It’s pretty easy to spot dark patterns when you look out for them, but I found a pretty obvious example of this.
Stoofie is a brand that sells water fountains for your pet (I don’t know what the problem with a water bowl is, but I digress). WayBack Machine
Plastered at the top of their website is “33% OFF Ends Today- Free Shipping” with no way to dismiss it. There is a scrolling text under the main image “FAST AND FREE SHIPPING 60-DAY FREE RETURNS”
If you scroll down, you’re immediately introduced with a product with the option to buy two preselected. The rest of this section explains itself:
Other things are sprinkled in the main page, but it really is the prime example of dark patterns. I am personally sick of finding them, but would love to see more examples of what others have found. Please, share your favorite examples of dark patterns. Don’t forget to archive them first so they can never be lived down.
One of the worst shopping basket designs I have ever seen, was where they added additional items together with the thing you wanted, forcing you to remove the thing they added before paying.
If they sell to anyone in australia let our consumer protection agency or whatever they called know. They tend to actually follow through with fining companies shit like this.
Amazon, no Prime, when there are several shipping options. It routinely selects by default the one that costs money, even if the free option (if it exists) is only a single day later.
Why no, I would not like to pay $9 to get it by Wednesday, because Thursday is fine and it saves me $9. Now fucking stop trying to trick me into it.
Why do people buy stuff from a creepy company like that? Couldn’t you just stop by at the local whatever shop on your way home? If you live in the middle of nowhere, that may not be an option, but surely there are lots of other online shops to choose from.
Why do people buy stuff from a creepy company like that?
Because its the biggest and most visible one that everyone uses. And because so many Amazon shoppers are Prime Members anyway, as the cost of not being a Prime Member makes it functionally a requirement.
Couldn’t you just stop by at the local whatever shop on your way home?
How much would I pay not to spend an extra 30-60min fighting traffic and waiting in long lines? In that sense, Prime is a steal.
I guess the convenience really depends on where you live. In my case, it’s really simple to do most of my shopping as a part of my daily commute. The place where I switch between a train and a bus, there’s also a shopping center right next to the station, so why not.
The presumption is that the brick and mortar store is not bad. Yes, they are bad too. Maybe just as bad, maybe not as bad, but they are no saints.
Options are limited for shopping, so we don’t have much choice. The reason I buy from Amazon is that essentially I didn’t want to shop at any local store any longer, they have bad polices AND they treat me like crap - not a valued customer.
Along came Amazon and I started buying from them. Then there was a big boo-hoo that ecommerce was killing their brick and mortar store sales. No sir, you were killing the sales but now I have somewhere else to go.
Amazon is horrible for many reasons, but pricing and customer service is not one of them. There’s a silver lining to that storm cloud.
For all its very real shittiness, you will likely find that Amazon ships faster, has lower prices, has a better selection, and much easier returns than other online shops. This almost entirely the result of their massive monopolistic power. I don’t begrudge people that are squeezed for time and money from trying to save either, but Amazon needs to be broken up.
For a lot of the cheap stuff on Amazon, the price is literally double at a local brick and mortar retailer. Phone chargers, kitchen utensils, towels, cleaning products are high-margin examples that come to mind. Plus, of course, your time and gas money to grab it. Some people also struggle with impulse purchases they may grab while shopping in store. Its easy to see why people continue to throw money at creepy Bezos and just wait for shit to appear on their porch.
The difference in selection is very real. If you need to buy one of those once in a lifetime things, you’ll probably find those in Amazon. The local stores have no incentive to keep those in stock, because they will probably only sell less than ten of those things within the next 20 years.
However, when it comes to phone chargers, towels, garbage bags or soap, my local store is perfectly fine by me. I don’t even know how much cheaper those things would be on Amazon, but I prefer to keep the local stores around. If I happen to need a very specific kind of charger with some special features, I’ll just see if there’s an online store for that sort of stuff. Usually there is and it’s also within a 1000 km radius of where I live. Sure, shipping usually takes a few days, but I’m in no hurry.
Most cookie consent dialogues:
- There’s only one big accepted button
- If the decline button even exists, it’s grey whereas the other one is green.
- The decline option could be buried deep under other menus.
- The sizes of the buttons
Most companies are trying to actively manipulate you to accept all cookies, but nowadays there are a few companies that don’t resort to any of these dirty tricks.
You forgot a million switches for each “partner”. More like prostitution.
Based on the number of partners some companies seem to have, they are far more promiscuous than most humans.
Yeah, EU fixed tjat somewhat, it gas to be privacy-by-default niw, the save choice being pre-selected and obvious and etc. But most dialogues are now illegal; no legal entity complains, nobody fixes it.
The one that scares me the most is:
Accept all or Settings
And you have to opt out 5-10 buttons and at the end there is a “save settings” or the “accept all” button again in green.
Who has time for this shit? Just for a stupid article? We need laws against these.
With a heading “We care about your privacy”.
🙄
“We care about your privacy. We absolutely hate it, but it counts as caring, doesn’t it?”
Oh they care. They care a lot. Particularly that you don’t have any so they can sell all your details to any bidder.
They care about it so much that they probably have a full time UI designer whose job is to figure out new ways to trick and manipulate users to hand out even more data.
Oh I remember those thoroughly cursed menus where you have to manually disable 256 cookies one by one. Haven’t seen those in a while though, so I guess some piece of legislation is doing its job.
Pretty sure EU law says that the buttons should be identical
Exactly. It should be as easy to decline all cookies as it is to accept. And user’s consent can’t be implicit.
I wish it was legal to ddos the sites that violate this law.
That’s actually a nightmare
Who has time for this shit? Just for a stupid article?Won’t using reader mode ( if your browser supports it ) help you avoid this ? or those browser add-ons like " I don’t care about cookies "
I’m honestly surprised no-one has built an extension to automatically opt out of them, or at least the major cookie providers interfaces.
I realise there are many extensions which outright block cookies, etc; I’m meaning specifically the annoying dialogues you describe
Aarhus university has done exactly that! https://consentomatic.au.dk/
It doesn’t work 100% of the time but it’s pretty good
In ublock origin settings. There is an “annoyances” group with options. It should take care of most of those popups.
AFAIK this uses UX design rules
Site has cookie consent dialogue?
immediately leave site (Most Popular)
That’s what my mother does because she’s senile.
Having the dialogue is a good thing.
(I don’t know what the problem with a water bowl is, but I digress)
(cats are more likely to drink moving water than still water since moving water is less likely to have bad things growing in it)
They also (generally) don’t like to have their water next to their food because when they drink they put their head down and can’t see predators that might be attracted to the food.
For some reason one of my cats only drinks water that she scoops up with her foot.
It means we have to clean her bowl way more often than should be necessary because the debris her feet collect gets deposited in the water bowl.
We have a cat that scoops her food out of the bowl, walks a few feet, drops it on the ground and eats (most of it). It’s very annoying to constantly have to sweep up cat food. Maybe this is related.
That does sound very annoying! The first time I noticed my cat doing this, her food and litter box were in the basement, which was stone and dirt in that house. (We put them down there because it was the only place in that house where we could practically prevent the dog from getting to them.) Nowadays the cat stuff is in, essentially, a much cleaner sun porch; as a result, we still have to clean her bowl more frequently than seems reasonable, but it lasts a lot longer than it used to.
We have a cat that does that too. She’ll drink normally as well, though. I view it as her cleaning her little feet.
That could be, but the bowl is communal between our four animals. I wish she wouldn’t.
Huh. I always wondered. When I’m poiring our dog water to the bowl when hiking, he always prefers to drink “from the bottle” - the bowl is there basically to catch the rest to return to the bottle (or for the other dog to drink). Guess now I maybe know why he does it.
Good to know, thanks for the insight!
Working for a certain big fucking corpo(that I utterly hate from bottom of my heart but don’t really have an option to leave), I see those patterns all over the product. Not just that, its practically impossible for non tech savvy to choose a non bundled or cheaper product or plan because it’s burried somewhere out of your sight
I’m not sure what you mean by “dark patterns” in this context. Isn’t this just marketing?
Is it that the more expensive choice is pre-selected? That the discounted price is likely just the real price and it’s never sold at the higher price? (that one got Saatva in trouble! - https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/open-lawsuit-settlements/11-5m-saatva-com-false-advertising-class-action-settlement/)
I read recently that the phrase “noticing patterns” is a racist dog whistle but I don’t have a firm handle on how or why.
I don’t know if dark patterns are exempt but the timing is weird.Dude what are you on about lol. Wikipedia on dark patterns
Those are pretty bright patterns in my book. More of the usual BS.
