[ivanbozic]

I run a development agency, and on a few occasions, we've had clients ask us to build features similar to what you've outlined above. One of those clients had a pretty thorough specification document that outlined how this behavior should work.

When you open the listing, it should wait a few seconds and then show you a number between 8 and 20 of people who are actively looking at this listing. If it was night-time, it shouldn't really be that much, so let's put in a number between 2 and 8.

This was of course all fake since the platform didn't launch yet. There was also a lot of other "building fake anxiety" tactics, but this one and all other got buried way in the backlog and never actually implemented thankfully.

I'm not saying that Booking.com is doing this, but I definitely hate this pattern.

[gnud]

Isn't this basically false advertising?

[Cthulhu_]

Arguably; it's not advertising the product itself (e.g. hotels). There's no rules against misreporting user or activity statistics as far as I know.

[ivanbozic]

As the other reply said – it's not, since no information regarding the actual listing is false.

So technically, it's not. But I agree with you that it should be labeled as such.