[midnightdiesel]

There’s no “what if” about it. Amazon.com’s UX has always been chock full of dark design patterns and incongruous UI choices. The same is true to varying degrees for many of their platforms and products. It’s not really a huge deal, although it is one of the big reasons I don’t feel like Amazon is very trustworthy.

[camtarn]

I find it very sad. I used to work on the team that rendered the front page 'customers also bought' ads, and we were incredibly serious about avoiding dark patterns. We even had a training programme to make sure we knew the personalization principles - erring on the side of over informing the customer, etc.

As a random dev in a different dept, I even got the first iteration of the Amazon app's notification ads pulled temporarily. They were badly implemented (they advertised a product, but linked to something different, and there was no obvious way to turn them off), I felt they reflected badly on the company, so I filed a ticket and it actually got listened to.

All that's gone out the window now. Every time I see the Prime clickthroughs, credit card deals, 'lightning deals' which are only about 20c off the normal discount, etc, it makes me grind my teeth.

[FakeComments]

My favorite is the fake menu on the homepage: the Prime “menu”, ie word with arrow, always shows an ad, no matter if you’re a member or not.