On the other hand, I've been adjacent to the decision to add them before. You're under a lot of pressure to increase conversion in your onboarding funnel, so you test out moving your email capture up a bit in your conversion flow (ie to before you deliver results) and it works! Conversion increases throughout the funnel! So you keep it.
Dark patterns like this persist because they measurably work. Some people (you and me) get extra pissed off, but we're in the small minority relative to the people who sign up at an elevated rate. :(
> You're under a lot of pressure to increase conversion in your onboarding funnel, so you test out moving your email capture up a bit in your conversion flow (ie to before you deliver results) and it works! Conversion increases throughout the funnel! So you keep it.
I think this is the fundamental problem. Too many people trying to increase conversion in their onboarding funnels, crowding out people who want to put interesting stuff on the internet for purposes other than farming people for money.
Until you quit your job and build some indie thing and try to make money and fuck, that’s difficult.
And you’re broke. And you worked really hard on this thing. Turns out ‘farming people for money’ = ‘paying rent’.
And you realise, shit man, if I make it a bit worse according to my ethics and taste, I’ll actually make money. And I won’t have to go and take some other job.
And I’ll be sad that this is how humans work, but it is how humans work, and am I going to change that or just tag along for the ride?
The other part of it is service providers wanting growth from cheap tricks. The mental laziness and expecting to have their cake and eat it too is the same.
At some point there needs to be more than sterns looks to discourage these behaviors.
I don't demand anything for free. I'll use it but go ahead and don't offer a service instead, won't bother me at all. User-abuse is not justified by calling usage service-abuse.
Not really - the market tempts you with free to hook you in. You cannot honestly say that the market has asked for every abusive free product that existed.
The faster a web site asks me for an email address determines how fast I bail on even looking at their product/tool, or if I have no choice I put in a bogus email address to get past it, if it is one of those damn forms that sends you a link I use one of the various public inbox/temporary email address sites so I don't have to deal with the attempts to bring me back into the conversion funnel when I was just seeking information.
This has been a pet peeve of mine as well. I avoid sites that require logins. I’ve been experimenting with alternate authentication/authorization mechanisms.
It’s a major reason why I created https://prose.sh to explore what’s possible. We don’t require an email and only ask for it on https://feeds.sh because it’s an rss-to-email notification service.
Read only websites and write SSH apps are pretty congruent to the HN bubble.
There’s an added benefit that only people that can open a terminal can create an account.
Unless the playing field between the companies are on the same level (reads: dark patters are deemed illegal, and I think it should be!), or you are in some sort of monopolistic industry, to my understanding you will lose to your competitors. I've never been in a situation to implement such patterns, but play these mental gymnastics to give the implementor some benefit of the doubt.
>Have some respect for your users, developers. ‘Cause you’re one of them.
No, they're not, not for most devs. Most devs don't use the stuff they produce. They're just hired guns, building something they're told to make. If they refuse to implement what they're told, they'll be fired for insubordination.
>Just because a psychological trick works doesn’t mean you must use it.
Your hand is forced if the other guy uses it and blows past you.
Reality cares not for niceties, and good people finish dead fucking last. You need to balance being a good man and an evil man to win or even just survive.
What does “conversion” actually mean in this context? Does it mean bullshit “growth & engagement” aka the numbers of (mostly non-consensual) subscribers in the spam list going up, or does it mean actual profit?
I could definitely see it working for the first case, which is all that your typical product/marketing person needs to justify their salary thus why the practice is popular, but I wonder if this actually ends up translating to actual profit (whether the spammed people end up buying stuff they wouldn’t have otherwise bought, and whether any prospective buyers that would’ve converted otherwise were driven away).
That's a pretty good question. Ideally you're measuring "paid us money" as conversion, and that was the case for the anecdote I had in mind in the above post: we had a checkout screen with a decent price tag at the end of the flow that we could measure against. We could track the impact of changes throughout that funnel on the bottom line.
But I have seen other decisions made based on proxies to "paid us money." Eg we find that X% people who perform action Y wind up paying us money, and for really long funnels it's easier to get statistical significance for action Y than for "paid us money." And so we make some change, find that it increases the rate at which people do action Y, and declare victory. We try to keep in mind potential downstream impacts (like loss of trust), but it's hard to argue a vague, potential downside against a solid, measured number sitting in a google doc in front of you. I suspect the phenomenon you call out is somewhat common.
Yeah it's unavoidable, if you rely on growth (especially if you have a free or freemium service) you need to do this crap (though the author describes the most hostile form of it).
The business models of the web trap everyone within these incentives in order to be competitive - everyone hates it, but moloch demands it [0].
To escape it you have to escape the business model, to do that you have to escape the incentives, and to do that you have to boil the ocean and hope it works out [1].
Of course it increases sign ups. That doesn't mean the users like it. And those extra sign ups are almost certainly costing you trust from your users (and potential users). And most of those additional sign ups will probably never use your site again. So other than increasing a metric that isn't actually what matters, and maybe getting someone a bonus or promotion for increasing said metric it doesn't help the business, especially in the long term.
Sure, I absolutely believe that if you create a "ransom" situation, some percentage of those extorted will pay the ransom where otherwise they would not gift you the ransom.
That does not imply it's good for your business.
Besides putting the business in a negative light for the new convert, I imagine a subset of those would feel more entitled than before. I probably would - if I had to give you something to convert my picture "for free", I would definitely feel entitled to good results. I would be far more likely to complain/badger customer assistance in case of insufficient (for my needs) results.
Just another example of enshittification, or whatever you want to call it - capitalism placing growth and greed above the health and privacy of the individual.
It works because it's manipulative and most people don't have the context to understand. Some may think they now have to sign up or they'll lose something.
"Preying on the uninformed and less tech literate" works, sure, the same way basically every other scam works, by pressuring people to do things they normally wouldn't.
Adobe's web-based JPG to PNG converter is exactly like this. Upload a JPG, hit convert - it uploads the file, processes it on their end, and then refuses to give you the result until you "sign up for a free adobe account that we conveniently didn't tell you about until now!"
Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually decide not to purchase from them.
They'll then start spamming you without your consent a day later.
Ransom sign-ups belong in the same tier of horrible.
Modern downloadable software does this too. You download a "free" partition manager or "free" PDF converter, or whatever "free" - you install it, get through their wizard/main workflow to do what you want, but then it says "oops, sorry, you have to pay for this!"
Anti-consumer stuff it all is. What a shame software and websites like this are allowed to exist.
This is a little tangential, but your post reminded me that I've struggled with converting images at work because our vpn blocks a lot of those file conversation sites (presumably for good reason, but I'm not privy). Converting common file formats seems like such a common use case that I really feel like there should be a tool built into modern operating systems for it. It seems like an obvious add to me, but then again the Windows search functionality barely works so I'm not sure they're incentived to actually help their users right now.
Converting common file formats seems like such a common use case that I really feel like there should be a tool built into modern operating systems for it.
It is in modern operating systems. Maybe not Windows, but modern operating systems like macOS have it built in.
You can do it a number of ways, including using Automator, Preview, or even access it from the Finder. I did it about 30 times today.
Select file > right click > Quick Service > Convert
MacOS can convert between pretty much any reasonable combination of formats using its automation/shortcuts framework. RTF→HTML→word or HEIC→jpg→png, whatever.
It's oddly impressive how small-scale Adobe went with enforcing these registrations. Considering that converting between JPG and PNG is such a granular and common task that there are hundreds of websites just for that, in addition to it being built into almost every major OS.. it's very petty to ask for registration for something this small, rather than leave it open, like their color wheel tool.
Yesterday I was using a website to generate a logo (not mentioning them they don’t deserve any publicity), and after entering the details, refining what to emphasize on, description, my email and logo requirements, they generated some and refused to show it unless I pay, not just signing up.. literal scumbags, why would I pay before even seeing the logo ffs, what if I didn’t like it? How about all the time and details I put there?!
They just released a new version too! A bunch of really nice features!
Long live native desktop software (FOSS and perpetual licensed proprietary)! SAAS-ified desktop apps and subscription software can’t disappear fast enough, if you ask me. I think most of it will, besides the big players (Adobe and Autodesk), because it relies too heavily on traffic from Google (slowly drowning in SEO spam).
I don't really understand who this post is addressed to. The people that decide to do this just want more money. they won't stop because of some rant by a random stranger on the internet. The programmers who implement this have to do what their boss tells them to, or change jobs, and this isn't something worth changing jobs over. Everybody else already knows that it's a thing, knows why it happens and can't do anything about it.
I've walked out of jobs for being outright abusive before. This has made the job search much more difficult for me and has been a point of controversy in the hiring decision before. I held out for many months without employment but the savings dry up. This isn't a viable path for everyone to take. It has stunted my personal development and put me in a very difficult financial position.
Great. I have a disability and jobs I can do are difficult to find. The moral high ground is just a little bit harder to hold when your medical care isn't at stake.
Great that it has worked for you. Life is not black and white though. It's easy to have a spine when you have fuck you money in the bank, but not so easy when you have family to feed. Would you starve you kids on principle just because you want to "take responsibility" at work?
What a bizarre attitude. If you change people's minds they behave differently.
Hell even in your example, there is a difference between some programmer who tells themselves this and some person who raises a stink; suddenly doing unethical shit slows you down, costs political capital, and approaches being more trouble than its worth. Fewer shit things will get done because there will be less energy to pursue them.
I'm not even suggesting you go out and be some citizen activist - just be normal. You'd have feedback for other kinds of stupid idea.
It's ultimately on developers as the last, ethical line of defense: They're the ones typing in the code at the end of the day. Without them, the bosses couldn't implement these things. Unfortunately, for every good developer who draws a line in the sand, there's Bob, two desks down, who is happy to implement whatever dark pattern boss tells him to. Fuck Bob.
What we really need is some kind of Hippocratic Oath for Software, that we all agree to and can collectively use to resist this shit. Not going to happen, but one can dream.
I wish there were a way for users to share the websites that do this and other dark patterns so that I can avoid them. Effectively a reputation system. Search engines used to do this, but apparently not any more. We need a replacement.
What about a browser extension doing exactly that: a distributed user populated database, karma based abuse prevention (because it will be abused) and a big indicator that turns on from yellow to red according to the level of garbage the site is throwing against its users.
I am optimistic that a social graph can help with this, using transitive trust and making it easy to transitively "cut off" bad parts of the graph with a blocklist. The problem is that commercial graphs do become useless, as you say.
But with the Fediverse we now have a graph that is resistant to this. I'm not aware of anyone building a reputation system on top of it, but this is something I expect will develop in the future. The system's opinion about a particular data point would then be personalized based on the people you say you trust to indicate that information, combined with the people they say they trust, and so forth.
I agree, we need a replacement. At the protocol level I would like life insurance policy returns and banking service as a place to store my money that allows me to pay any portion of currency I want at any time. So Facebook can be paid for the time I'm on the site, for instance. The returns from the insurance contract might even make it all free to me (it would, easily). Everyone is happy except those who rely on reaching you via forced advertisements. Oh, and the people who rely on enslaving others.
Any such protocol would be labeled as evil, filthy socialism.
There are people out there who do whatever pop ups tell them to do. I was in a meeting once and we need to check something on a site the other person just clicked yes on the cookie banner without reading. I told him “You should click no on those” and he replied “I know, every keeps telling me that but I just click yes anyway”. I just blankly stared at him for a couple of seconds and returned the focus to the meeting.
This experience reminds me the “normies” use the internet very very differently than techy people and it explains a lot of the weird quirks on the web.
We are at the mercy of the lowest common denominator which happens to be a majority
I also dislike websites that get you down a path before requiring an email signup or cell phone verification.
But I much prefer the former to the latter; pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? Whereas I won't give out my phone number under pretty much any circumstance (and don't have a spam-only number).
When I have no choice, I use a free throwaway email service. Unfortunately it's much harder to get a throwaway phone number so it greatly annoys me when services (Twitter, specifically) require one
The only problem is - it works well. Websites get you invested before sigup on purpose to increase their conversion rate. I'm afraid it's gonna fall on deaf ears.
Readit News
On the other hand, I've been adjacent to the decision to add them before. You're under a lot of pressure to increase conversion in your onboarding funnel, so you test out moving your email capture up a bit in your conversion flow (ie to before you deliver results) and it works! Conversion increases throughout the funnel! So you keep it.
Dark patterns like this persist because they measurably work. Some people (you and me) get extra pissed off, but we're in the small minority relative to the people who sign up at an elevated rate. :(
I think this is the fundamental problem. Too many people trying to increase conversion in their onboarding funnels, crowding out people who want to put interesting stuff on the internet for purposes other than farming people for money.
Which is a beautiful way to live life.
Until you quit your job and build some indie thing and try to make money and fuck, that’s difficult.
And you’re broke. And you worked really hard on this thing. Turns out ‘farming people for money’ = ‘paying rent’.
And you realise, shit man, if I make it a bit worse according to my ethics and taste, I’ll actually make money. And I won’t have to go and take some other job.
And I’ll be sad that this is how humans work, but it is how humans work, and am I going to change that or just tag along for the ride?
The web is a brutal place for everyone.
I’m not a fan of these choices but we as users demand a lot for free and sites are going to do what they can to try to survive.
At some point there needs to be more than sterns looks to discourage these behaviors.
For example the image conversion site can be replaced with instructions how to do it on device.
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It ended poorly.
It’s a major reason why I created https://prose.sh to explore what’s possible. We don’t require an email and only ask for it on https://feeds.sh because it’s an rss-to-email notification service.
Read only websites and write SSH apps are pretty congruent to the HN bubble.
There’s an added benefit that only people that can open a terminal can create an account.
After all, you’re more engaged then!
Have some respect for your users, developers. ‘Cause you’re one of them.
No, they're not, not for most devs. Most devs don't use the stuff they produce. They're just hired guns, building something they're told to make. If they refuse to implement what they're told, they'll be fired for insubordination.
Your hand is forced if the other guy uses it and blows past you.
Reality cares not for niceties, and good people finish dead fucking last. You need to balance being a good man and an evil man to win or even just survive.
I could definitely see it working for the first case, which is all that your typical product/marketing person needs to justify their salary thus why the practice is popular, but I wonder if this actually ends up translating to actual profit (whether the spammed people end up buying stuff they wouldn’t have otherwise bought, and whether any prospective buyers that would’ve converted otherwise were driven away).
But I have seen other decisions made based on proxies to "paid us money." Eg we find that X% people who perform action Y wind up paying us money, and for really long funnels it's easier to get statistical significance for action Y than for "paid us money." And so we make some change, find that it increases the rate at which people do action Y, and declare victory. We try to keep in mind potential downstream impacts (like loss of trust), but it's hard to argue a vague, potential downside against a solid, measured number sitting in a google doc in front of you. I suspect the phenomenon you call out is somewhat common.
The business models of the web trap everyone within these incentives in order to be competitive - everyone hates it, but moloch demands it [0].
To escape it you have to escape the business model, to do that you have to escape the incentives, and to do that you have to boil the ocean and hope it works out [1].
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
[1]: https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...
Deleted Comment
Besides putting the business in a negative light for the new convert, I imagine a subset of those would feel more entitled than before. I probably would - if I had to give you something to convert my picture "for free", I would definitely feel entitled to good results. I would be far more likely to complain/badger customer assistance in case of insufficient (for my needs) results.
It works because it's manipulative and most people don't have the context to understand. Some may think they now have to sign up or they'll lose something.
"Preying on the uninformed and less tech literate" works, sure, the same way basically every other scam works, by pressuring people to do things they normally wouldn't.
Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually decide not to purchase from them. They'll then start spamming you without your consent a day later.
Ransom sign-ups belong in the same tier of horrible.
Modern downloadable software does this too. You download a "free" partition manager or "free" PDF converter, or whatever "free" - you install it, get through their wizard/main workflow to do what you want, but then it says "oops, sorry, you have to pay for this!"
Anti-consumer stuff it all is. What a shame software and websites like this are allowed to exist.
Or, grab a free image editor (https://www.getpaint.net/ is popular for Windows), open in one format, save in the other.
It is in modern operating systems. Maybe not Windows, but modern operating systems like macOS have it built in.
You can do it a number of ways, including using Automator, Preview, or even access it from the Finder. I did it about 30 times today.
Select file > right click > Quick Service > Convert
The most comprehensive solution is to download imagemagick.
That's the whole point, they want you to be invested.
Long live native desktop software (FOSS and perpetual licensed proprietary)! SAAS-ified desktop apps and subscription software can’t disappear fast enough, if you ask me. I think most of it will, besides the big players (Adobe and Autodesk), because it relies too heavily on traffic from Google (slowly drowning in SEO spam).
I disagree. I've been very intentional about the places I work and have managed to build a successful career while never implementing a dark pattern.
"I was just following orders" is not an excuse. Take responsibility for your actions.
Hell even in your example, there is a difference between some programmer who tells themselves this and some person who raises a stink; suddenly doing unethical shit slows you down, costs political capital, and approaches being more trouble than its worth. Fewer shit things will get done because there will be less energy to pursue them.
I'm not even suggesting you go out and be some citizen activist - just be normal. You'd have feedback for other kinds of stupid idea.
What we really need is some kind of Hippocratic Oath for Software, that we all agree to and can collectively use to resist this shit. Not going to happen, but one can dream.
But with the Fediverse we now have a graph that is resistant to this. I'm not aware of anyone building a reputation system on top of it, but this is something I expect will develop in the future. The system's opinion about a particular data point would then be personalized based on the people you say you trust to indicate that information, combined with the people they say they trust, and so forth.
Any such protocol would be labeled as evil, filthy socialism.
Unfortunately these patterns work great so they will never stop. As more dark patterns are “discovered”, we’ll see the web becoming more of a dump.
You see it every day, successful websites and socials become successful thanks to these pattern, not in spite of them.
This experience reminds me the “normies” use the internet very very differently than techy people and it explains a lot of the weird quirks on the web.
We are at the mercy of the lowest common denominator which happens to be a majority
But I much prefer the former to the latter; pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? Whereas I won't give out my phone number under pretty much any circumstance (and don't have a spam-only number).
I used to, but I've since taken to just not signing up to things instead.