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Dark Patterns Across the Web Are Designed To Trick You
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: Harry Brignell has posted a 30-minute video documenting dark patterns, deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces (not exclusive to the internet) that trick users into setting up recurring payments, purchasing items added to a shopping cart, or spamming all contacts through pre-checked forms on Facebook games for example. Basically, they're tactics used by online services to get users to do things they wouldn't normally do. Yael Grauer has written an in-depth report on Ars Technica about dark patterns, where he discusses Brignull's work with UX designers and business executives: "Klein [Principal at Users Known and author of UX for Lean Startups] believes many of the worst dark patterns are pushed by businesses, not by designers. 'It's often pro-business at the expense of the users, and the designers often see themselves as the defender or advocate of the user,' she explained. And although Brignull has never been explicitly asked to design dark patterns himself, he said he has been in situations where using them would be an easy solution -- like when a client or boss says they really need a large list of people who have opted in to marketing e-mails. 'The first and easiest trick to have an opt-in is to have a pre-ticked checkbox, but then you can just get rid of that entirely and hide it in the terms of conditions and say that by registering you're going to be opted in to our e-mails,' Brignull said. 'Then you have a 100-percent sign-up rate and you've exceeded your goals. I kind of understand why people do it. If you're only thinking about the numbers and you're just trying to juice the stats, then it's not surprising in the slightest.' 'There's this logical positivist mindset that the only things that have value are those things that can be measured and can empirically be shown to be true, and while that has its merits it also takes us down a pretty dark place,' said digital product designer Cennydd Bowles, who is researching ethical design. 'We start to look at ethics as pure utilitarianism, whatever benefits the most people. Yikes, it has problems.'" Brignull's website has a number of examples of deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces.
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign
I see what you did there, tricking me into reading your message.
2. Bad actors exist and the internet allows them to hide things so that users select things they normally would not.
3. Bad actors are often inside of what most people consider "reputable" companies.
4. Morality is hard and the bad actors in charge of stuff tend to push for lots number 2 (I had to skip "1" for the irony).
You knew all this stuff already, or should have. We have a justice system which is supposed to handle companies breaching moral code, or what we call law. The problem is obviously how to make things visible to the user, which given the desires of HTML and JavaScript won't happen. setAttribute("type", "hidden"); has valid purposes as well as nefarious. Such is the nature of tools. I guess secondarily the punishment for bad actors may not fit the crime, but again we have a justice system for that.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Notice how news sites like CNN are gradually going all video? And not the good videos that explain a lot succinctly or put you into a snippet of the news action, but those excruciating new wastes of bandwidth that just display story text, in a giant font, screen after screen, backed by nothing but a musical bed, until you realize that you have spent ten minutes watching one paragraph of text.