The U.S. FTC, along with two other international consumer protection networks, announced on Thursday the results of a study into the use of “dark patterns” – or manipulative design techniques – that can put users’ privacy at risk or push them to buy products or services or take other actions they otherwise wouldn’t have. TechCrunch:
In an analysis of 642 websites and apps offering subscription services, the study found that the majority (nearly 76%) used at least one dark pattern and nearly 67% used more than one. Dark patterns refer to a range of design techniques that can subtly encourage users to take some sort of action or put their privacy at risk. They’re particularly popular among subscription websites and apps and have been an area of focus for the FTC in previous years. For instance, the FTC sued dating app giant Match for fraudulent practices, which included making it difficult to cancel a subscription through its use of dark patterns.
[…] The new report published Thursday dives into the many types of dark patterns like sneaking, obstruction, nagging, forced action, social proof and others. Sneaking was among the most common dark patterns encountered in the study, referring to the inability to turn off the auto-renewal of subscriptions during the sign-up and purchase process. Eighty-one percent of sites and apps studied used this technique to ensure their subscriptions were renewed automatically. In 70% of cases, the subscription providers didn’t provide information on how to cancel a subscription, and 67% failed to provide the date by which a consumer needed to cancel in order to not be charged again.
So, 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.
My guess is a combination of user-hostile design and deceptive compliance. I wish there were a catchier term for it that captured the nefarious nature of what you mean.
But what is the word for “knowing what the user wants, blatantly ignoring it and imposing the companies will anyway”?
Enshittification will often involve doing things like this, yes. But as the link itself states, the actual meaning—per Doctorow’s original definition—is an entire process, and a little more descriptive. These things are not the same, one is just frequently a symptom of the other.
Sorry if this comes across as pedantic, I’m in a personal quest, of sorts, to protect the original meaning because I think it’s too important to lose. To anyone else reading this: please, don’t use enshittification when you really only mean “the platform is doing something bad.”
For the quoted behavior, I’m a big proponent of “asshole design.”
In other words, asshole design is only one part of the enshititification process.
Yeah, I think you could say that :^)
The most important things to remember about enshittification are the reasons why it happens in the first place and the particular manner in which it does, time and time again. To anyone interested in this topic, consider giving Doctorow’s talk a watch. It’s great, and explains all of this really well.
You know that it’s not a new concept, right? Just a new word for a specific type of rent seeking that has plagued capitalism forever.
It’s nice to see people learning economics from YA fiction authors, but read some books man
You know that it’s not a new concept, right? Just a new word for a specific type of rent seeking that has plagued capitalism forever.
Any pre-existing name for this specific type of rent seeking you’d rather people used instead? For what it’s worth, I believe enshittification has its own benefits.
It’s nice to see people learning economics from YA fiction authors, but read some books man
There are better ways to express yourself than this.
Being a YA fiction author does not diminish the worth of one’s ideas or their other works. Cory also worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is absolutely a position that, coupled with his many years of studying the digital landscape, gives him a level of insight into it that makes people interested in what he has to say about it, and for good reason. It’s not merely about economics.
If you think people could do the subject, themselves, or others better in this regard by consuming better material, you could point a better direction than “read some books”
I’m just annoyed that people think rent seeking is some newly discovered concept. I’m not sure if there’s a name for the very specific type we’re referring to and I’m not sure there needs to be.
I think we’d be much better off if people actually understand the underpinning concept rather than having a thin and shallow understanding of just one single way it manifests.
I’ll let the opening paragraph of the “rent seeking” wiki page to show why:
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions and potential national decline.
Successful capture of regulatory agencies (if any) to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for rent-seekers in a market while imposing disadvantages on their uncorrupt competitors. This is one of many possible forms of rent-seeking behavior.
(Emphasis mine)
On the wiki itself, each one of those items in the list I bolded has an entire wiki page about it and I’m pretty certain what is called “enshittification” fits into at least one of them.
I just wish people would care about the actual thing that’s going on and not just one aspect of one type of the thing.
Edit: for any downvoters, look at my response to the reply below for clarification. Yes I’m glad that a small group of terminally online nerds in the tech industry have finally discovered one aspect (and consequence) of rent seeking. That’s not really my issue.
If it is not indeed a new concept, it seems a great deal of people either didn’t know about it, or refused to care. Rather than be annoyed at the rediscovery, perhaps a better outlook would be to rejoice that these same ideas are reaching more people through the new words than it did with the old?
The problem is, they’re not actually learning about anything real, they’re learning about one specific outcome of rent seeking in the modern world that they only noticed because of their profession. By giving this very narrow and specific concept a cute name, and making that shit popular or whatever has literally prevented young people from understanding these important economic concepts on any real level.
So yeah I’m glad that a small portion of terminally online tech nerds have finally discovered a major form of rent seeking in their industry and identified it as a problem. But then they just stop there as if it exists in a vacuum. I just wish they’d read some actual books (or hell, if you don’t want to turn off the screen, audio books?) about the subject rather than just repeat some clever term over and over.
That’s my problem. I guess it’s nitpicky. But I do believe there are people who will now never learn another single thing about economic concepts that affect their lives because they’re not even aware that this “newly discovered phenomenon” is just one small aspect of a much larger problem that is endemic to all of capitalism. They just think it’s this quirky thing that only affects tech.
It’s easier to just put up with a small change you dislike rather than search for an alternative and then learn it. Companies do this on purpose to avoid losing too many users while maximizing taking advantage of them. They can do this when they’re the ones in control of the software running on your computer/phone.
What is it called when people do this?
Proprietary software, because this doesn’t happen when the users can remove the anti-features. You don’t need to personally be a programmer but you do need to find like-minded people. A free software alternative to proprietary programs probably already exist (free as in freedom) but they may not work exactly like the proprietary one, or not yet be complete.
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.
Have you tried blocking them with uBlock Origin?
Gotta use “medium mode,” and then allow scripts individually until the site isn’t broken.
More people should be aware of this hidden setting in uBlock Origin.
I also use the element picker to straight up remove those fake “sign up to read the rest” “pop-ups” that grey the page out and stop you from scrolling. Can usually get past some of the lazier pay walls that way.
same, i use the picker for all kinds of things.
Hmm I haven’t tried this. Thanks for the suggestion.
It works wonders. I’ve blocked so much crap on YT. Everything including the shopping ads, the little white watch more popus, the related video popups, and whatever else I’ve forgotten about.
My home feed is nothing but actual videos I can watch - no shorts, catagories, special promotions or other junk.
I also set my bookmark to the subscriptions page, that way I always start there. No need to “ring that bell” when all the latest stuff I’ve subscribed to is the first I see.
Can you block updates via hosts file?
“Dark patterns” is the crux of capitalism. There have always been manipulative sales tactics with or without tech. “Number go up” worship has led to countless methods of abusive sales tactics, pervasive advertisement, unwanted spam and cold calling, and deceptive pricing.
Good on the FTC for trying to rein in some aspects of this but without addressing the root cause it’s like plugging one hole as the dam is about to burst.
The older I get, the more I question the value of public companies vs the damage they do. As soon as you’ve got shareholders at large to please, you’re incentivized to keep your share price going up above all else, especially in the short term. Global stock markets seemed like a great idea at the time, but I feel they’re doing more damage than good at this end of capitalism.
A company going public is always a bad sign to me. Whenever I see it, I instantly distrust what that company might be doing next. Clearly it’s bad if my gut reaction is to distrust.
And with the legal/SC climate being what it is, I bet the FTC won’t even have the power to plug that one hole.
There are a few pieces of software I use (regularly) that would continue to get money from me if they followed the old model of paying for major versions. (pay for v1, get v 1.1-1.9) with v2 being the next “big” update that you’d have to pay an upgrade fee (smaller than a new purchase) to continue on the train.
But they switched to subscription model, and lost me as an “active” customer.
YNAB is the big one I use at least weekly, sometimes daily. I am on YNAB4 until it will no longer function because I’m not paying them a monthly fee to use that product. I would have GLADLY paid for major updates/changes even if it equaled the subscription in the end. But each of those purchases would be a decision I made on whether the change had enough value for me.
Subscriptions allow them to not strive for large enough improvements to warrant a version update / upgrade fee. They just run along with little or no useful changes (IMHO).
I can highly recommend you to try Actual Budget to replace YNAB, it has come a long away and has bank sync and a very usable mobile (progressive web) app now
That has been on my radar for a while. I haven’t checked it out recently. I’m sure YNAB4 will die sometime in the future, but I’m going to milk it out to the end :). There’s already a hack for android (for dropbox syncing) and hoops to jump through to get it working in MacOs. It’s just a matter of time before the house of cards falls apart.
Actual is now open-source and 100% free. New signups are currently disabled until we figure out a plan for a potential hosted option. Go to the repo to learn more. You can self-host it and modify it however you want. See the blog post.
Looks sick. I’ve been using Tiller, and it’s honestly the last major thing holding me to Google Docs. If it’s FOSS and syncs w/ banks, I’ll self-host it and be happy. If it works, I’ll happily send the amount I paid for Tiller to the team.
Edit: Bank account linking seems to be “coming soon”. That’s a critical feature for me, since I have a bunch of accounts and a huge part of the value is pulling all of that in for me. I’ll play with it anyway, but I really need that feature (and I’m happy to pay a service like Plaid for access).
Edit2: Looks like it’s implemented, but it’s essentially EU-only. I’d really like them to support Plaid or something.
What’s it called when a subscription confirms that you cancelled and then just keeps charging you anyway, and provides no customer support so you have to call your bank and charge back 4 months of payments? Because Bumble did that to me 2 years ago.
I would call that fraud. lol.
A good case for a charge back.
Outright theft?
DirecTV did that to my dad years ago. He called to cancel but they sat on it for 4 months and gave us service but didn’t stop sending bills. He just just stopped paying them until they started threatening legal action so he had to keep fighting them. Eventually they gave up.
Dark patterns are basically best practices at this point
I wouldn’t say “best practices”, though “standard operating procedure” might be more the case.
Depends what the definition of “best” is.
In capitalism “best” is the most profit for the least time and effort.
I think they’re using “best practices” as the industry term used by corporations
I know it’s really low hanging fruit, but a couple of weeks back, on a whim, I decided to play Candy Crush for the first time in probably ten years. For the first time since I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, in fact.
And boy oh boy, is that shit eye-opening when you’re playing with a greater understanding of what makes an ADHD brain tick.
The speed at which you can tick through the screens to get to playing, the satisfying way the haptics tap when you make a match, the constancy of advertising power ups. The game is a masterpiece in addictive design, working just on the right side of being compulsive to play.
Fortunately for me, being aware of this stuff means I’m not tempted to spend any money on it. As soon as I’m out of lives I shut it down. But I’m still susceptible to its charms all the same, and it’s kinda scary how easy it is.
And yet the article doesn’t mention whether they’re going to do anything about it. I’m guessing nothing, based on this:
This isn’t the first time the FTC has examined the use of dark patterns. In 2022, it also authored a report that detailed a range of dark patterns, but that wasn’t limited to only subscription websites and apps. Instead, the older report looked at dark patterns across industries, including e-commerce and children’s apps, as well as different types of dark patterns, like those used in cookie consent banners and more.
like those used in cookie consent banners
Amazing how big some sites are and yet they still have the shadiest cookie banners. Individually clicking categories to disable, having to scroll to save instead of being tricked by the “accept all” that gets highlighted when you start disabling consent categories…
Individually clicking categories to disable
Not legal in EU, you can report this to appropriate department. What I hate is if I have VPN enabled I will get privacy banners in Google sites but if I don’t then Google will collect all data because I am not in EU.
In the B2B world, there’s no escaping these banners. It’s as if GDPR never happened.
Great site for rating and ranking mobile games by dark pattern presence.
Can probably narrow it down to most proprietary software.
Evil UX
I’m shocked!
/s
