't recommend using G2A on any level. While there may be some reputable "grey market" sellers that take advantage of pricing in different regions etc, g2a seem to be far shadier [0]. (specifically the keys are being bought with stolen credit cards, and the original seller gets hit with chargebacks)
This looks remarkably similar to Audible's unsubscribe flow. I was a member, but I've had less time to listen and increased my podcast count, so I decided to cancel and pick it back up in a year or so.
They ask a million times if you're sure and then offer another million other options (suspend the account for a few months, after which they will automatically charge you again). After you get through that, including a screen warning that you will lose unused credits, they offer a plan that will let you keep the credits you've already paid for by paying them another, smaller sum (I think $10 a year).
I tried to use Uber for the first time yesterday (in Moscow). The car wouldn't come for way too long, so I clicked cancel and thought that was it. I even selected a reason for cancelling. As I was walking home, a driver called me saying that he had arrived. I said that I had cancelled the trip a long time ago. Then the app showed that my trip cost 0 and asked to rate the driver, which I did.
When I came home, I discovered that they sneakily took money for that trip! I complained to the support and they said it's working as intended, but they refunded me... in bonus points that can only be used to pay for Uber, which I never intended to use again after this "experience".
Some of these cases are not only dark patterns, they constitute was it legally known as fraud. If you deceive someone in order to gain a financial advantage, it is fraud. The problem is that going against those gigantic companies is very difficult.
And then others aren't dark patterns. One of the first examples, British Airways, is pretty unfairly called out.
The article says that they imply "cheapest at the top". No, the flights aren't shown "cheapest at the top", and they never imply they are. They're sorted in chronological order.
There is a summary item that says the lowest fare for a booking class that day, but that's all.
One pattern I've seen recently that's been increasingly prevalent (but I haven't seen discussed anywhere) is of a form where a site gives you two options in a dialog box along the lines of:
Would you like to sign up to our newsletter?
o [[[ OK!! ]]]
o No I'm an idiot and I don't want to save money or hear about the latest job offers that may change my life
(Exaggerated slightly.)
I'm not sure this if this technically counts as a dark pattern as it's fairly transparent but I find it is very annoying because it is an attempt to force a user to state an opinion they probably don't hold if they don't want to sign up for whatever service.
I assume it does work or it wouldn't spread so widely but exploiting people's reluctance to criticise themselves seems quite unpleasant: I imagine this affects people with the weakest self-esteem the most.
I would argue that it's a dark pattern if that's the only way past the form.
A lot of sites using that technique also let you click an X button or click the darkened non-form area to continue. If that's supported, I always choose it as a tiny protest (in hopes that someone actually profiles how click-outs are happening).
If you make users click something obnoxious and self-deprecating to continue, then I'd certainly call that a dark pattern. It's like an incredibly mild version of the cult tactic where you shame people for skepticism.
If you're in the UK, ordering a pizza from a chain gives you forms with a ton of these patterns. Like the incredibly misleading 'tick the boxes below if you don't want to receive an email/text message with future promotions' thing.
Or the awkward auto coupon set up, which seems like it was designed to minimise the amount of money people were saving through codes. It's as if they realised "hang on, lots of people are using 30-40% off codes" so stuck a cheap 5% off one in my default. The user then has to deliberately remove the auto applied one to get the better offer, which is something many people won't bother to do. Or maybe I'm just overly suspicious, who knows.
Either way, they make the sites rather awkward to use.
If you're talking about the one starting with a D and ending in ominos - Put all fake data in except for address and pay cash on delivery. In my experience even [email protected] and 00000 555 555 for phone number works a treat.
I'm happy to see mainstream technews bringing this topic to a wider audience. As I'm sure most HN regulars are aware, we've had many high ranking posts on this topic
Those extra fees at the very end infuriate me the most - it makes comparison shopping impossible. Thats including not giving me a shipping estimate until after I enter my shipping address and payment info. I want to know what I am going to pay before entering my payment details!! Hotel "resort fees" and cable or Internet subscriptions are the worst offenders, I honestly can't believe either is legal.
It actually is illegal in some parts of the world; the EU at least. These kind of hidden fees (for travel, hotels, etc.) are illegal now exactly because you should be able to compare prices, and offenders are getting reprimanded and fined for it.
As someone currently paying a $22/day parking fee at a hotel, I know exactly what you mean. However, in my case it was a booking through Hotwire, so I didn't even know the hotel name in advance.
What about those 'free' WiFi access points that require you to login with Facebook for 'prevention of abuse', and then abuse your Facebook account by posting you were there.
Facebook actually offers a "wifi authentication" feature to store proprietors. I ran into an instance of it while in Europe. Haven't seen it used in the US, though.
> Though perhaps the worst class of dark pattern is forced continuity, the common practice of collecting credit card details for a free trial and then automatically billing users for a paid service without an adequate reminder.
The fact that this is even possible makes me feel like I'm in the middle ages.
Oh God, there's a special place in hell for stamps.com.
I did not read the fine print, but made the mistake of thinking that it was a partnership with USPS and did not incur extra fees (like a crazy $13 monthly fee, even if you're not using the service).
By the time I discovered that, I also discovered that you can sign up on line, but you have to cancel by phone (or "being on hold", I discovered it).
It used to be common for record clubs, book clubs, magazine subscriptions etc.
Fill in this bank debit form, get two months trial subscription, if you do nothing we'll charge you 14 months for your first year and your trial period. (The more reputable places would give a genuine free trial,but it wasn't uncommon for the trial to be charged).
This offers an opportunity - a browser plug-in that brings up a warning whenever a known page with a dark pattern is accessed. That would be a useful feature to add to an ad-blocker.
I've been thinking of writing a simple add-on just to get rid of that annoying "Get to Google Faster" box Google puts on every search result if Google isn't your default search engine. (Google is my default search engine, but because I have their tracking blocked, their web site doesn't know this.)
Companies that do this sort of crap may not win much by it in the long run. One of the reasons for Amazon's success is easy order cancellation. That's what makes one-click ordering work. Their innovation was not that you can order with one click; it's that you can easily undo a one-click order. That makes it a safe feature for consumers. Most businesses still don't get this.
Dark patterns need to start winning FTC attention, period. If it's somehow not already criminal to cunt people about, lie and mislead and steal from them on web pages that needs to change too.
People should use the credit card dispute process more often. If a company has made it unreasonably difficult to cancel, or charged money that you didn't actually agree to pay (because they hid the notice too well), that's exactly what chargebacks are for.
How does Harry Brignull get his dark patterns site covered so regularly? About once a year for the past decade, somebody does an article about it. Weird.
Anyway. I'm a designer and my work has even featured on his site (after he did some freelancing with us - cheeky begger). His implication that people like me sit around trying to making life harder for customers is complete bollocks. We don't. Businesses just don't. It's bad business and nobody would willing do it.
Usually (and I grant their might be a tiny number of exceptions) they have to do things crappily because of constraints beyond their control. It may seem malicious to the likes of a freelance design-and-run merchant like Brignull, but it's not. It can also just be clueless visual designers wanting to make things pretty at the expense of being usable. But mostly it's just hidden constraints.
Is there such a thing as Yelp for websites where they are scored for their UX with DarkPattern being a scored attribute?
I would love to check a new website against this list, and I would also spend my expensive time to add to this list to report dark pattern websites as they upset me enough to take action.
[+] [-] partiallypro|9 years ago|reply
Ok, so you have hours of when I can cancel...clearly not because you have shift hours, since I'm talking to a machine. So why do you have specified hours?
Stamps.com billed me for 8 months before I noticed they were billing me. I only noticed it because I was doing my taxes. The billing size was just small enough to fly under my radar, but just big enough to hurt a bit. I feel that chose that pricing for that reason.
Anyhow, I saw they were in this story, so I felt I would expand upon their "dark patterns."
[+] [-] someone7x|9 years ago|reply
For example, a few days ago there was a Show HN about PlateJoy, which sounded really interesting. But, the only way I could learn about it was to enter my email and take a quiz. Now enters the part where the antics of countless other bad actors takes its toll on an otherwise innocent website; I decide it isn't worth the risk and move a long.
[+] [-] wldcordeiro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlunkr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivraatiems|9 years ago|reply
What's worse, Cortana has ruined Windows search. Searching from the Start Menu is way less expansive and useful in 10 than was in Windows 7. (I never used 8, so I can't comment there.) It's like it's punishing me for not using something that breaks how I want to work anyway.
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanlm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JusticeJuice|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dzugaru|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gthtjtkt|9 years ago|reply
Then, to make it better, they started calling me every day after I canceled my subscription.
I was going to recommend them to all my friends and family, but instead I did the opposite -- I told everyone to avoid them and only mentioned the negative aspects of their service.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rybosome|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] empath75|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noxToken|9 years ago|reply
I was in the middle of a game when the stupid ad for Web TuneUp[0] appeared from my task bar over the screen. The linked image is exactly how it appeared with the auto-confirm box pre-checked. In a rush to dismiss the ad to get back to my match, I accidentally clicked the OK button instead of the tiny decline.
Of course, uninstalling that travesty was a nightmare.
[0]: http://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/01/avg-putting-millions-of-chr...
[+] [-] yedpodtrzitko|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maccard|9 years ago|reply
[0] - http://tinybuild.com/g2a-sold-450k-worth-of-our-game-keys
[+] [-] jonlucc|9 years ago|reply
They ask a million times if you're sure and then offer another million other options (suspend the account for a few months, after which they will automatically charge you again). After you get through that, including a screen warning that you will lose unused credits, they offer a plan that will let you keep the credits you've already paid for by paying them another, smaller sum (I think $10 a year).
I will definitely think hard before reactivating.
[+] [-] simfoo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grue3|9 years ago|reply
I tried to use Uber for the first time yesterday (in Moscow). The car wouldn't come for way too long, so I clicked cancel and thought that was it. I even selected a reason for cancelling. As I was walking home, a driver called me saying that he had arrived. I said that I had cancelled the trip a long time ago. Then the app showed that my trip cost 0 and asked to rate the driver, which I did.
When I came home, I discovered that they sneakily took money for that trip! I complained to the support and they said it's working as intended, but they refunded me... in bonus points that can only be used to pay for Uber, which I never intended to use again after this "experience".
[+] [-] otterley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mknocker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FireBeyond|9 years ago|reply
The article says that they imply "cheapest at the top". No, the flights aren't shown "cheapest at the top", and they never imply they are. They're sorted in chronological order.
There is a summary item that says the lowest fare for a booking class that day, but that's all.
[+] [-] SNvD7vEJ|9 years ago|reply
Pisses me off every time.
[+] [-] chimprich|9 years ago|reply
Would you like to sign up to our newsletter? o [[[ OK!! ]]] o No I'm an idiot and I don't want to save money or hear about the latest job offers that may change my life
(Exaggerated slightly.)
I'm not sure this if this technically counts as a dark pattern as it's fairly transparent but I find it is very annoying because it is an attempt to force a user to state an opinion they probably don't hold if they don't want to sign up for whatever service.
I assume it does work or it wouldn't spread so widely but exploiting people's reluctance to criticise themselves seems quite unpleasant: I imagine this affects people with the weakest self-esteem the most.
[+] [-] prplhaz4|9 years ago|reply
http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11855787
[+] [-] Bartweiss|9 years ago|reply
A lot of sites using that technique also let you click an X button or click the darkened non-form area to continue. If that's supported, I always choose it as a tiny protest (in hopes that someone actually profiles how click-outs are happening).
If you make users click something obnoxious and self-deprecating to continue, then I'd certainly call that a dark pattern. It's like an incredibly mild version of the cult tactic where you shame people for skepticism.
[+] [-] CM30|9 years ago|reply
Or the awkward auto coupon set up, which seems like it was designed to minimise the amount of money people were saving through codes. It's as if they realised "hang on, lots of people are using 30-40% off codes" so stuck a cheap 5% off one in my default. The user then has to deliberately remove the auto applied one to get the better offer, which is something many people won't bother to do. Or maybe I'm just overly suspicious, who knows.
Either way, they make the sites rather awkward to use.
[+] [-] unfortunateface|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JTon|9 years ago|reply
For those wanting to go right to the source: http://darkpatterns.org/
[+] [-] nommm-nommm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Freak_NL|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|9 years ago|reply
Yes, that's the intention :(
[+] [-] heywire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeonM|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noxToken|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimino|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detaro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] initram|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
The fact that this is even possible makes me feel like I'm in the middle ages.
[+] [-] ipsin|9 years ago|reply
I did not read the fine print, but made the mistake of thinking that it was a partnership with USPS and did not incur extra fees (like a crazy $13 monthly fee, even if you're not using the service).
By the time I discovered that, I also discovered that you can sign up on line, but you have to cancel by phone (or "being on hold", I discovered it).
Seriously. Never stamps.com.
[+] [-] anexprogrammer|9 years ago|reply
It used to be common for record clubs, book clubs, magazine subscriptions etc.
Fill in this bank debit form, get two months trial subscription, if you do nothing we'll charge you 14 months for your first year and your trial period. (The more reputable places would give a genuine free trial,but it wasn't uncommon for the trial to be charged).
[+] [-] ethanbond|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
I've been thinking of writing a simple add-on just to get rid of that annoying "Get to Google Faster" box Google puts on every search result if Google isn't your default search engine. (Google is my default search engine, but because I have their tracking blocked, their web site doesn't know this.)
Companies that do this sort of crap may not win much by it in the long run. One of the reasons for Amazon's success is easy order cancellation. That's what makes one-click ordering work. Their innovation was not that you can order with one click; it's that you can easily undo a one-click order. That makes it a safe feature for consumers. Most businesses still don't get this.
[+] [-] benologist|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimrandomh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilgongo|9 years ago|reply
Anyway. I'm a designer and my work has even featured on his site (after he did some freelancing with us - cheeky begger). His implication that people like me sit around trying to making life harder for customers is complete bollocks. We don't. Businesses just don't. It's bad business and nobody would willing do it.
Usually (and I grant their might be a tiny number of exceptions) they have to do things crappily because of constraints beyond their control. It may seem malicious to the likes of a freelance design-and-run merchant like Brignull, but it's not. It can also just be clueless visual designers wanting to make things pretty at the expense of being usable. But mostly it's just hidden constraints.
But hey who cares. It's good rant material.
[+] [-] ccvannorman|9 years ago|reply
I would love to check a new website against this list, and I would also spend my expensive time to add to this list to report dark pattern websites as they upset me enough to take action.