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Yesterday I went to book a hotel and Priceline had a room for $129, which was $20 cheaper than Expedia or any other site. Curious, I clicked on it and went to
by seieste 7y ago
Yesterday I went to book a hotel and Priceline had a room for $129, which was $20 cheaper than Expedia or any other site.
Curious, I clicked on it and went to the Priceline site, and watched as a JavaScript animation “rolled” the price from $129 to $149 and alerted me that someone just got the last room. Obviously the whole thing was fake. (Why would they implement such an animation, and how likely is it that someone got the room in those two seconds?)
At this point, it’s not even nudging or dark patterns but just straight out fraud.
- jbverschoor 7y agoBooking.com has been fined for this.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago> a JavaScript animation “rolled” the price disable javascript.
- Analemma_ 7y agoThat would be an interesting court case: if you browse with Javascript off, and only see the fake price, could you bring a case of false advertising if (as I'm assuming is the case) they never intended to sell at that price?
- cameronbrown 7y agoIn all likelihood you'd just see nothing.
- blhack 7y agoThe judge would probably look at it as hacking.
- nofunsir 7y agoA "glitch"
- cpach 7y agoWhat are the odds that a booking site like that works at all with JS disabled?
- lucisferre 7y agoI was on a site recently where viewing the images on the site did not work with an ad blocker on.
- autoexec 7y agoSites that refuse to display an image without javascript are a pet peeve of mine. Naturally most popular image hosts are guilty of this. Even imgur which was created because other image hosts were so obnoxious and has since become more and more like the services it replaced.
- londons_explore 7y agoThe tech behind these sites is tricky - to make it work at all, they do a lot of caching. The "roll" in price is probably the change between the last time someone searched for that room type at that hotel and now (when availability gets rechecked). My guess is it could also roll downwards.
- FussyZeus 7y agoYeah right. Big business has done an excellent job of systematically destroying trust in the customer at every step of every process. I just assume any time I'm dealing with a corporation, I'm getting fucked over. That's why I feel no remorse for fucking them over any chance I get.
- jt2190 7y ago> Big business has done an excellent job of systematically destroying trust in the customer at every step of every process. This is a really interesting point. Even though we should test our assumptions about the reasons for the price increase here against Hanlon's razor [1], it's very easy to _feel_ that we're being taken advantage of, and emotions matter a lot in purchasing decisions. A savvy competitor might be able to take advantage of this kind of pricing clumsiness. (For example, I recently bought a new car from a "no haggle" dealer for pretty similar reasons... Working with traditional dealers in the U.S. is a very painful experience for many.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
- FussyZeus 7y agoThe thing is Hanlon's razor can't really be applied to a corporation. A corporation is inherently an immoral actor; it doesn't act maliciously, or at least it shouldn't. It acts rationally. The key note being that it's rationale therefore need not be ethical or moral at all. I don't think corporations are stupid at all, they're the collected intelligence of thousands of people being used with the moral and ethical consequences abstracted away to where they can act in horrifying ways and not feel any remorse. This is why probably the hundred or so people involved in denying a cancer patient's claim for insurance payment don't feel bad; none of them made the decision, it's just a process. So, with that in mind, I don't think Hanlon applies here, if you want a razor, use Occam's. And the theory here that requires the least assumptions is that corporations would sell their own mother if it made them one red cent, so when I hear "priceline changed it from $129 to $149" my prevailing assumption is the low price was to get you in the door, and they've found that a price increase of $20 at the point of sale isn't enough to deter customers. They're probably A/B testing a number of increases to see just how much they can squeeze from people.
- decebalus1 7y agoSeriously, who are the people writing these features? As 'software is eating the world' I think we'll need an ethics board/bar association or something soon.
- soverance 7y agoFor real. I am always amazed to hear about such fraud, because it means somewhere, a programmer with zero ethics decided he didn't care what he was doing as long as the paycheck cleared. Gross.
- Fjolsvith 7y agoAs if ethics was a prerequisite for being able to sling code.
- anfilt 7y agoAlso I would not be surprised to find a lot this stuff was out sourced. Someone in other cointry might be more desperate for money. So lying to the final end user might be pretty low on their I won’t do this. You can also have people who are “I dont want to lose my job by making a big a stink.” I am not sure people would risk their fincial stability over lying unless said lying would also affect them in other ways
- eswat 7y agoMentioned in a few related threads about Facebook and e-commerce dark patterns: we don't put our peers to task enough and make them aware about the potential harm they do. Another comment here also mentioned that consequential actions are abstracted in large companies; group diffusion of responsibility gently removes most bad decisions that would normally make a person think remorsefully about what they’ve done. Having an ethics board would be a top-down solution. The bottom-up, which I’m more fond of, is releasing literature and material to anyone working in tech about how their work could actually affect their end users; we need to help each other develop more self-awareness of the results of our work instead of the breadth of material about the work itself.
- 7y ago
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoAt this point there's little to no difference between con, dark pattern and fraud. I'd like to see them prosecuted as such.
- ryandrake 7y agoRemember, for every software-based dark pattern or fraud out there, there was a software developer who implemented it. Before we throw stones, we, as a profession should get better about self-policing and cleaning our ethical house.
- pnw_hazor 7y agoFunny how you get down voted for pointing the reality of the situation. Dark patterns would go away tomorrow if software developers really cared about it.
- paulryanrogers 7y agoHow? With a union or guild?
- noelsusman 7y agoI've only ever seen this accomplished with professional organizations and licensing. Medicine is the easiest example. Clinicians can push back on unethical requests by arguing that complying with a request would result in them losing their license. That gives the employee a lot more leverage.
- jbay808 7y agoEngineers too, in Canada.
- ghaff 7y agoThere are professional engineers (PE) in the US as well. But the software engineering one has been discontinued because basically no one got it. You can get PEs in other fields of engineering. How common it is probably depends on the field and on the type of job. (Basically, you get a PE so that you can sign off on designs where regulators or other government agencies are involved--or want an official credential for e.g. being an expert witness/consultant.)
- yegle 7y agoThis reminds me the progress bar in TurboTax to check whether you have every number correct. Any modern computer should not take more than 1 second to do the verification and the animation is pure fake.
- ntpeters 7y agoNot defending them here, but at a previous job I noticed them doing the same and asked why. Turned out when they updated the site to make the UI/UX faster they got calls to customer service from people saying that didn’t think it worked because “it went too fast”.
- ativzzz 7y agoSounds like the Houston airport where people complained about waiting too long at customs during international travel, and the successful response was to simply elongate the walk to customs. Nothing changed, except the customer perspective.
- eridius 7y agoI've also read that this is the reason baggage claim is so far away from arrivals. It means passengers spend less time standing around the baggage claim area waiting for their bags. The overall wait time is the same, but it's the dead time spent waiting that people hate.
- votepaunchy 7y agoI’ve found baggage claim to be nearest the exit, presumably so that one need not lug their bag the half-mile from the plane. And baggage claim needs to be outside security so it all works nicely.
- eridius 7y agoBaggage claim being far away from arrivals, and baggage claim being near the exit, are orthogonal requirements. Baggage claim could be close to both the exit and arrivals simply by having arrivals be near the exit. But airports are intentionally designed such that you have to walk pretty much the entire length of the terminal to go from arrivals to baggage claim.
- cataphract 7y agoReminds me of a website that used a random number generator for the "<n> persons are looking at this right now". The random number would be stored in Redis for some time so it wouldn't go randomly up and down upon refresh, at which point it would be obviously fake.
- julianlam 7y agoSeems like a waste of redis' capabilities, when localStorage is much easier to implement for something like this.
- HelloNurse 7y agoCandy Crush Soda Saga does it with microtransactions. The game is a puzzle in which you need to do something in a limited number of moves and on defeat screens there are notices along the lines of "420455 people bought extra moves to beat this level".
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoIt isn't really fraud unless we start regulating and prosecuting it. And we don't, right? This has been going on forever, though. So I doubt we'll do anything about it. And should we? I mean, how is it really different than saying something is 50% off and leaving the price the same, but just jacking up the list price 100%?
- Super_Jambo 7y agoAll of the above should be prosecuted. If you want markets to be anywhere near efficient you're gonna have to force the capitalists into it. If we don't we'll eventually be back to kings.
- umanwizard 7y agoThat should be illegal also, and is in some countries. In France, for example: “Le vendeur doit clairement signaler les rabais proposés par rapport à un prix de référence réel. Il est ainsi interdit d'augmenter le prix d'un produit avant la période des soldes, dans le but de faire croire à une offre promotionnelle plus importante qu'elle ne l'est réellement.”[0] My translation: “The vendor must clearly indicate the discounts offered relative to a real reference price. It is thus forbidden to increase the price of a product before the sales period, with the goal of making people believe that a promotional offer is more significant than it actually is.” This sort of practice shouldn’t be considered normal. It’s one of the many ways in which low-level corruption is widely legal and accepted in the US. [0]: French government website explaining sales regulations. https://www.service-public.fr/professionnels-entreprises/vosdroits/F20566 https://www.service-public.fr/professionnels-entreprises/vos...
- JasonFruit 7y ago> It isn't really fraud unless we start regulating and prosecuting it. And we don't, right? I can't let this stand. Actions were right or wrong before the first regulation was written and before the first judge banged his gavel under an acacia tree. Wrong actions continue to be wrong no matter what laws and judges say. Lying to make a sale is fraud, whether it's regulated and prosecuted or not.
- el_benhameen 7y agoHad the same thing happen with Priceline just a few weeks ago, except instead of $20, the price was double the advertised price and only changed when I entered my payment info and tried to pay. I finally called and booked over the phone after having three different rooms double in price when I hit the confirmation button. The person on the other end must have really wanted to make the sale at that price, because they booked me for a month later than my request as the advertised price for my days seems to have just straight up not existed. It was a pretty hellish experience trying to get them to change the dates, but in the end, they knew that I had a confirmation with my dates and I had paid, so it really would be fraud to not give me the room. Priceline: only once.
- boardwaalk 7y agoThis isn't limited to travel-oriented sites either. I went to Lens.com the other day to price-shop some contacts, and my price at checkout (right where you're putting in your payment info) was something like $15 more than in my cart! Even accounting for taxes. It was still an okay price relatively speaking, but I immediately left, because there's no way I'm rewarding that behavior. Of course, I then got the "you left something in your cart" email.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago" was something like $15 more than in my cart!" This is infuriating. I think I would call them and wait on hold just to give tell them how I'll never shop there again. It should definitely be illegal.
- pravda 7y agoThey are kind of 'forced' to do this to compete on the contact-lens-price aggregator sites. Kind of like how hotels have had to add 'resort fees' to obscure the real price of a hotel room. If you want to avoid this nonsense, try Daysoft in the UK. Great prices, no prescription needed, and fast shipping to the US.
- tim333 7y agoLegally it's more false advertising than fraud.
- bhouston 7y agoThis happened to me where the price of a hotel when up $30 during checkout and then a second $30. It was on another property of IAC.
- pjdemers 7y agoThe fraud is the $129 room was gone hours, maybe days ago. It didn't just sell, the web site simply quoted a price they though was low enough to keep you from looking elsewhere, within reason. Once you looked serious about booking, they actually checked the hotel's inventory. You can really tell this happens when you try to book a room/flight/car that is sold out. They quote you a price, if you actually try to book, then, they tell you there is no space. Consolidator travel sites do not check the inventory of every room, flight, or car they quote you. They can't possibly do that. They are all estimates until they see your credit card number. One other thing about travel booking: I don't want the last or even second to last room at a hotel or seat on a plane. The chances of being bumped are too high. So telling me "only 1 seat left", isn't going to close the deal.
- mehrdadn 7y agoHotels bump people just like flights? Hadn't realized that. Do they bump in LIFO order?
- pjdemers 7y agoI don't know how the choose, but they bump you to another hotel.
- merlincorey 7y agoAt least in America, if a hotel bumps you, they have to legally provide you a room in another hotel of equal or greater value. Worked out for me once during a trip to NYC where my hotel was full, but they sent me to a nicer hotel right over Times Square.
- twic 7y agoIn a small town in Denmark, a hotel i was booked into was full, so they tried to send me to the other hotel in town, but that was full, so i slept on a sofa in a meeting room. The meeting room's floor was scattered with pieces of Lego, which made night-time trips to the bathroom somewhat terrifying. Not the most auspicious start to a business trip.
- m463 7y agoI stopped using them completely after the second time buying plane tickets only to find they were unavailable in the middle of the checkout process. I now go directly to the airline website.
- longcommonname 7y agoYeah, this is a thing. So many reasons but essentially the initial request returns a fare that is invalid when you try to book. But there's also issues where the carriers play games by reserving flights for specific customers. By customer I mean the travel agent or website.
- wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y agoB&H did this to me for a monitor. Said there was a sale, I put it in my cart, got to the checkout page still on sale, was putting in my info and going to the final confirmation page and it was suddenly $50 more?...
- Lucadg 7y agoit's happening to me too a lot lately on Booking.com. The feeling I am left with is "next time I need to book fast without too much searching and checking other sites". I guess this the exact mindset they want their users to have.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoI think we need to coin a new term: black patterns. Or mafia patterns. Or evil patterns. "Dark" is simply not enough.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoMaybe we should create a comprehensive list of these bad companies / bad actors? Something like: https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master...