4 ms·

Of the eight dark patterns you identify as such in your thesis, Facebook implements at least two, possibly three - I could swear I've seen reports of what you d

Of the eight dark patterns you identify as such in your thesis, Facebook implements at least two, possibly three - I could swear I've seen reports of what you describe as "hellbroadcast", but I don't have a cite to hand. Your "impersonation" I've seen very recently reported here on HN at least, and what even is Facebook if not the ultimate example thus far of what you (correctly) term a "social pyramid scheme"? Fair point. I didn't mean to imply Facebook as a paragon of goodness, but rather that social media as a whole does not inherently imply dark patterns. I think there are certainly things I'd like to see removed from products and I think those products would actually benefit from that in the long-run. The problem is measurement: it's much easier to employ a dark pattern, show some short-term metric that indicates "engagement" and get promoted or leave before it all drops off again. Playing the long game is much harder, career-wise. I do find myself moved to inquire further into how you compose, on the one hand, having produced detailed documentation and an inventory of examples on how to develop user experiences which are designed specifically to the purpose of maintaining user engagement in ways largely orthogonal to the inherently engaging quality (or lack thereof) of the underlying content - and, on the other hand, your argument here that platforms like Facebook, which are so broadly known to implement such patterns that to advance the claim merits no controversy whatsoever, do not achieve any benefit, or their users suffer any detriment, from such implementations. This is a good question. I'll address it backwards: as to "merits no controversy", again I just meant that social media doesn't inherently imply dark patterns. I often feel like media presents the argument as such: "X does A, Y does B, all social media is bad by default." It's a sexy headline, but I don't think it really holds a lot of water with the majority of the 1B+ daily users of FB. I do think a whollleee lot of research is needed into how people's social relationships are changing and whether their real happiness is going up or down, but I think of social media as part of the solution, not the cause. I would have grown a lot more distant from my social connections due to work/family as I grew older whether or not MySpace existed. I am not sure if at the time of writing the thesis that I actively avoided discussing users as "happy" or "unhappy" but I am glad I did. Motivation and happiness are not necessarily the same thing (Frodo is super motivated to get to Mount Doom, but he's not happy about it) but I think UX designers really do intend their users to be happier. As to how I square the circle on writing a book with all these patterns, but then turn around and say companies don't have reference material like this... First off, I didn't contribute to it no-one read the book :) It probably sold 50 copies or so. When I wrote the thesis, gamification was beginning to cool off from it's peak bullshit, but there was still plenty of bullshit to go around. I chose the topic to sort of make the statement "if you are going to do this stuff, at least try and do it so it's actually trying to meet a users needs rather than just chucking dark patterns at them." I hoped that if the book became popular, we'd see less of the bad stuff and more thoughtful application of the good stuff so that apps would be more useful/meaningful to users. When I was doing my research, I went barking up a great number of trees trying to find evidence of some sort of secret documentation of motivational patterns (it was helpful studying in Silicon Valley). I never found it. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but I never found it and I really don't think it does exist. I think designers go with their gut and what worked elsewhere, and they don't have secret teams of behavioral economists figuring out a UX pattern to bump engagement by 3%. Does this help? I enjoy the conversation and am happy to clarify anything.

throwanem 9y ago
This does indeed help! I greatly appreciate your thoughtful response, and can only apologize for my inexcusable tardiness in following up further. I'm not sure it needs secret teams of behavioral economists to produce dark patterns which drive motivation even to the detriment of the users they artificially engage. You can hypothesize and A/B test your way into such patterns as well, I think, and never quite realize what you're actually doing - for those of us who develop software on a professional basis, how many of us can maintain the perspective of an end user into the software we ourselves work on every day? Certainly I can't, and the next one of us I meet who can will be the first. Granted Facebook's engineers operate on a higher level than the norm, but in that regard? If anything, they're far more isolated from their users than the norm, too. I'm sorry to hear your book sold poorly! I have to admit I've contributed to that trend, since I have no application for the information it contains. But I assume the book must differ markedly from your thesis, which appears much more concerned with factual documentation of the patterns it describes, and much more muted in its expression of opprobrium toward the dark patterns you cite there. I'm not sure I agree that the use of even those patterns you recommend is as innocuous as you suggest, but that's something on which we can reasonably disagree, I think. Finally, I'd note that my concern with Facebook isn't so much its effect on its users, and on those who aren't its users but are surrounded by those who are, today - to be clear, I'm not at all sanguine about today's effects either, but what concerns me far more is that Facebook has almost without notice amassed an extent of power utterly unprecedented in human history, and it has done so in a fashion which permits that power to be exercised in total opacity - quite aside from the limited nature of options for curbing that exercise should it prove noxious, it's very hard even to know when and how that power is being used. Until recently, Facebook has been satisfied simply to exist, and to grow. After the events of 2016, though, we've already seen initial gestures on the part of Zuckerberg et al toward a more active exercise of that power - and whether or not you agree with the direction in which it's been suggested that power be exercised, I should think the mere existence of that power, in the hands of people who can do what they damn well please with it and never need fear being gainsaid, should be worrisome in its own right. Perhaps it's being used today in a way that accords with your preferences. Will it be ever thus? I do, though, take your point about the conflation of social media with Facebook, and I agree that it's understandable but not helpful that people equate the two. Facebook's model is, I think, an accident of history - when it came along, there were no good ways for people to both connect socially on the Internet and maintain ownership and control of their identities and information, and Facebook solved the first problem well enough that for a long time nobody much thought hard about the second. But there's no clear reason why both can't be simultaneously solved, and I know of at least one credible project currently underway which intends to do precisely that.

throwanem 9y ago

This does indeed help! I greatly appreciate your thoughtful response, and can only apologize for my inexcusable tardiness in following up further. I'm not sure it needs secret teams of behavioral economists to produce dark patterns which drive motivation even to the detriment of the users they artificially engage. You can hypothesize and A/B test your way into such patterns as well, I think, and never quite realize what you're actually doing - for those of us who develop software on a professional basis, how many of us can maintain the perspective of an end user into the software we ourselves work on every day? Certainly I can't, and the next one of us I meet who can will be the first. Granted Facebook's engineers operate on a higher level than the norm, but in that regard? If anything, they're far more isolated from their users than the norm, too. I'm sorry to hear your book sold poorly! I have to admit I've contributed to that trend, since I have no application for the information it contains. But I assume the book must differ markedly from your thesis, which appears much more concerned with factual documentation of the patterns it describes, and much more muted in its expression of opprobrium toward the dark patterns you cite there. I'm not sure I agree that the use of even those patterns you recommend is as innocuous as you suggest, but that's something on which we can reasonably disagree, I think. Finally, I'd note that my concern with Facebook isn't so much its effect on its users, and on those who aren't its users but are surrounded by those who are, today - to be clear, I'm not at all sanguine about today's effects either, but what concerns me far more is that Facebook has almost without notice amassed an extent of power utterly unprecedented in human history, and it has done so in a fashion which permits that power to be exercised in total opacity - quite aside from the limited nature of options for curbing that exercise should it prove noxious, it's very hard even to know when and how that power is being used. Until recently, Facebook has been satisfied simply to exist, and to grow. After the events of 2016, though, we've already seen initial gestures on the part of Zuckerberg et al toward a more active exercise of that power - and whether or not you agree with the direction in which it's been suggested that power be exercised, I should think the mere existence of that power, in the hands of people who can do what they damn well please with it and never need fear being gainsaid, should be worrisome in its own right. Perhaps it's being used today in a way that accords with your preferences. Will it be ever thus? I do, though, take your point about the conflation of social media with Facebook, and I agree that it's understandable but not helpful that people equate the two. Facebook's model is, I think, an accident of history - when it came along, there were no good ways for people to both connect socially on the Internet and maintain ownership and control of their identities and information, and Facebook solved the first problem well enough that for a long time nobody much thought hard about the second. But there's no clear reason why both can't be simultaneously solved, and I know of at least one credible project currently underway which intends to do precisely that.