Admiral PatrickFTC study finds 'dark patterns' used by a majority of subscription apps and websites | TechCrunch
VahtosSo, a dark pattern is a design that tries to trick the user into something. But what is the word for “knowing what the user wants, blatantly ignoring it and imposing the companies will anyway”?
Example: I think YouTube shorts are a terrible format, and I find them generally irritating. So I click the X on the element in YouTube that has a bunch of side scrolling cards, where each card is one of these shorts. YouTube informs me it will hide them for 30 days and then they’ll be back.
Another example, Windows Update. I’ve set all the group policy settings so it should never restart and update without me triggering it. But, if I allow it to download the update, then damn my group policy settings, it is going to apply that update and restart whenever it wants.
YouTube have been doing that sort of thing for years though. Do you remember the push to have everyone switch to a Google+ account with a real name attached?
They'd ask if you wanted to do the aforementioned, and if you said no, they responded "OK we'll ask again later."
No "Never ask me this again.", just the implicit "f--k you, we're going to pester you with this over and over again until you sign up."
After they got enough sign-ups they quit asking. And then Google+ went down the Swanee, so they relented and decided that maybe it was OK for people to have pseudonymous accounts after all. It only took years for that to happen.
Can't see how short-form content is going to fail in the same way, so there'll be nothing here to teach them the lesson again.
It’s a language game too. Target recently changed their credit card reader screen - it’s been annoying about their rewards program for a while, but before it was “skip” to pass the screen, now the button is “not now”. Skip is more of a “no” than “not now”. Either way, though, they’re shoving their easier shopper tracking down everyone’s throats.