As I write this, I am attempting to reduce the number of licenses allocated in the Adobe admin portal.
After hunting through the site, it appears easy to add, but impossible to remove licenses without going through sales support (instant response with a human), who then transfer you to the "Cancellation Team" which are remarkably hard to find online and have not replied to previous attempts at cancellation.
This is my third try, and the wait has been ridiculous. After finally being connected to a member of their cancellation team, they are "reviewing my request" and 1-2 minutes (please stand by) has turned into 15+
This experience has been so bad (on top of many others), that I'm strongly considering moving our entire org to open source tools (aside from InDesign for the publications group, which our partners require).
Following up: 50 minutes in chat and 5 rounds of back and forth like a used car dealership before they would agree to cancel.
Adobe: "Have 3 months free!"
Me: "We are no longer using these licenses."
Adobe: "But you are on the hook for a year. We have reset all of your licenses to have the same annual renewal date, regardless of when you purchased them."
Me: "We are no longer using these licenses. Free months are just a tactic in hopes that we miss the cancellation window and are forced to pay for another year."
Adobe: "We highly recommend that you accept our generous 3 months free offer."
Me: "That sounds a little ominous. Please cancel the licenses, effective immediately."
This is paraphrased, but follows the essential conversation. Adobe, you disappoint me.
If you do, please be sure to donate (time or money) to the open source projects to help better them! This is how open source can exceed commercial software. At the very worst case, if the projects tumble there's always a possibility to "fork" as an insurance policy.
I thought the advantage of subscription software is that you don't need to pay an expensive one time fee if you need software just for a short project. But if they make it hard to cancel, that really sucks.
If you're doing what I think you are, this is not possible except in the month that your yearly contract renews. I went through the same thing.
You've most likely got yearly licences that you pay off monthly, which means you can only modify on a yearly basis, so they don't let you modify most of the year.
Moving tooling is Hard, and the OSS stuff frankly sucks in comparison.
Give the Affinity [1] suite a serious look. It's not Photoshop or Illustrator, but for many users it really is a functional alternative and much of the tooling works similarly enough that it's usable (unlike much of the OSS stuff which just gets maddening). Pricing is also very sane.
Truly disgusting. Why is it normal to be able to sign up for a service (such as internet service) completely self-service, with no human interaction, but as soon as I want to cancel the service, I have to call a 1-800 number and interact with a human? Comcast/Xfinity does this. Anti-consumer at best.
Adobe also charges 3 (I think) months penalty if you cancel CC. I have recently learned that if you reference covid-19 they immediately process anything you want with no penalties.
I suspect they don't want to end up on the wrong side of a crowdsource shitlist for penalizing people during the pandemic.
I believe this kind of thing is a big contributor to Amazon's hegemony in online shopping. I'm reluctant to order from other sites because there's a whole new set of dark patterns I may fall victim to. At least I'm familiar enough with Amazon to know I'm not getting charged for things I didn't intend to order, the low stock warnings are somewhat legitimate, etc. I'm not saying Amazon doesn't have its own issues, but at least it's a known quantity.
If it weren't for Amazon's dominance, other sites would be able to compete without resorting to these dark patterns, so this is a self-perpetuating cycle: people only shop on Amazon -> the only other sites that can survive are the ones that engage in deception -> trust in non-Amazon shopping sites decreases -> people only shop on Amazon -> ...
I don't mean to cast these scammy shopping websites as victims. My concern is more about how the legitimate sites that could exist don't because they're crowded out by Amazon (and other big players like Walmart) and the scammy shopping sites this article discusses.
Amazon earned a lot of loyalty from me with a light pattern. An Xbox they shipped me was stolen off of my porch and they replaced it with no questions. I've purchased other things from random outfits, had them charge the card and then just ghost me. If I could buy anywhere with the same confidence I have in Amazon then Amazon's hold on me would be a lot weaker.
that is not accurate. Amazon is brimming with dark patterns.
They walk the line between selling to customers and selling customers.
Over time, there are more and more "sponsored" results occluding and confusing my search results.
There are now warranty upsell screens on just about every purchase ("would you like coverage on your $5 part?")
They don't offer you the lowest cost on an item, you really have to drill down into all the offers to check.
If you block part of their site, things don't work - but if you sign in, all is well.
Can you delete your browsing history? Well, no. You can "hide" your browsing history but "removing items from view".
Search results are peppered with nonsensical results - that you searched for/bought before. I'm pretty sure this is timed with memory decay.
for example if 3 months ago you searched for dishes. Today when you search for computer parts, there might be a dish thrown into the results.
They talk about "free shipping" everywhere, but even if your cart is $500, you are opted-into non-free shipping and must manually select free shipping.
They don't tell you what is being sent in their shipping emails. But you can install their browser plugin and get all the info conveniently.
Here in Austria/Germany I see these dark patterns only from Amazon. They always try to get you to subscribe to prime, they mislead you with delivery times (my girlfriend has Prime and the website shows LONGER delivery times for her. Same item, browser signed into my account without Prime: shorter delivery time)
I want to support the local economy, so unless an item is only available on Amazon, I try to avoid buying from them. I've ordered from lots of different online stores in the past few years, and in my experience these dark patters are pretty rare.
Similar for platforms that let you build ecommerce sites, like Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc. They might be cookie cutter and usually over-priced for the level of hosting you get and the poorness of the wysiwyg site editing experience, but they solve a big problem of letting you get up and running with a trustworthy site fast.
It’s interesting though because there still are plenty of scam sites hosted by those platforms, plenty of dark patterns on Amazon too.
> At least I'm familiar enough with Amazon to know I'm not getting charged for things I didn't intend to order
You are better at online shopping than I am.
Amazon has tricked me into signing up for Prime twice. First time it was disguised as a shipping option. The second time I'm not sure exactly how they did it.
This is interesting - I feel like the site should separate dark patterns that add information from ones that lie or obfuscate. In my experience, consumers feel differently about these categories.
I've sat in on a few dozen user research sessions for ecommerce. This was qualitative research that included their general shopping habits, and additionally testing new features. The most interesting thing that I learned is that consumers (a) are generally pretty aware of when they're being pressured, and (b) are fine if it's transparent and accurate.
A classic example of this were low-stock notifications. The shoppers were generally okay with being told that something was low stock if that was really true. Many people could name specific items they lost because they were sold out. Some could also name instances of when they had bought something "1 item remaining" and seen it on sale the next day. They preferred having the information because it helped them make an informed decision. It turns out that lots of people browse the same items for a while, and use sales or almost-out-of-stock as a "now or never" moment.
The most interesting user session I ever sat in on was for a countdown timer for a sale ending. The designer refused to design it at first, and then was like, "fine, I'm going to design the hell out of this and then show you in user research that nobody wants this." And then she showed it to 5 people in user research, who were generally okay with it on the condition that it counted down to the actual sale ending. Some said they actually liked knowing, because when they're just looking on their phones they might not be in a good position to buy it, and want to know how much time they have later to get it. They said that they'll often refresh the page to see if the timer resets, because if it starts ticking from the same time, they feel like the site is just scammy and they'll leave.
Anyways, I'm not trying to defend lots of these patterns. Most of them are clearly wrong, and the ones that I mentioned above can also be used to lie and deceive. But I wouldn't put them all together - in my experience, consumers generally want accurate information even if they're aware that the company is doing it to pressure them.
The example session makes it clearer that they are talking about fake social proof and artificial urgency (if the promotion ends in 15 minutes, it is a fake one created just when you entered the site, real ones last until a round time or for days). Unless the examples are misleading, they should just name those categories better.
Insurance company I use to work for made it really difficult to actually buy their car insurance online cos they'd virtually always loose money if you bought their online deals. The website tried to get you to phone with your quote so that sales reps could bump your price up for basically no reason. If this was too much then they'd pretend to talk to their manager for a few mins to "see if they could get you a good deal" come back on the phone and make up another price for you. Worked on old people best. Lovely.
Did it increase total profit? I won't pick up the phone unless I have no other option, and I won't call someone just to get a quote. Besides, those sales rep cost money too.
In California, if you sign up for something on-line the law requires that you be able to cancel it on-line, too. This has been a wonderful development, and now it's easy to cancel things like XM subscriptions, etc.
I've had booking.com tell me "Hurry! There are only x rooms left!" when I've been to the property before, and know that x is a number larger than the entire number of rooms that exist.
There's also a secret search term that turns on every single live A/B test, making the site essentially unusable. I don't know what it is but a Booking.com employee may be willing to share if you every catch them after a few drinks.
It's really bad, but it's still my favourite site to book hotels. I can filter for all criterias that matter to me and have all my bookings in one place. And their hotline worked for me when something went wrong.
Luckily my brain can filter most of the dark patterns.
Wasn't there an article here recently about some site that was supposedly telling you how many other people were looking at the same item, and a look a the javascript showed that it was basically a (small) random number generated on page load?
It lists "forced enrollment" as an example of "forced action" which is tangential action required tobe completed. For me, a recpatcha step asking me to classify traffix lights or cars is one as well.
Imagine if each of the the web developers creating these websites actually ran a physical store and had to deal face-to-face with the public. Real, live customer service. No keyboard to hide behind. What would those businesses be like? Would anyone shop there?
One of the worst I came across is TeamViewer. You can sign up instantly for your organisation.
They throughout your time on them send you a spammy marketing email once every 3 to 5 days - the sort of stuff that's everyone ignores. You get one renewal remind amongst all that crap a week before your final month, usually sandwiched between two other mails.
Then when you want to cancel it...there is no easy link to cancel online they way their is to sign up. To top it off, you have to cancel it before that final month before hand by opening up a ticket on their system. Then it's not automatically cancelled, they setup a call to speak to a rep. If you miss that and then you enter your final month - they automatically renew and make you pay for another year up front! Even endless calls with the German call centre does not get a refund for this dark pattern.
I am massively against most of these, but I think a few are ok:
- Low-stock Message - when this data is true, I'm very happy to see it. I can say for sure it's true on the nike website, thing have gone out of stock an hour later or after I have ordered it. So I appreciate it when it's true.
- Countdown timers - A countdown timer to the end of a sale seem perfectly reasonable to me. Some sales are quite good and I like to know when they're going to end.
What concerns me when reading such articles is that if lying is so prevalent and there is still no action against the bad actors, then the GDPR tracking checkboxes on many sites are likely also just sent to /dev/null?
At least in my experience, one gets subscribed to many things they explicitly opted out from. It is very easy to say later if somebody digs to just say yes was clicked instead of no or there was a bug affecting a small portion of their traffic.
Some of the things listed are sales techniques I expect from a business. If businesses want to set themselves apart by being more straightforward, that's another way to sell.
I'm left wondering if the authors take advertisements at face value as well?
"After extensive research, we found that the stain could be removed, but not as easily as shown in the TV advert. As academics, we conclude that this is dark and deceptive."
[+] [-] vz8|5 years ago|reply
After hunting through the site, it appears easy to add, but impossible to remove licenses without going through sales support (instant response with a human), who then transfer you to the "Cancellation Team" which are remarkably hard to find online and have not replied to previous attempts at cancellation.
This is my third try, and the wait has been ridiculous. After finally being connected to a member of their cancellation team, they are "reviewing my request" and 1-2 minutes (please stand by) has turned into 15+
This experience has been so bad (on top of many others), that I'm strongly considering moving our entire org to open source tools (aside from InDesign for the publications group, which our partners require).
[+] [-] vz8|5 years ago|reply
Adobe: "Have 3 months free!"
Me: "We are no longer using these licenses."
Adobe: "But you are on the hook for a year. We have reset all of your licenses to have the same annual renewal date, regardless of when you purchased them."
Me: "We are no longer using these licenses. Free months are just a tactic in hopes that we miss the cancellation window and are forced to pay for another year."
Adobe: "We highly recommend that you accept our generous 3 months free offer."
Me: "That sounds a little ominous. Please cancel the licenses, effective immediately."
This is paraphrased, but follows the essential conversation. Adobe, you disappoint me.
[+] [-] yabudemada|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarcob|5 years ago|reply
I thought the advantage of subscription software is that you don't need to pay an expensive one time fee if you need software just for a short project. But if they make it hard to cancel, that really sucks.
I'm so glad I moved away from Adobe...
[+] [-] danpalmer|5 years ago|reply
You've most likely got yearly licences that you pay off monthly, which means you can only modify on a yearly basis, so they don't let you modify most of the year.
[+] [-] c0nsumer|5 years ago|reply
Give the Affinity [1] suite a serious look. It's not Photoshop or Illustrator, but for many users it really is a functional alternative and much of the tooling works similarly enough that it's usable (unlike much of the OSS stuff which just gets maddening). Pricing is also very sane.
[1] https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
[+] [-] wildrhythms|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhuffman|5 years ago|reply
I suspect they don't want to end up on the wrong side of a crowdsource shitlist for penalizing people during the pandemic.
[+] [-] trashcan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6chars|5 years ago|reply
If it weren't for Amazon's dominance, other sites would be able to compete without resorting to these dark patterns, so this is a self-perpetuating cycle: people only shop on Amazon -> the only other sites that can survive are the ones that engage in deception -> trust in non-Amazon shopping sites decreases -> people only shop on Amazon -> ...
I don't mean to cast these scammy shopping websites as victims. My concern is more about how the legitimate sites that could exist don't because they're crowded out by Amazon (and other big players like Walmart) and the scammy shopping sites this article discusses.
[+] [-] hirundo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ieeamo|5 years ago|reply
I’d wager that many of the dark patterns persist because Amazon use them, making their justification inside smaller companies easier.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
They walk the line between selling to customers and selling customers.
Over time, there are more and more "sponsored" results occluding and confusing my search results.
There are now warranty upsell screens on just about every purchase ("would you like coverage on your $5 part?")
They don't offer you the lowest cost on an item, you really have to drill down into all the offers to check.
If you block part of their site, things don't work - but if you sign in, all is well.
Can you delete your browsing history? Well, no. You can "hide" your browsing history but "removing items from view".
Search results are peppered with nonsensical results - that you searched for/bought before. I'm pretty sure this is timed with memory decay.
for example if 3 months ago you searched for dishes. Today when you search for computer parts, there might be a dish thrown into the results.
They talk about "free shipping" everywhere, but even if your cart is $500, you are opted-into non-free shipping and must manually select free shipping.
They don't tell you what is being sent in their shipping emails. But you can install their browser plugin and get all the info conveniently.
[+] [-] yarcob|5 years ago|reply
I want to support the local economy, so unless an item is only available on Amazon, I try to avoid buying from them. I've ordered from lots of different online stores in the past few years, and in my experience these dark patters are pretty rare.
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
Is there any evidence that e-commerce sites were any less scummy before Amazon started competing?
[+] [-] mlthoughts2018|5 years ago|reply
It’s interesting though because there still are plenty of scam sites hosted by those platforms, plenty of dark patterns on Amazon too.
[+] [-] timoth3y|5 years ago|reply
You are better at online shopping than I am.
Amazon has tricked me into signing up for Prime twice. First time it was disguised as a shipping option. The second time I'm not sure exactly how they did it.
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|5 years ago|reply
Well, unsubscribing Amazon videos is a dark pattern too. Not as bad as Adobe, but still.
[+] [-] jakevoytko|5 years ago|reply
I've sat in on a few dozen user research sessions for ecommerce. This was qualitative research that included their general shopping habits, and additionally testing new features. The most interesting thing that I learned is that consumers (a) are generally pretty aware of when they're being pressured, and (b) are fine if it's transparent and accurate.
A classic example of this were low-stock notifications. The shoppers were generally okay with being told that something was low stock if that was really true. Many people could name specific items they lost because they were sold out. Some could also name instances of when they had bought something "1 item remaining" and seen it on sale the next day. They preferred having the information because it helped them make an informed decision. It turns out that lots of people browse the same items for a while, and use sales or almost-out-of-stock as a "now or never" moment.
The most interesting user session I ever sat in on was for a countdown timer for a sale ending. The designer refused to design it at first, and then was like, "fine, I'm going to design the hell out of this and then show you in user research that nobody wants this." And then she showed it to 5 people in user research, who were generally okay with it on the condition that it counted down to the actual sale ending. Some said they actually liked knowing, because when they're just looking on their phones they might not be in a good position to buy it, and want to know how much time they have later to get it. They said that they'll often refresh the page to see if the timer resets, because if it starts ticking from the same time, they feel like the site is just scammy and they'll leave.
Anyways, I'm not trying to defend lots of these patterns. Most of them are clearly wrong, and the ones that I mentioned above can also be used to lie and deceive. But I wouldn't put them all together - in my experience, consumers generally want accurate information even if they're aware that the company is doing it to pressure them.
[+] [-] marcosdumay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnypotty|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
They are fairly infamous for fishy looking inventory warnings, aggressive push to register/login, cross/up sell, etc.
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
I've had booking.com tell me "Hurry! There are only x rooms left!" when I've been to the property before, and know that x is a number larger than the entire number of rooms that exist.
[+] [-] danpalmer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omnibrain|5 years ago|reply
Luckily my brain can filter most of the dark patterns.
[+] [-] MikeDelta|5 years ago|reply
BTW, booking got fined by the Hungarian Watchdog for 6.1 million GBP for these practices [0].
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-booking-hldg-hungary-idUS...
[+] [-] cratermoon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
"Dark patterns" sounds like some cheesy term someone uses when they don't want to admit malice.
[+] [-] sriku|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
allow: news.ycombinator.com
[+] [-] secfirstmd|5 years ago|reply
They throughout your time on them send you a spammy marketing email once every 3 to 5 days - the sort of stuff that's everyone ignores. You get one renewal remind amongst all that crap a week before your final month, usually sandwiched between two other mails.
Then when you want to cancel it...there is no easy link to cancel online they way their is to sign up. To top it off, you have to cancel it before that final month before hand by opening up a ticket on their system. Then it's not automatically cancelled, they setup a call to speak to a rep. If you miss that and then you enter your final month - they automatically renew and make you pay for another year up front! Even endless calls with the German call centre does not get a refund for this dark pattern.
TLDR: avoid TeamViewer
[+] [-] CyanDeparture|5 years ago|reply
- Low-stock Message - when this data is true, I'm very happy to see it. I can say for sure it's true on the nike website, thing have gone out of stock an hour later or after I have ordered it. So I appreciate it when it's true.
- Countdown timers - A countdown timer to the end of a sale seem perfectly reasonable to me. Some sales are quite good and I like to know when they're going to end.
[+] [-] veselin|5 years ago|reply
At least in my experience, one gets subscribed to many things they explicitly opted out from. It is very easy to say later if somebody digs to just say yes was clicked instead of no or there was a bug affecting a small portion of their traffic.
[+] [-] aww_dang|5 years ago|reply
I'm left wondering if the authors take advertisements at face value as well?
"After extensive research, we found that the stain could be removed, but not as easily as shown in the TV advert. As academics, we conclude that this is dark and deceptive."
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] is_true|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianlam|5 years ago|reply
Interesting...