The dark patterns are not a sign of misunderstanding good UX, nor are they a sign of pure evil by their makers. Big social networks only come into existence vi

The dark patterns are not a sign of misunderstanding good UX, nor are they a sign of pure evil by their makers. Big social networks only come into existence via an aggressive, exponential roll-out. The main feature of such a network is having your friends on there. None of the other features matter as its plain to see how they copy concepts from each other all the time. It's about getting you in there. Once in existence, producing revenue means keeping you in the experience for as long as possible. Which is best done in an app and preferably logged in. This allows for the personalization and notifications. Put another way, publishing all of this on the open web, with many users using ad-blockers, just doesn't cut it. Further, you don't want to give away all content to the open web (cough...Google). We gave them this power. None of us want to surf the open web. We want 3 apps that do everything. And we won't pay for it, not a penny.