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I just looked at AllTrails, and it's pretty clear what the value is - you get to download and print the maps, and use them on your phone. I appreciate what you
by rfrey 10y ago
I just looked at AllTrails, and it's pretty clear what the value is - you get to download and print the maps, and use them on your phone.
I appreciate what you're saying about an honest transaction, but "dark patterns" is a useful term that is being diluted to apply to any company that doesn't offer everything for nothing. If asking you to create an account to use the product is a "dark pattern", what do we call moving buttons to capture accidental tricks, getting you to open your contact list with tricky wording and spamming everyone, etc? Surely those aren't the same as "please create an account to use our product"?
- throwanem 10y agoSure, those are worse, but it's a difference of kind rather than degree. I mean, I can download, print, and view offline maps from OpenStreetMap, too. That's free and it doesn't play cheesy games to get my information. Why should I care about AllTrails, which does? (I feel like I should note that the default presumption here is of sketchiness, not uprightness. Maybe that's unfair, and maybe there are a lot of us out here who've been hosed often enough by bait-and-switch games that anything which smells of yet another one gets tarred with the same brush. I don't think that's an argument against the article's thesis, you know?)