5 ms·

It's missing the one that I hate the most: the way Booking.com and similar sites create a fake sense of urgency. "9 people are actively looking at this hotel r

It's missing the one that I hate the most: the way Booking.com and similar sites create a fake sense of urgency. "9 people are actively looking at this hotel right now!" Yeah, right.

yoz-y 7y ago
Or the everlasting "1 item remaining in stock" on amazon.
- teekert 7y ago
  Yeah, that always makes me think: "Hmm, a high quality product would create some demand, why not keep the stock well filled?" Also it conjures up images of 1 last item lying at the bottom of a big box where it was squeezed and just lying around for the longest of it's entire batch.. No good! So, why? In me it creates a sense of "no thanks, I'll wait".
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    I suspect that some edible products are actually leftovers approaching shelf life limits. At least the one time I have ordered some protein bars, they were barely before their displayed end of life (and those things last for over a year)
ivanbozic 7y ago
I run a development agency, and on a few occasions, we've had clients ask us to build features similar to what you've outlined above. One of those clients had a pretty thorough specification document that outlined how this behavior should work. When you open the listing, it should wait a few seconds and then show you a number between 8 and 20 of people who are actively looking at this listing. If it was night-time, it shouldn't really be that much, so let's put in a number between 2 and 8. This was of course all fake since the platform didn't launch yet. There was also a lot of other "building fake anxiety" tactics, but this one and all other got buried way in the backlog and never actually implemented thankfully. I'm not saying that Booking.com is doing this, but I definitely hate this pattern.
- gnud 7y ago
  Isn't this basically false advertising?
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    Arguably; it's not advertising the product itself (e.g. hotels). There's no rules against misreporting user or activity statistics as far as I know.
    - nickjj 7y ago
      It is an interesting topic. I never worked in a brick and mortar store but I wonder if they purposely only place 1 or 2 items onto a shelf to create a false sense of scarcity. Meanwhile they have a whole pallet of them in the back. As a customer you would never know but if it came down to taking legal action, it would probably be pretty hard to prove without a doubt this was done on purpose. Scarcity or feeling like you're going to miss out on something (especially a deal) is a really powerful trigger. I generally ignore most advertising but man when you see that there's only 2 left of something you want on an online site, I would be lying if I said it didn't affect me. Luckily this tactic is less potent now for a number of things because so many online stores sell the same items.
      - asdff 7y ago
        Next time you go to a restaurant notice where they seat you. Usually its in the front so the place looks crowded from the street.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      You're lying to make it seem more desirable; is there a difference between "20% more effective" and "20 people are looking at this"?
    - tomrod 7y ago
      Maybe no explicit rules, but seems to run against ethics nonetheless.
trymas 7y ago
> It's missing the one that I hate the most: the way Booking.com and similar sites create a fake sense of urgency. There's booking.com mentioned at 3min 30sec into the video on the main page.
- ckastner 7y ago
  It seems to be missing from the 'Types of Dark Pattern' list: https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern
erikpukinskis 7y ago
“9 people looked at this property in the last [rolling window whose length maximizes booking revenue].”
misterdoubt 7y ago
Also "1 room left at this price!" Maybe... at this exact price. Maybe the next available will be higher. Maybe not.
smueller1234 7y ago
Many years ago, I reviewed the code at Booking.com that implemented this (in the version thar existed at the time, there's many more variants of it today) and it had a clear enough definition and was roughly what you'd expect it to be if you tried to design/implement it faithfully but without crazy out-there amounts of work: "number of detected-as-not-a-bot page views for this hotel (page) within the last X minutes" where X was, if I recall correctly, "a few" as in single digit. It was done by consuming a near-real time steam of logs, such that the X minutes above wouldn't be massively biased by the processing delay. I'm certain this was reimplemented at least once since because that wouldn't scale any more to their volume today. Also, this functionality has received significant amount of scrutiny from some regulators, so last I looked, there was a mouse over that gave the actual definition. That being said, in no way am I trying to convince anyone that it's not a "dark pattern" or that you have to think it's a good idea on any way. Just looking to preempt some comment that claims Booking.com is actively lying about this. They weren't ~5-6 years ago when I read the implementation and I don't they could've started doing that systematically since then due to regulatory attention.
- kashyapc 7y ago
  I don't know, still, most people's "psychological setup" isn't wired to handle this kind of manipulation on a frequent basis, even if "designed/implemented it faithfully". It would just make the web a little more serene place if the said websites did away with these kind of pernicious practices which only induce stress and agony.
  - smueller1234 7y ago
    I'm with you. Weirdly, even though I certainly have an above average understanding of these tactics, they almost certainly still have a minor effect on me anyway. What I was trying to do was to preempt the allegations that Booking is lying to its users. None of the allegations I'd seen while I was there actually checked out on that front. I, like most others, severely disliked the urgency messaging, but as is with ethics discussions, it was never clear cut. I did not perceive that there was a widespread culture of trying to trick users into purchasing something they didn't want. For most of my tenure, I managed the infrastructure department, not product, so was a bit removed. Experimentation infrastructure fell into my scope, though. We invested significant effort into both education and countermeasures for things like p-hacking.
TuringTest 7y ago
At least that one can be ignored. I hate even more how flight companies increase the price for the flight you've pre-selected if you are actively comparing options for several flights with the same origin/destination for the same dates (only to recover the original price several hours later if you don't buy it right then).
badpun 7y ago
My team actually implemented this feature in a large booking.com competitor and the numbers were in fact correct - we didn’t just pull them out of thin air.
cercatrova 7y ago
There are even companies that will implement this design for your own ecommerce site (https://fomo.com https://fomo.com). Reportedly they make a lot of money, 88k a MO th at least (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-social-proof-marketing-platform-to-88k-mo-in-revenue-05b996966c https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-social-proo...).

It's missing the one that I hate the most: the way Booking.com and similar sites create a fake sense of urgency. "9 people are actively looking at this hotel right now!" Yeah, right.

yoz-y 7y ago

Or the everlasting "1 item remaining in stock" on amazon.

teekert 7y ago
Yeah, that always makes me think: "Hmm, a high quality product would create some demand, why not keep the stock well filled?" Also it conjures up images of 1 last item lying at the bottom of a big box where it was squeezed and just lying around for the longest of it's entire batch.. No good! So, why? In me it creates a sense of "no thanks, I'll wait".
- yoz-y 7y ago
  I suspect that some edible products are actually leftovers approaching shelf life limits. At least the one time I have ordered some protein bars, they were barely before their displayed end of life (and those things last for over a year)

ivanbozic 7y ago

I run a development agency, and on a few occasions, we've had clients ask us to build features similar to what you've outlined above. One of those clients had a pretty thorough specification document that outlined how this behavior should work. When you open the listing, it should wait a few seconds and then show you a number between 8 and 20 of people who are actively looking at this listing. If it was night-time, it shouldn't really be that much, so let's put in a number between 2 and 8. This was of course all fake since the platform didn't launch yet. There was also a lot of other "building fake anxiety" tactics, but this one and all other got buried way in the backlog and never actually implemented thankfully. I'm not saying that Booking.com is doing this, but I definitely hate this pattern.

gnud 7y ago
Isn't this basically false advertising?
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Arguably; it's not advertising the product itself (e.g. hotels). There's no rules against misreporting user or activity statistics as far as I know.
  - nickjj 7y ago
    It is an interesting topic. I never worked in a brick and mortar store but I wonder if they purposely only place 1 or 2 items onto a shelf to create a false sense of scarcity. Meanwhile they have a whole pallet of them in the back. As a customer you would never know but if it came down to taking legal action, it would probably be pretty hard to prove without a doubt this was done on purpose. Scarcity or feeling like you're going to miss out on something (especially a deal) is a really powerful trigger. I generally ignore most advertising but man when you see that there's only 2 left of something you want on an online site, I would be lying if I said it didn't affect me. Luckily this tactic is less potent now for a number of things because so many online stores sell the same items.
    - asdff 7y ago
      Next time you go to a restaurant notice where they seat you. Usually its in the front so the place looks crowded from the street.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    You're lying to make it seem more desirable; is there a difference between "20% more effective" and "20 people are looking at this"?
  - tomrod 7y ago
    Maybe no explicit rules, but seems to run against ethics nonetheless.

trymas 7y ago

> It's missing the one that I hate the most: the way Booking.com and similar sites create a fake sense of urgency. There's booking.com mentioned at 3min 30sec into the video on the main page.

ckastner 7y ago
It seems to be missing from the 'Types of Dark Pattern' list: https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern

erikpukinskis 7y ago

“9 people looked at this property in the last [rolling window whose length maximizes booking revenue].”

misterdoubt 7y ago

Also "1 room left at this price!" Maybe... at this exact price. Maybe the next available will be higher. Maybe not.

smueller1234 7y ago

Many years ago, I reviewed the code at Booking.com that implemented this (in the version thar existed at the time, there's many more variants of it today) and it had a clear enough definition and was roughly what you'd expect it to be if you tried to design/implement it faithfully but without crazy out-there amounts of work: "number of detected-as-not-a-bot page views for this hotel (page) within the last X minutes" where X was, if I recall correctly, "a few" as in single digit. It was done by consuming a near-real time steam of logs, such that the X minutes above wouldn't be massively biased by the processing delay. I'm certain this was reimplemented at least once since because that wouldn't scale any more to their volume today. Also, this functionality has received significant amount of scrutiny from some regulators, so last I looked, there was a mouse over that gave the actual definition. That being said, in no way am I trying to convince anyone that it's not a "dark pattern" or that you have to think it's a good idea on any way. Just looking to preempt some comment that claims Booking.com is actively lying about this. They weren't ~5-6 years ago when I read the implementation and I don't they could've started doing that systematically since then due to regulatory attention.

kashyapc 7y ago
I don't know, still, most people's "psychological setup" isn't wired to handle this kind of manipulation on a frequent basis, even if "designed/implemented it faithfully". It would just make the web a little more serene place if the said websites did away with these kind of pernicious practices which only induce stress and agony.
- smueller1234 7y ago
  I'm with you. Weirdly, even though I certainly have an above average understanding of these tactics, they almost certainly still have a minor effect on me anyway. What I was trying to do was to preempt the allegations that Booking is lying to its users. None of the allegations I'd seen while I was there actually checked out on that front. I, like most others, severely disliked the urgency messaging, but as is with ethics discussions, it was never clear cut. I did not perceive that there was a widespread culture of trying to trick users into purchasing something they didn't want. For most of my tenure, I managed the infrastructure department, not product, so was a bit removed. Experimentation infrastructure fell into my scope, though. We invested significant effort into both education and countermeasures for things like p-hacking.

TuringTest 7y ago

At least that one can be ignored. I hate even more how flight companies increase the price for the flight you've pre-selected if you are actively comparing options for several flights with the same origin/destination for the same dates (only to recover the original price several hours later if you don't buy it right then).

badpun 7y ago

My team actually implemented this feature in a large booking.com competitor and the numbers were in fact correct - we didn’t just pull them out of thin air.

cercatrova 7y ago

There are even companies that will implement this design for your own ecommerce site (https://fomo.com https://fomo.com). Reportedly they make a lot of money, 88k a MO th at least (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-social-proof-marketing-platform-to-88k-mo-in-revenue-05b996966c https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-social-proo...).