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Majority of sites and apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscriptions
- fredsmith219 2y agoI use virtual card and lock the card as soon as I’m done. The company will send a few nag notices then cancel for me.
- noman-land 2y agoWhich virtual card service do you use?
- bdcravens 2y agoSome banks and credit card companies offer this as part of your service. For others, Privacy.com is a good option.
- weberer 2y agoI generally use the Apple app store on my phone if anything requires a subscription, even if I usually use the service on some other device. It just makes it way easier to see which subscriptions are still in effect, and lets you cancel them with one click. I hate Apple's billing monopoly shenanigans in general, but this one case where it actually benefits the end-user.
- bluGill 2y agoOnly because it isn't worth it for the company to go after you. If they want to fight you a canceled credit card is not a unsubscribe notice and they are likely to win in court. However if you try to unsubscribe and discover it is too difficult calling the credit card companies and ask them to stop payment can get attention - credit cards companies have consumer protection and they can make things difficult for those making unsubscribe difficult.
- shreddit 2y agoIs anybody surprised by this? Companies are not your friend, they only want your money...
- jjbinx007 2y agoI'd argue that companies do this are actually your enemy. Most people would agree that stealing and lying is wrong, but this isn't far removed from that.
- highcountess 2y agoYes, but also consider what you are saying, this “companies” are really just a group of people, many of those people who engage in or support these types of rather pernicious and arguably evil patterns of behavior are here and all around us, and they likely all rationalize their involvement with some kind of “I just implement what I’m told” or “I’m under pressure to increase revenue” or “if I don’t do it someone else will”. Companies are just people, a collection of people selected often to engage in rather evil, sneaky, and hateful behaviors in many cases, including the gaslighting about “hate” that many engage in as a means for manipulating an increase revenues … “we are about love … so you will give us more of your money.”
- jampekka 2y agoThe socioeconomic system that selects for such companies is actually the enemy. We accept and even encourage and glorify lying and cheating, as long as it's made for monetary gain.
- truthhurts2 2y ago[flagged]
- tgv 2y agoUsually, misdirections work better if they're not straight lies.
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- helsinkiandrew 2y agoFYI: the specific dark patterns are listed and described on pages 8-16 of the report: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/dark-commercial-patterns_44f5e846-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/dark-co... > They generally fall in one of the following categories: > forced action, interface interference, nagging, obstruction, sneaking, social proof, urgency
- voidUpdate 2y agoIf those are dark patterns, then most websites I visit violate that
- ben_w 2y agoYes? That's the headline and the opening paragraph...
- voidUpdate 2y agoI read that as specifically about marketing subscriptions, I mean in general
- ssss11 2y agoSo much of everything marketing and sales is unwanted.
- kombookcha 2y agoThat's the disturbing part, isn't it - it's completely normalized to the point that most of the sites you're gonna pass through on a given day will be doing it to some degree. It's like if in literally every room you entered on a given day, there was one of those street peddlers who accost you to make you sign a subscription to something or other. Sure you can just firmly tell him no a couple of times and he'll back off, but going through your day like that sucks!
- HumblyTossed 2y ago
- lynx23 2y agoNot really surprising. The only time my world was rocked was when I figured out a middle-class high-priced spa my partner and I are regularily visiting since more then 10 years is using hidden divs to hide pr0n-akin SEO on their main page. We only "saw" it because a screen reader we were using ignored the visibiliy of elements. Felt pretty surreal, but helped me to understand that everyone is doing fowl-play these days.
- panstromek 2y ago> pr0n-akin SEO What is that?
- darmon333 2y agoUsing porn sites to enhance your search ranking. SEO = Search engine optimization.
- panstromek 2y agoDidn't know this is a thing. How is that even beneficial, when porn is usually shadow banned?
- darmon333 2y ago"How is that even beneficial" Linking works by linkbacks and other factors, there are specific organizations that reverse engineer googles alogorithms and there's an entire industry dedicated to hacking who gets listed on the first 1-3 pages of googles search results. AKA you can pay an SEO company to tell you what you need to link to get your webpage/company to float up the list of google results when people google for certain keywords. You have to understand there is big money in exposure. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-payments-to-apple-reached-20-billion-in-2022-cue-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-... Just see what google pays to be on apples iphone, thats a tonne of money, and we can be certain the bean counters have run the numbers.
- 2y ago
- seydor 2y agowe should use the more accurate term 'Modern User Retention Strategies'
- Ygg2 2y agoWe should use more accurate term "Modern Money Extraction Bullshit".
- kombookcha 2y agoTo enter this Free And Open Space you must consent to being held upside down and given a vigorous shake. Any money or valuables that fall from your pockets will belong to us, and go in this big sack marked with a dollar sign. :)
- highcountess 2y agoThese dark patterns are also pervasive across all of American society in general. A common one that is spread across many aspects of American society is the hiding of the full cost of something, e.g., flights, apartment leases, home purchases, car purchases, internet contracts, etc. where there are all kinds of last moment cost ad-ons. That may look like extra monthly fees on apartment leases beyond the price that was advertised, air travel that obscures things like the baggage charges, internet service that requires monthly equipment rental and various fees, etc. You know it’s all deceptive and fraudulent just by virtue of that they hide it, but also that the companies usually vehemently resist being transparent about the coerced extraction of money, not really all that different than theft. When someone holds a gun to your head you also have a choice to not hand over your money.
- lynx23 2y agoGenuinely interested, is this perhaps a result of the practice of writing prices without VAT? As a european, I always felt this has a fraudulent touch.
- jaza 2y agoDitto as an Australian. To be fair, we have a valid historical reason for prices down here always including tax - GST (our name for VAT / sales tax) was only introduced in 2000, and before that there was never any tax involved at point of sale - so it would have been too big a cultural change for "the marked price" to suddenly not be "the exact price that you pay". (Tipping is also rare here, same as in most of Europe.) So, yeah, the American way of "marked price plus tax plus tips" seems like egregious fraud to us too. Although, over the past decade or so, "credit / debit card surcharge" fees (generally of 1-2%, but sometimes much more) - which aren't included in the marked price - have become pervasive here. And they're often charged (both online and in-store) when there is no alternative form of payment available (either a really lousy alternative - e.g. "pay by bank transfer, but we won't give you the product until the transfer has cleared, which may take up to 3 business days" - or literally no alternative at all, which is supposed to be illegal, but plenty of businesses seem to get away with it). But I guess it's a good sign, that quite a lot of people here complain loudly about such fees - maybe in the USA, the vast majority just resign themselves to it being yet one more gotcha creeping into everyday payments.
- truthhurts2 2y ago[flagged]
- ben_w 2y agoEvery part of both sentences is wrong.
- truthhurts2 2y ago[flagged]
- bcye 2y agoWhy exactly does an international organisation have the US FTC as part of its logo and advertise a US .gov side?
- laserlight 2y agoProbably because [0]: > The Network operates under an anually [sic] rotating presidency. On 1 July 2024 the Federal Trade Commission, United States of America, assumed the role of the 2024-2025 ICPEN Presidency. [0] https://icpen.org/who-we-are https://icpen.org/who-we-are
- jobigoud 2y agoIt looks like this organization has rotating presidency and the current president happens to be the US FTC.
- rdm_blackhole 2y agoI am not sure if social proof is a dark pattern. If you use it to say, here, we already have x number of satisfied customers, what is possibly wrong with that?
- aabhay 2y agoYes but to place it in an unnecessary step between clicking “cancel” and “yes I’m sure, continue to cancel”?
- rdm_blackhole 2y agoI am not sure what this has anything to do with my statement above. I am talking about social proof here, which is listed as part of dark patterns. What is wrong with saying, we have X number of happy customers? As long as it's true, I am not sure how it is deceptive.
- ale42 2y agoI think it's fine as a marketing argument, like in the page where you present your product. As much as citing the big names already using it. What isn't fine is when you try to book an hotel room and you get nagging messages saying that 2849 other people want to book the same room for the same dates. And of course when you try to unsubscribe and you need to pass through marketing material, with or without social proof.
- lolinder 2y agoThat's not social proof, that's false urgency, which is its own pattern listed separately. > Dark patterns involving urgency impose a real or fake temporal or quantitative limit on a deal to pressure the consumer into making a purchase, thus exploiting the scarcity heuristic. Accordingly, such dark patterns may also be referred to as scarcity cues or claims. Examples include low stock and high demand messages or a countdown timer to indicate an expiring deal or discount.
- Tade0 2y agoIt gets worse when you're a contractor and regular consumer protections don't apply, since they address you as a business. I'm currently receiving unwanted attention from a credit scoring company, whose sales person said falsehoods about their records about me just to make a sale. I had to go to their office to confirm that without buying a subscription, because while they're legally compelled to give me this information, they don't have to make it easy, so the only ways are appearing there personally or usig snail mail.
- Ylpertnodi 2y agoName and shame?
- Tade0 2y agoI kind of want to, but they're local to Poland and maybe, just maybe their lawyers are reading this. Also they're infamous for such practices now that legislation protecting from loans taken using a stolen id is in effect and they lost their value proposition. In any case when I went there I've met a man who had a poor credit score because a person with the same name and almost the same id number had a court case against him, and someone somewhere made a typo. Strong case for giving children original names.
- liendolucas 2y agoWhy isn't there yet a "two clicks away unsubscribe" law? Unsubscribing from any service is two clicks away: one for unsubscribing and the second should be a mail with a link to confirm that you effectively want to unsubscribe. And you should receive another email confirming that you definitely unsubscribed. This button for unsubscribing should be visible at all times from whatever app/browser/GUI you're using. It is as simple as that. Why isn't this a solved problem yet?
- ant6n 2y agoyou could do a one-click unsubscribe, but then set up a website where that button keeps jumping away from your mouse for 20 minutes, while it's showing you uplifting messages why in fact, you should continue with the subscription. Still, only one click! Or, follow this maze with your mouse pointer until the unsubscribe button in the middle. If you hover-move across a wall, you need to start from the beginning. Good luck!
- oefrha 2y agoPretty sure when I unsubbed from Amazon Prime a few years back, I had to navigate three or four pages of “are you really sure…” where the primary button sometimes took me further and sometimes sent me back. It was fun. And afterwards my Roku TV box somehow managed to resub me twice even though I didn’t watch any Prime content (customer support rep said it was the Roku and I had no other explanation).
- justinclift 2y ago> And afterwards my Roku TV box somehow managed to resub me twice even though I didn’t watch any Prime content ... Is that the kind of thing that a pet chewing on a remote control (or similar) could trigger?
- oefrha 2y agoNo idea. I just wanted the customer service rep to reverse the credit card charge (yeah I only found out from monthly review of credit card bill, pretty sure I never even got an email saying my subscription was reenabled) and cancel the subscription, and didn’t prod when that goal was achieved. After the second time I ditched the Roku altogether. IIRC I also did a sign-out-everywhere.
- navaed01 2y agoIm more shocked by the world of direct mail advertising. I constantly receive important and substantive looking letters from banks, car insurance, car warranty resellers that are all aiming to trigger a negative emotional reaction (urgency) so you open their mail and don’t throw it immediately in the trash. The sheer volume of junk mail I receive and its toll on the environment throughout the entire chain honestly makes me shudder. In the digital world FIGMA - Is by far the worst at adding monthly users to your account, without clear indication that it’s happened and they make it incredibly difficult to find where to unsubscribe those users as an Admin
- lolinder 2y agoA particularly egregious example is that once you get a mortgage you'll get flooded with hundreds of letters over years bearing the name of your mortgage company in the top left corner of the window claiming to be extremely urgent. If you look closely at these mailers you'll note that the name of the mortgage company isn't quite where the return address should be, and if you open the mailer and read the fine print they do finally disclaim being the mortgage company, but they're intentionally designed to mislead you into thinking they're from your company in a way that really ought to be illegal but isn't.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoIf any piece of mail has “standard postage” stamped on it on the top right, throw it in the trash. Any legitimate mail has “first class” stamped on it. https://www.mw-direct.com/blog/posts/first-class-mail-vs-standard-mail-learn-the-difference/ https://www.mw-direct.com/blog/posts/first-class-mail-vs-sta...
- technothrasher 2y agoI found a small trick that much of the most junky mail doesn't get delivered to business addresses, and so I forwarded all my mail to my business address. This worked for a little while, and greatly reduced the amount of junk mail I received. But the US post office only lets you forward for a limited amount of time (or makes you pay a ridiculously high price to keep doing it). At that point, I just took down my mailbox and changed my address on all my bills and such to my work address. This lead to the USPS reporting to HUD that my house was abandoned. That got forwarded to the bank that holds my mortgage, who freaked out. I got them calmed down, but then went through a period of having to explain to quite a few people why I don't have a mailbox. I got accused of being selfish and of being a luddite. I got told it was illegal. I basically was shamed about it endlessly. After ten years, I finally just put a mailbox back up at my house because my son, who just turned eighteen and was applying for credit cards and such, ran into issues where he couldn't receive them because he had no residential mailbox and the banks told him "tough luck".
- pkorzeniewski 2y agoI absolutely hate subscriptions, I can't wrap my head around why people got so comfortable with allowing companies to charge their credit cards whenever they want, how much they want and how long they want.. Yes it's convenient, but there are so many potential problems - what if you loose access to your account and basically won't be able to cancel the subscription? what if company will continue to charge you even after closing your account? what if they accidently charge you for who knows what? what if you simply forget you even had a subscription? I've had enough bad experiences with subscriptions that I avoid them at all cost, just to give an example - I subscribed to a popular streaming service because I wanted to watch a movie that was only available on their platform. I immediately canceled my subscription so it would end with current billing month, but to my surprise when I checked my credit card history several months later I've noticed an additional charge that was around 10x what I paid for the one month of subscription! I emailed them and they answered me that "it was some kind of mistake" and refunded me, but it made me realize how dangerous subscriptions are. Subscriptions should be able to be paid by invoices - you receive an invoice before next billing period and if you don't pay, account is locked, but of course that would give user too much control over their spendings and companies clearly don't want that.
- truthhurts2 2y ago[flagged]
- lmpdev 2y agoAs far as I know Adobe was a billion-dollar company decades before forcing subscriptions on users
- CuriouslyC 2y agoIronic quip: The guy who apparently got Adobe to switch to subscriptions was on the Hacker News cofounder matching, claiming that as one of his big accomplishments. I almost wanted to try and match with him just to impart the magnitude of the pain that decision had caused in the user community, and how it ultimately has opened the door for photoshop competitors even if it has juiced short term profits. Definitely a short sighted business move that is going to eventually end Adobe's market dominance.
- washadjeffmad 2y agoWho in higher education is teaching and encouraging dark patterns? Where are people learning not just how to design them, but that there's no ethical impact to subjecting people to them?
- Akronymus 2y agoI guess MBA fits the bill.
- eclecticfrank 2y agoThey learn about while refering to it as nudging and behavioural theory. Here is one example: https://sam.hwr-berlin.de/en/vorlesungsverzeichnis.php?p_id=40&action=course.courseDetailPage&courseLectureSeriesId=31012 https://sam.hwr-berlin.de/en/vorlesungsverzeichnis.php?p_id=...
- jdmoreira 2y agoHigher education? You think the world runs on the output of higher education? It's all about incentives and the incentive is to make money. PE firms, investors, the founder, the employee with stock options. The world runs on making money and subscription businesses are one hell of a cash cow.
- maxehmookau 2y agoYup, I'm about ready for governments to get involved here. The place I buy my laundry detergent from now wants a subscription in return for 20% off so now I have to subscribe every time I purchase it, and then unsubscribe. Or be the sucker who pays 20% extra for it.
- arrobbiato 2y agoI’d propose some kind of certification for SaaSes, maybe including a digitally signed seal on the website and a registry, validating that the site doesn’t use dark patterns. Or maybe something like that exists?
- AlexDragusin 2y agoWhat a nice idea, perfect as a subscription business :) On a serious note, might work well as some sort of community effort.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- awahab92 2y agosubscriptions should just be illegal so sick of these bottom feeder apps praying on users forgetting that they are subscribed so they can keep extracting life-essence from your empty husk of a corpse
- bluGill 2y agoI won't even agree to 6 months no payments or interest when buying things - sure it is 6 months I don't have to pay and I can invest the money to make interest. However they are looking for ways to make me forget to pay after 6 months.
- tantalor 2y ago"traders"?
- bdcravens 2y agoIt's hardly an ideal alternative to ethical business practices, but a few financial tools exist to deal with this. Banks that let you create virtual cards, or a service like Privacy.com, for example. I've even gone a step further with multiple bank accounts. All of my income goes into an account that doesn't even have a debit card attached to it, and I only allow a couple of sources to even ACH out of that account (like my mortgage). I manually move money out into accounts I use for spending, bills, etc. (not that hard, with tools like Zelle)
- cletus 2y agoI was so hopeful when subscriptions became a thing because it could technically solve one of the big problems with desktop software: updates. Selling a version of software that you "own" creates a perverse incentive: charge as much as you can and as often as you can for "upgrades". Back when Photoshop was sold this way, support for the raw formats of new cameras that came out was gated for absolutely no reason behind buying a newer version of Photoshop. Even bugfixes would eventually only be applied to the latest version or two. And what constitutes a major version requiring a paid upgrade anyway? Well that's completely arbitrary but the company is incentivized to make that happen as often as possible. Subscriptions technically mean the company can just keep updating the software. There's only one version to support, really. There's no incentive to gate features behind another paid update. The gold standard for subscriptions is Jetbrains. Cancel anytime. When you do cancel, whatever version you had you got to keep, basically. You got warnings in your email that you would be charged in a few weeks if you didn't cancel. The prices were reasonable. Jetbrains quite literally did everything right. Then there's Adobe. The subscription prices are pretty outrageous. No warning. Hard to cancel. Easy to get a recurring charge. Adobe, like many companies, seems to have decided that whatever the sticker price was for the standalone software, charge that every year in a subscription. But before you start waxing lyrical about the halcyon days of software you "own", you've either forgotten or never experienced the shady things software compnaies did to maximize revenue then as well.
- squigz 2y ago> But before you start waxing lyrical about the halcyon days of software you "own", you've either forgotten or never experienced the shady things software compnaies did to maximize revenue then as well. Just because there was shady shit back then doesn't mean it wasn't, in some ways, a better system.
- systemtest 2y agoI remember purchasing the latest version of 1Password every other year for around $40. And if I didn't need the latest features, I would postpone the purchase. Everything continued to keep working if I didn't get the latest version. Nowadays it's $2.99 a month. If you cancel or miss a payment they lock you out of all your passwords at the end of the current billing period.
- NeoTar 2y agoI think every subscription should be required to have an information label, akin to the Broadband Consumer Labels (https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels) that contains basic facts about the subscription, e.g. - Price (only Monthly/Annual prices are acceptable), - Additional data if this is an introductory rate, - Minimum length of contract, - Whether the contract auto-renews, - How to cancel, - Cancellation period (i.e. 30 days in advance of renewal), - Any cancellation charges,
- selfmodruntime 2y agoYes! It's insane how hard it can be to match an automated withdrawal to the service you're subscribed to. This is a bit better within PayPal, but the number of times I had to research what subscription belongs to the parent company/payment provider that just charged my credit card is incredible.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jrs235 2y agoRemember subscriptions also came about because of corporate limitations on expenses. If the charge was under the corporate limit then an often burdensome and time consuming approval process wasn't neccesary. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
- nuclearsugar 2y agoWhile Patreon is often to support an individual artist, it's still a subscription. I wonder how often people sign up and forget they're a member. If your email inbox has 10,000 unreads and you don't check your bank statement, it'll just keep you on as a member forever. Especially since expiring credit card numbers are automatically relinked.
- Satanister 2y agoThe term "Dark Pattern" is at least ridiculous. Article is trash tier. Still gas 226 comments. Hacker News is a place of schizos. Get a life!