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Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced t

by antocv 5y ago

Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests. Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is actively hostile to buyers of content". Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams, but now the users are seeking out scams to indulge in.

r_singh 5y ago
Users are the last ones to blame. If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists. If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….
- chii 5y ago
  but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).
  - Ragnarork 5y ago
    Users voted with their wallets at the time (back in the late 2000s), which led to Apple and Google becoming the dominant forces in the market and the providers of a huge chunk of the worlds smartphone. How would users vote now with their wallet when everything is tailored for users having either an iPhone or an Android phone? (Yes, I know alternatives exists, even alternatives not built on top of Android, but it's extremely limited and targets very tech savvy users, possibly requiring coding skills to use to their fullest).
    - tndtgrwy 5y ago
      I agree. I own a pine phone. It's all but un-useable in any meaningful sense of the word. I own a brick and motor and have just been mandated by the government to run their version of the vaccine passport app. It's android OR ios. What choices do I have here?
      - ArnoVW 5y ago
        Not really your question I think, but, what country do you live? You are mandated an app? That's crazy?! What about people that don't have a phone? Or a 'dumb'-phone? Where I live any valid QR code works, be it paper or even just a picture of the paper. No need to use an app.
        yosamino 5y ago
        You need the app to verify the the information that is encoded in the QR code. This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.
        PeterisP 5y ago
        Well, business is different; you don't have to use your phone for that, you can use a separate smart device (which may be a non-phone like tablets or perhaps iPod might work) just for this purpose; and, unlike consumers, there's generally no taboo in requiring businesses to fulfill requirements which may need extra hardware that they don't yet have and need to purchase, or require them to change their buildings, etc, so saying "your business needs to run this app" does not imply "my phone needs to be iOS or Android" as there's zero expectation that your personal phone should be sufficient for that requirement imposed on the company. Also, they're not saying that your business needs to run this app, they are saying that your business needs to verify Covid certificates and offering these apps as one way to do it. But it's not the only way - for example, it may be less convenient, but you can do that QR code scanning + Covid certificate validation on any computer with a connected camera using a web service (https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ is one random example, there is also open source code to roll your own checks for EU Covid certificates in some custom system if you need to), and there you can use Windows or Linux or whatever, there's no need for a smartphone as such. In fact, if the parent poster's Pinephone can run a browser and expose a camera to it, then perhaps it might work out of the box on the Pinephone without needing a special app.
  - keawade 5y ago
    The “users voted with wallets” / “free market decided” line often ignores how consumers are not choosing in a vacuum or choosing simple things or sometimes not choosing at all. Often choices are made for short term benefits that come with a long term negative trade off. ie choosing features like a phone camera even though the device also disregards the user’s privacy. In other cases, choices aren’t even made by consumers directly. Like when a company acquires potential competition before they’re able to grow into a threat. Or even a company uses their growing economic power and position for regulatory capture. Sometimes a company just breaks away from their competition and end up the only competitive choice in the market and are able To cement their position through the means above. Especially following the previous cases, users sometimes don’t choose at all because there remain no meaningful choices in the ecosystem they purchase in.
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    What do you mean by “i [sic] guess android [sic]”? Over 70% of smartphones in use run Android.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    On the Android side mostly Samsung and Chinese phones.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    It was not the users. Microsoft's Windows Mobile / Windows Phone and Nokia's Symbian completely failed to keep up with new innovations, which was the real problem. Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app side with everything that existed on the Windows Mobile world and on the developer side with everything else. Symbian was (effectively) a Nokia-only OS, which meant that developers were pretty scarce and again it was incompatible on the developer and user experiences. Then came iOS as the first "disruptor" where the jailbreakers (!) of the first days showed just how sorely behind the competition was... the first iPhone was EDGE-only ffs and still it was radically different and better than everything on the market including the back-then flagship models with Windows Mobile from HTC. Android followed up and obliterated the competition, which was easy enough to do given Google's budget and Microsoft's complete inability to react - the iPhone was released in 2007 and the comical disaster of Windows Phone took until 2010! The rest is history, everything not from Apple moved over to Android - the longest holdout was Blackberry with their moat of business users and the BlackBerry Messenger. And somewhere along the line, Samsung managed to destroy both HTC and Sony... what remains now on the market is Samsung, Xiaomi, BBK (Vivo/OPPO) and a bunch of low budget stuff fighting for the scraps. Very sad indeed.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      Very concise; and that's pretty much the way I remember it too. Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally). We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago. But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzleloader and head out to the mountains and spend the next decade collecting beaver pelts. Cookie settings be damned.
      - AstralStorm 5y ago
        Don't worry, the tax men will find you and force you to file the taxes on paper. Or maybe even electronically. I presume your beavers also come with healthcare, and the stores where you'd buy anything will still take cash.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  I feel a constant tension where companies and governments are all but demanding everyone owns a smartphone with one of these two specific operating systems for all sorts of things (from banking, to authentication, to government services), but have to somehow facilitate the remainder of users as an afterthought. It makes a lot of things really suck, and that's ignoring all those walled gardens essentially requiring them (Whatsapp and Signal come to mind).
  - afandian 5y ago
    More insidious is the requirement to have an account with Google or Apple.
    - Freak_NL 5y ago
      That's what bugs me too. Having to enter a legal agreement with a foreign entity to use local services irks me out of principle.
  - dools 5y ago
    Your government demands you own a smart phone?
    - Freak_NL 5y ago
      You can of course function without one, but the nudging towards getting their authentication app is getting worse. For healthcare records, vendors in the Netherlands are required to move authentication of their portals to the government provided DigiD¹. Healthcare will be the first field where the minimum level of assurance is being raised to 'substantial', and this means that only authentication via the Android or IOS DigiD app will suffice (right now for other government functions like taxes and planning your booster shot you can also use SMS as (weak) 2FA). While the government is aware that there is a group of people who can't or won't use a smartphone or their app, there is no technological solution on the horizon, despite viable alternatives for 2FA existing (like WebAuthn). This is what I mean by “all but demanding”. Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme. 1: Broader than just DigiD actually, supporting European eIDAS standards, but for 99% of citizens this means DigiD.
- kleiba 5y ago
  I don't have a smartphone, am I not participating in society?
  - r_singh 5y ago
    What I mean is that you need it to use an increasing number of private and public services these days. Speaking from my experiences in Europe and South Asia. So effectively companies and the government are telling us that we need one of these to get avail conveniences and in some cases to be able to use their service at all… With policies that mandate the use of digital vaccine certificates, apps and QR codes being ubiquitous, we’re effectively being forced to become a customer of Apple or Google one way or another I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      > I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone Really? I wonder where you are. I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it with me; I've never been to any kind of shop that doesn't accept my debit card, other than for small-value purchases like a bag of onions from a greengrocer, for which cash is sometimes required.
      - r_singh 5y ago
        I was in Mumbai and Berlin. I did not need my smartphone to pay, but to display my vaccination certificate which is required at most places and to scan the menu which these days is replaced with a QR code placed on the table
        denton-scratch 5y ago
        Each time I got jabbed, they gave me a little cardboard "certificate" the size of a credit card. I carry them in my wallet, but I've never had to produce them anywhere. Perhaps I'm going to the wrong places.
- simonh 5y ago
  For the same reasons the world is ok with only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems. Consolidation benefits users. It increases capital investment in the dominant platforms making them better faster; it increases the chances your software and skills will be compatible with your next computer; you benefit if your family, friends or colleagues use a compatible platform; it focuses developer efforts to have fewer platforms to develop for so there’s more better software. Users flock to dominant platforms because it’s in their interests to do so, and in their interests that others do too. This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power. There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    > Consolidation benefits users. Only to a point then it crosses over into exploitation. If users could switch OS's more easily then there would probably be more of them in widespread use, like browsers. As it is most people have to buy a new device to change OS. Websites themselves become sticky because of network effects and familiarity.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems There's a chap from RedHat here, telling me that Linux is commercially viable.
    - simonh 5y ago
      There are several commercially viable desktop OSes other than Windows and MacOS, but they are not mass market. I knowingly wrote my comment to exclude specialist players addressing niche markets because they have completely different adoption dynamics. Actually ChromeOS is arguably mass market. That's all beside the point though really. It doesn't change the fact that the dynamics that drive consolidation are actually in a very large part motivated by user self interest.
- heresie-dabord 5y ago
  Maybe it is as simple as the fact that chaos is by definition hostile. Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government. Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand. Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.
noiwillnot 5y ago
> even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests Consumers have been sold a dream, and after the tech advances and sweatshoping can't go farther, they would rather eat skimpflation day after day than pay more. This is most evident online, where a good chunk of the population expect everything to be free.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  [Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business (2008)](https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/ https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/) They expect it for free but it's not like the product can actually be bought.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  People only expect things to be free because they're not being told / educated on the actual cost of their "free" service. I wonder how many people over the past 15 or so years have been denied a job because a tech-savvy HR person combed through social media / forum profiles and read things they didn't like? And if you think that wasn't happening then, you're out of your mind. This was happening in World of Warcraft guilds, for God's sakes... players with "wrong" opinions were kept out of certain guilds by """""""well-meaning""""""" officers of those guilds, so I assure you, it was happening in the real world. But today, as then, you never knew about it, so you had no knowledge that your employment was denied because most American states are at-will and it's not like HR would have said you have a "problematic" stance regarding <insert issue X>. This is but one small example of the "progress" we've seen on the "modern web".
WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
There is also ever-increasing ubiquitous digitalization of many aspects of our life. In a lot of countries, you either spend minutes to hours online to do government-required paperwork or days "the old way", and the old way is mostly dwindling, catering mostly to elderly internet-inept citizens. There are services you're only going to get online. And all those online things are way easier once you're committed to the Clown® Computing, Clown® fatigue notwithstanding. So you opt to not have those things, and for all intents and purposes you look like a digital hermit with a disturbing tendency for self-flagellation. "Why do you keep doing these things to yourself?" So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far.
- starbugs 5y ago
  > So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far. I think that's a great acceptable answer to OP's question.
ratww 5y ago
Yeah, that's the thing. You can't really fight against results. Putting an annoying modal asking for an email will give you lots of email leads. Sending newsletters will give more returns to the website. Sending desktop notifications whenever there's a new article works and gives more visits. A website that takes 20 seconds to load is not an issue. Advertisements give more than zero moneys. The reason it gives positive results is because this is "fine" for enough people. Some people are totally okay with having 5000 unread emails. The web is slow because computer/OS/ISPs are greedy. Ads? Look at television. Just blame cookie banners on the government. Why it's fine for a segment of people, I don't know. Maybe they have no choice, maybe they don't know better, maybe they are completely fine with it. All I know is that they are the target users and I'm not, and companies are ok with either losing me or forcing me to go trough this bullshit. Or maybe they don't even have to worry, since there's no competition.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  We can look at earlier consumer-hostile experiences which were generally solved by consumer rights regulations. You can fight against results - lying in advertising by saying that your Patented Snake Oil Tincture cures everything really does "work" and bring in money, but it was stopped by regulation; lying that this knock-off is really SuperBrandItem does work and bring results, but trademark laws significantly reduced it; selling things that look ok but break immediately are solved by various warranty and fit-for-purpose laws, etc, etc. This is fundamentally a coordination problem that can't really be solved by individual users separately "voting with their wallets" (as past experience shows - none of the problems listed above were solved by consumer choices) but can be solved by coordinated requirements, with the users as a community voting in standards and regulations for commerce that are mandatory for every seller.
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    A lot of this is also caused by following the leader. And the leaders are fueled by adtech or spyware...
  - thereddaikon 5y ago
    Yes, this is primarily a regulatory problem not a technical or design one. Most user hostile actions do work to bring in more users or make you more money. If they didn't then companies wouldn't be doing it would they? But just because something makes sense for a business does not mean it is ethical, moral or legal. Snake oil and counterfeit goods are solid examples. Things like auto charging, difficult to cancel subscriptions and the trade in user information should also be handled in a similar way.
rini17 5y ago
OK, let's say I won't tolerate it. What do I do? crickets And no, average users have never avoided scams, email spam is older than web.
- 5560675260 5y ago
  Don't like something? Take your money elsewhere, and make sure to tell why on social media, even if you don't have large following. Besides making bad practices unnoticeably less profitable this normalises caring about this. In the future we will see more business will see practices that you like as advantageous.
  - feupan 5y ago
    Sometimes there’s no elsewhere. Sometimes elsewhere only has crickets. It feels like you can’t both have a successful product and one that is free of noise. Only some open source software succeeds at this and even then quality often suffers immensely.
    - 5560675260 5y ago
      There is obviously no magical quick denoising solution. But we still can demand less noise and patronise providers that at least pretend to listen.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    Voting with your dollars does cede a lot of power to the wealthy, since they have most of the money and represent a small portion of the population.
    - 5560675260 5y ago
      I think you have it backwards. Wealthy already have all the power they need. Everyone else has zero power, unless they organise, pool their resources or at least choose to move in same direction independently.
Mordisquitos 5y ago
> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests. While technically true in terms of theoretical modelling of a market economy, I don't think that's a fair diagnosis in practice. Were early-19th century English workers forced to take jobs with 6-day working weeks and >12 hours a day? Technically no. But did they have a choice? And was there an adequate incentive to even provide such a choice? Of course nobody "is forced" to use dark-pattern software, but as it stands today, normal users have no choice on the matter. I would argue that potential user-friendly-non-dark-pattern competitors are unable to break into the market of the Microsoft-Apple-Google oligopoly not because user hostility and dark-patterns are in of themselves a competitive advantage nor of any economic value as a whole. Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.
- antocv 5y ago
  > normal users have no choice on the matter. The choice to not use shit software is easier than going on a strike and demanding 8h work day instead of 14h. Which our ancestors also did, some died for the cause. I for one, do not use and have not used and especially not payed for user-hostile software, beginning since 2000. It is possible, you dont really have to accept shit or keep on using shit. Everytime that click feels wrong, that idea seems off, dont click it, close that software suite and uninstall. You do not have to accept that License.
  - Madmallard 5y ago
    Congratulations on making a decision long before it became a serious problem for users and developing the habit. The vast majority of people are not like you. Most people succumbed to these practices over a gradual period of a decade and as such are locked-in habit-wise to this with an attention span that is hard-pressed not to focus on the matter.
  - 5y ago
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account Freee market delivers best results for the people, and if it doesn't, it's the people's fault!
laurent92 5y ago
> and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them I went Apple precisely because it was not hostile at all compared to Windows and Google’s forest of adware. The minute you give me a non-user hostile OS (phone or desktop), I’ll PAY $300/year for it. But even Ubuntu returned Amazon results when I searched the local application (Don’t get me started on technicalities of “But maybe you want your start menu to display your friend’s most recent purchases? How can Ubuntu know? But they’ve recognized their mistake after going to production and rolled back parts of it!”) It’s time to stop blaming the user and start blaming the EU for their badly-written cookie banner laws.
- Kbelicius 5y ago
  > It’s time to stop blaming the user and start blaming the EU for their badly-written cookie banner laws. Are you saying that EU cookie law is to blame for software being hostile to its users? I can't see how that can be.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Yes, blame the one law that attempts to give people a modicum of privacy, and not the developers really wanting you to click through and press accept all for income. The problem with beating dark patterns there specifically is the sheer number of them...
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > badly-written cookie banner laws The law doesn't call for cookie banners. It calls for consent. I'm willing to auto-consent, because I use a cookie blocker. I think this plague of popups is temporary, and is going to abate; eventually the browser-makers will incorporate auto-consent, as they have incorporated cookie controls. And I believe that a lot of those consent popups are an attempt to annoy europeans into lobbying for repeal of the law. Ain't gonna happen - we're quite pleased with it.
Ensorceled 5y ago
> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. This is an intensely user hostile view point, ironically enough. "The dark patterns being foisted upon the average user are their own fault, they deserve what they get" In fact, I think this attitude is how the developers and product managers responsible for this stuff sleep at night, "these people deserve this for their moral failings, so what I'm doing doesn't make me a terrible person" How would my mom switch from her crappy bank app? That app that the bank is kind of forcing her to use by making the in person experience so terrible and, well, because of COVID. There is only one bank in her town, I guess she could start driving "to the city" for banking but, surprise, all those banks have equally shitty apps. She could switch from Facebook to ... what exactly? Her extended family are all on Facebook, her grandkids are posting pics of the great grandkids on Facebook. Yeah, she deserves the disaster that is Facebook.
- antocv 5y ago
  Ironically the "my mom" and "but my grandparents" angle is what has always been used to dumb down and introduce user-hostile patterns. Surprise, after 20 years the developers and managers assume they are building software for retarded un-learnable "grandparents and mothers", the end result is well stupid software.
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    If your user base is large enough, some significant faction of your users are in fact “retarded un-learnable,” though I might have put it more delicately. And when there’s money involved, there’s always incentive to cater to your lowest common denominator user. I’ve watched many in-person and remote use testing sessions, some people just have no clue how to use technology, yet you still have to design apps and websites for them to use. These people aren’t necessarily dumb or anything like that, they just don’t understand technology.
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Most of the dark patterns are not due to dumbing down UI. They're either because nothing better is available (security), income would be reduced (ads, cookie warnings, software is deliberately crippled for non-professional versions), development is done by lowest bidder.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. It's because it's the same kind of users that tolerated such bullshit on TV 20 years ago: 5 ads or more over a 30 minutes show. The truth is: most people are brainlessly consuming any media (be it TV or the Internet or the latest crappy auto-tuned pop song) and are wandering hyperconsumerists souls. 20 years ago it was more complicated to go on the Internet, so your average "I'll sit in front of TV and tolerate 5 ads over my 30 minutes show" wasn't on the Internet. It's that simple. It takes time and half a brain to not get abused by all these companies. People don't want to spend the time and certainly don't have half a brain. The Internet adapted itself to the masses. That'd be my rant.
- ratww 5y ago
  I think that's a bit unfair. It's not that the masses wanted that scenario. They would be completely cool with a non-user-hostile TV or web. It's just that TV channels and internet companies are constantly trying to push as much garbage as they can, and the amount we currently got is the amount they can get away with.
Damogran6 5y ago
Not sure why you brought Apple into this, while yes, their walled garden is very pretty, the experience of them extracting money out of your accounts is as friction free as it gets.
nathias 5y ago
we kind of are, because dark patterns get into regulation and become part of law
jclardy 5y ago
Is Apple's case really a dark pattern? I can start a software subscription trial and immediately cancel. Do that with a random third party and suddenly the cancellation page is "down for maintenance" and you have to call in for support where they try to sell you a discounted package (cough Adobe.) Also do you really want to go around typing in credit card details into every app you pay for? for every in-app purchase, for every movie rental, every song purchase? How is that user hostile?
mihaaly 5y ago
Unluckily providers clone each other, designers trying to prove their reason of existence pushing for new or modern approaches just for the sake of it, and technical writers in the fallacy of quantity write about anything different comes their way quickly, judging by first look not by sustainable usability consequently generating the appearance of trend without having any trend (not like a trend is a good measure, not at all! nevertheless, it is used as guideline by too many). I try to avoid as much as possible from the user hostile internet but there is wee choice in an era of rapid cloning of UX with random tweaks for the illusion of novelty. I go away immediately (for many many years now) from pages blocking the view with dialogs of subscription after 10-20 seconds or even less from arriving. I go away from randomly found unknown sites expecting me of configuring 30 cookie settings the 500th of time that month. I do not watch youtube because it is intrusive with ads, suggestions, autoplay (on the top of the usual strident but uninterestingly wicked content). I simply avoid discovering new content because 98% of the time it is just a struggle not useful or entertaining at all. It is the exception that I get what I need instead of being pushed into something others want from me. There is unmanageable amount of content pushed my way and almost zero interest of serving what I need. It is a struggle to use the web. I avoid it more and more in fact only going for reliable locations when I need something. Unluckily there is little choice to choose from approaches when I am determined to do something. Movie streaming sites all have the same intrusive and pushy behaviour. I cannot browse their collection in peace not only because they do not provide real choice but pour their preselected lists on me but when I stop the mouse in some random location an active content pops into my face distracting me from relaxing on entertainment content. Netflix, Amazon Prime and some other I tried works the same. It is not relaxing but upsetting, not entertaining at all. I more and more need to rely on my old collection of movies. Same with music. I am avoiding using social media sites due to the overload of useless content poured into my face following an obscure logic (no logic). Those just block me instead of being helpful or entertaining. LinkedIn is exception, I use it for job search, but don't get me started how sh*ty that is, oh my god! Like if clueless amateurs were given half the necessary time to come up with something whatever. Since Google and all the other job searching sites are even worse I cannot go elsewhere really after finished with know names and organisation and the direct search (which is the only reliable). When I complain about usability they respond nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which is also typical in parallel of the irrelevant empty responses. Unluckily this whole unusable internet is a huge and painful topic that would fill days and weeks of discussions and summarising the negative but completely avoidable experiences, all the user hostility out there. HN is one of my remedies with its reliable and simple approaches and interesting, easy to navigate content, with the lack of obstructive visual noise and manipulation.
ModernMech 5y ago
> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software Moreover, no one is forced to write dark pattern software. It's probably safe to say that most dark-pattern software is the result of a voluntary, monetary transaction between employer and employee. People are knowingly writing this software on purpose, for money. Let's see a show of hands of people in this community who wrote dark pattern software for their boss instead of quitting. Where is this software coming from if not from a community of people like the ones here at Hacker News?
ahiknsr 5y ago
> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. Come on. This is bullshit. https://www.businessinsider.com/unredacted-google-lawsuit-docs-detail-efforts-to-collect-user-location-2021-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/unredacted-google-lawsuit-do... "When Google tested versions of its Android operating system that made privacy settings easier to find, users took advantage of them, which Google viewed as a "problem," according to the documents. To solve that problem, Google then sought to bury those settings deeper within the settings menu."
noncoml 5y ago
Victim blaming much?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
duckmysick 5y ago
> Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams How long ago are we talking about? Because scams and hostile threats were on the internet as long as I remember. Phishing and carding was present in the 90s, Morris worm was in the late 80s. Perhaps things are worse now because the stakes are higher. Ecommerce wasn't popular back then and computer viruses sent some spam or displayed funny messages. Now that the targets are more attractive (and there's more of them), scams are getting more sophisticated and increased in volume.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > Morris worm was in the late 80s To be fair, that wasn't any kind of scam; it was more like "I started a joke that started the whole world laughing".
buttercraft 5y ago
This must be the attitude that scammers adopt so they can sleep at night. It's like saying that fraud is okay as long as the victim is stupid enough.
wbsss4412 5y ago
I’m somewhat confused by your example here. Are there downsides to Apple having control over the App Store? Absolutely. Is tying your credit card to your Apple account “user hostile”? I’m not so sure. The piece of mind knowing that I’m not going to have to fight with some random company to get a subscription cancelled is worth it for me. (Looking at you, NYTimes, Comcast, etc.)

by antocv 5y ago

r_singh 5y ago

Users are the last ones to blame. If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists. If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….

chii 5y ago
but uses voted with their wallets - there have been many smartphone manufacturers, but they fell one by one to user's choices to flock to the iphone (and i guess android).
- Ragnarork 5y ago
  Users voted with their wallets at the time (back in the late 2000s), which led to Apple and Google becoming the dominant forces in the market and the providers of a huge chunk of the worlds smartphone. How would users vote now with their wallet when everything is tailored for users having either an iPhone or an Android phone? (Yes, I know alternatives exists, even alternatives not built on top of Android, but it's extremely limited and targets very tech savvy users, possibly requiring coding skills to use to their fullest).
  - tndtgrwy 5y ago
    I agree. I own a pine phone. It's all but un-useable in any meaningful sense of the word. I own a brick and motor and have just been mandated by the government to run their version of the vaccine passport app. It's android OR ios. What choices do I have here?
    - ArnoVW 5y ago
      Not really your question I think, but, what country do you live? You are mandated an app? That's crazy?! What about people that don't have a phone? Or a 'dumb'-phone? Where I live any valid QR code works, be it paper or even just a picture of the paper. No need to use an app.
      - yosamino 5y ago
        You need the app to verify the the information that is encoded in the QR code. This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.
        PeterisP 5y ago
        Well, business is different; you don't have to use your phone for that, you can use a separate smart device (which may be a non-phone like tablets or perhaps iPod might work) just for this purpose; and, unlike consumers, there's generally no taboo in requiring businesses to fulfill requirements which may need extra hardware that they don't yet have and need to purchase, or require them to change their buildings, etc, so saying "your business needs to run this app" does not imply "my phone needs to be iOS or Android" as there's zero expectation that your personal phone should be sufficient for that requirement imposed on the company. Also, they're not saying that your business needs to run this app, they are saying that your business needs to verify Covid certificates and offering these apps as one way to do it. But it's not the only way - for example, it may be less convenient, but you can do that QR code scanning + Covid certificate validation on any computer with a connected camera using a web service (https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ is one random example, there is also open source code to roll your own checks for EU Covid certificates in some custom system if you need to), and there you can use Windows or Linux or whatever, there's no need for a smartphone as such. In fact, if the parent poster's Pinephone can run a browser and expose a camera to it, then perhaps it might work out of the box on the Pinephone without needing a special app.
- keawade 5y ago
  The “users voted with wallets” / “free market decided” line often ignores how consumers are not choosing in a vacuum or choosing simple things or sometimes not choosing at all. Often choices are made for short term benefits that come with a long term negative trade off. ie choosing features like a phone camera even though the device also disregards the user’s privacy. In other cases, choices aren’t even made by consumers directly. Like when a company acquires potential competition before they’re able to grow into a threat. Or even a company uses their growing economic power and position for regulatory capture. Sometimes a company just breaks away from their competition and end up the only competitive choice in the market and are able To cement their position through the means above. Especially following the previous cases, users sometimes don’t choose at all because there remain no meaningful choices in the ecosystem they purchase in.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  What do you mean by “i [sic] guess android [sic]”? Over 70% of smartphones in use run Android.
- pmontra 5y ago
  On the Android side mostly Samsung and Chinese phones.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  It was not the users. Microsoft's Windows Mobile / Windows Phone and Nokia's Symbian completely failed to keep up with new innovations, which was the real problem. Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app side with everything that existed on the Windows Mobile world and on the developer side with everything else. Symbian was (effectively) a Nokia-only OS, which meant that developers were pretty scarce and again it was incompatible on the developer and user experiences. Then came iOS as the first "disruptor" where the jailbreakers (!) of the first days showed just how sorely behind the competition was... the first iPhone was EDGE-only ffs and still it was radically different and better than everything on the market including the back-then flagship models with Windows Mobile from HTC. Android followed up and obliterated the competition, which was easy enough to do given Google's budget and Microsoft's complete inability to react - the iPhone was released in 2007 and the comical disaster of Windows Phone took until 2010! The rest is history, everything not from Apple moved over to Android - the longest holdout was Blackberry with their moat of business users and the BlackBerry Messenger. And somewhere along the line, Samsung managed to destroy both HTC and Sony... what remains now on the market is Samsung, Xiaomi, BBK (Vivo/OPPO) and a bunch of low budget stuff fighting for the scraps. Very sad indeed.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Very concise; and that's pretty much the way I remember it too. Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally). We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago. But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzleloader and head out to the mountains and spend the next decade collecting beaver pelts. Cookie settings be damned.
    - AstralStorm 5y ago
      Don't worry, the tax men will find you and force you to file the taxes on paper. Or maybe even electronically. I presume your beavers also come with healthcare, and the stores where you'd buy anything will still take cash.
deleted 5y ago
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Freak_NL 5y ago
I feel a constant tension where companies and governments are all but demanding everyone owns a smartphone with one of these two specific operating systems for all sorts of things (from banking, to authentication, to government services), but have to somehow facilitate the remainder of users as an afterthought. It makes a lot of things really suck, and that's ignoring all those walled gardens essentially requiring them (Whatsapp and Signal come to mind).
- afandian 5y ago
  More insidious is the requirement to have an account with Google or Apple.
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    That's what bugs me too. Having to enter a legal agreement with a foreign entity to use local services irks me out of principle.
- dools 5y ago
  Your government demands you own a smart phone?
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    You can of course function without one, but the nudging towards getting their authentication app is getting worse. For healthcare records, vendors in the Netherlands are required to move authentication of their portals to the government provided DigiD¹. Healthcare will be the first field where the minimum level of assurance is being raised to 'substantial', and this means that only authentication via the Android or IOS DigiD app will suffice (right now for other government functions like taxes and planning your booster shot you can also use SMS as (weak) 2FA). While the government is aware that there is a group of people who can't or won't use a smartphone or their app, there is no technological solution on the horizon, despite viable alternatives for 2FA existing (like WebAuthn). This is what I mean by “all but demanding”. Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme. 1: Broader than just DigiD actually, supporting European eIDAS standards, but for 99% of citizens this means DigiD.
kleiba 5y ago
I don't have a smartphone, am I not participating in society?
- r_singh 5y ago
  What I mean is that you need it to use an increasing number of private and public services these days. Speaking from my experiences in Europe and South Asia. So effectively companies and the government are telling us that we need one of these to get avail conveniences and in some cases to be able to use their service at all… With policies that mandate the use of digital vaccine certificates, apps and QR codes being ubiquitous, we’re effectively being forced to become a customer of Apple or Google one way or another I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone Really? I wonder where you are. I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it with me; I've never been to any kind of shop that doesn't accept my debit card, other than for small-value purchases like a bag of onions from a greengrocer, for which cash is sometimes required.
    - r_singh 5y ago
      I was in Mumbai and Berlin. I did not need my smartphone to pay, but to display my vaccination certificate which is required at most places and to scan the menu which these days is replaced with a QR code placed on the table
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        Each time I got jabbed, they gave me a little cardboard "certificate" the size of a credit card. I carry them in my wallet, but I've never had to produce them anywhere. Perhaps I'm going to the wrong places.
simonh 5y ago
For the same reasons the world is ok with only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems. Consolidation benefits users. It increases capital investment in the dominant platforms making them better faster; it increases the chances your software and skills will be compatible with your next computer; you benefit if your family, friends or colleagues use a compatible platform; it focuses developer efforts to have fewer platforms to develop for so there’s more better software. Users flock to dominant platforms because it’s in their interests to do so, and in their interests that others do too. This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power. There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  > Consolidation benefits users. Only to a point then it crosses over into exploitation. If users could switch OS's more easily then there would probably be more of them in widespread use, like browsers. As it is most people have to buy a new device to change OS. Websites themselves become sticky because of network effects and familiarity.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems There's a chap from RedHat here, telling me that Linux is commercially viable.
  - simonh 5y ago
    There are several commercially viable desktop OSes other than Windows and MacOS, but they are not mass market. I knowingly wrote my comment to exclude specialist players addressing niche markets because they have completely different adoption dynamics. Actually ChromeOS is arguably mass market. That's all beside the point though really. It doesn't change the fact that the dynamics that drive consolidation are actually in a very large part motivated by user self interest.
heresie-dabord 5y ago
Maybe it is as simple as the fact that chaos is by definition hostile. Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government. Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand. Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.

noiwillnot 5y ago

> even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests Consumers have been sold a dream, and after the tech advances and sweatshoping can't go farther, they would rather eat skimpflation day after day than pay more. This is most evident online, where a good chunk of the population expect everything to be free.

johnchristopher 5y ago
[Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business (2008)](https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/ https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/) They expect it for free but it's not like the product can actually be bought.
cbozeman 5y ago
People only expect things to be free because they're not being told / educated on the actual cost of their "free" service. I wonder how many people over the past 15 or so years have been denied a job because a tech-savvy HR person combed through social media / forum profiles and read things they didn't like? And if you think that wasn't happening then, you're out of your mind. This was happening in World of Warcraft guilds, for God's sakes... players with "wrong" opinions were kept out of certain guilds by """""""well-meaning""""""" officers of those guilds, so I assure you, it was happening in the real world. But today, as then, you never knew about it, so you had no knowledge that your employment was denied because most American states are at-will and it's not like HR would have said you have a "problematic" stance regarding <insert issue X>. This is but one small example of the "progress" we've seen on the "modern web".

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago

There is also ever-increasing ubiquitous digitalization of many aspects of our life. In a lot of countries, you either spend minutes to hours online to do government-required paperwork or days "the old way", and the old way is mostly dwindling, catering mostly to elderly internet-inept citizens. There are services you're only going to get online. And all those online things are way easier once you're committed to the Clown® Computing, Clown® fatigue notwithstanding. So you opt to not have those things, and for all intents and purposes you look like a digital hermit with a disturbing tendency for self-flagellation. "Why do you keep doing these things to yourself?" So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far.

starbugs 5y ago
> So, yeah, so far, personal comfort beats the hostility. So far. I think that's a great acceptable answer to OP's question.

ratww 5y ago

Yeah, that's the thing. You can't really fight against results. Putting an annoying modal asking for an email will give you lots of email leads. Sending newsletters will give more returns to the website. Sending desktop notifications whenever there's a new article works and gives more visits. A website that takes 20 seconds to load is not an issue. Advertisements give more than zero moneys. The reason it gives positive results is because this is "fine" for enough people. Some people are totally okay with having 5000 unread emails. The web is slow because computer/OS/ISPs are greedy. Ads? Look at television. Just blame cookie banners on the government. Why it's fine for a segment of people, I don't know. Maybe they have no choice, maybe they don't know better, maybe they are completely fine with it. All I know is that they are the target users and I'm not, and companies are ok with either losing me or forcing me to go trough this bullshit. Or maybe they don't even have to worry, since there's no competition.

PeterisP 5y ago
We can look at earlier consumer-hostile experiences which were generally solved by consumer rights regulations. You can fight against results - lying in advertising by saying that your Patented Snake Oil Tincture cures everything really does "work" and bring in money, but it was stopped by regulation; lying that this knock-off is really SuperBrandItem does work and bring results, but trademark laws significantly reduced it; selling things that look ok but break immediately are solved by various warranty and fit-for-purpose laws, etc, etc. This is fundamentally a coordination problem that can't really be solved by individual users separately "voting with their wallets" (as past experience shows - none of the problems listed above were solved by consumer choices) but can be solved by coordinated requirements, with the users as a community voting in standards and regulations for commerce that are mandatory for every seller.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  A lot of this is also caused by following the leader. And the leaders are fueled by adtech or spyware...
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  Yes, this is primarily a regulatory problem not a technical or design one. Most user hostile actions do work to bring in more users or make you more money. If they didn't then companies wouldn't be doing it would they? But just because something makes sense for a business does not mean it is ethical, moral or legal. Snake oil and counterfeit goods are solid examples. Things like auto charging, difficult to cancel subscriptions and the trade in user information should also be handled in a similar way.

rini17 5y ago

OK, let's say I won't tolerate it. What do I do? crickets And no, average users have never avoided scams, email spam is older than web.

5560675260 5y ago
Don't like something? Take your money elsewhere, and make sure to tell why on social media, even if you don't have large following. Besides making bad practices unnoticeably less profitable this normalises caring about this. In the future we will see more business will see practices that you like as advantageous.
- feupan 5y ago
  Sometimes there’s no elsewhere. Sometimes elsewhere only has crickets. It feels like you can’t both have a successful product and one that is free of noise. Only some open source software succeeds at this and even then quality often suffers immensely.
  - 5560675260 5y ago
    There is obviously no magical quick denoising solution. But we still can demand less noise and patronise providers that at least pretend to listen.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Voting with your dollars does cede a lot of power to the wealthy, since they have most of the money and represent a small portion of the population.
  - 5560675260 5y ago
    I think you have it backwards. Wealthy already have all the power they need. Everyone else has zero power, unless they organise, pool their resources or at least choose to move in same direction independently.

Mordisquitos 5y ago

> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests. While technically true in terms of theoretical modelling of a market economy, I don't think that's a fair diagnosis in practice. Were early-19th century English workers forced to take jobs with 6-day working weeks and >12 hours a day? Technically no. But did they have a choice? And was there an adequate incentive to even provide such a choice? Of course nobody "is forced" to use dark-pattern software, but as it stands today, normal users have no choice on the matter. I would argue that potential user-friendly-non-dark-pattern competitors are unable to break into the market of the Microsoft-Apple-Google oligopoly not because user hostility and dark-patterns are in of themselves a competitive advantage nor of any economic value as a whole. Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.

antocv 5y ago
> normal users have no choice on the matter. The choice to not use shit software is easier than going on a strike and demanding 8h work day instead of 14h. Which our ancestors also did, some died for the cause. I for one, do not use and have not used and especially not payed for user-hostile software, beginning since 2000. It is possible, you dont really have to accept shit or keep on using shit. Everytime that click feels wrong, that idea seems off, dont click it, close that software suite and uninstall. You do not have to accept that License.
- Madmallard 5y ago
  Congratulations on making a decision long before it became a serious problem for users and developing the habit. The vast majority of people are not like you. Most people succumbed to these practices over a gradual period of a decade and as such are locked-in habit-wise to this with an attention span that is hard-pressed not to focus on the matter.
- 5y ago

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account Freee market delivers best results for the people, and if it doesn't, it's the people's fault!

laurent92 5y ago

> and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them I went Apple precisely because it was not hostile at all compared to Windows and Google’s forest of adware. The minute you give me a non-user hostile OS (phone or desktop), I’ll PAY $300/year for it. But even Ubuntu returned Amazon results when I searched the local application (Don’t get me started on technicalities of “But maybe you want your start menu to display your friend’s most recent purchases? How can Ubuntu know? But they’ve recognized their mistake after going to production and rolled back parts of it!”) It’s time to stop blaming the user and start blaming the EU for their badly-written cookie banner laws.

Kbelicius 5y ago
> It’s time to stop blaming the user and start blaming the EU for their badly-written cookie banner laws. Are you saying that EU cookie law is to blame for software being hostile to its users? I can't see how that can be.
AstralStorm 5y ago
Yes, blame the one law that attempts to give people a modicum of privacy, and not the developers really wanting you to click through and press accept all for income. The problem with beating dark patterns there specifically is the sheer number of them...
denton-scratch 5y ago
> badly-written cookie banner laws The law doesn't call for cookie banners. It calls for consent. I'm willing to auto-consent, because I use a cookie blocker. I think this plague of popups is temporary, and is going to abate; eventually the browser-makers will incorporate auto-consent, as they have incorporated cookie controls. And I believe that a lot of those consent popups are an attempt to annoy europeans into lobbying for repeal of the law. Ain't gonna happen - we're quite pleased with it.

Ensorceled 5y ago

> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. This is an intensely user hostile view point, ironically enough. "The dark patterns being foisted upon the average user are their own fault, they deserve what they get" In fact, I think this attitude is how the developers and product managers responsible for this stuff sleep at night, "these people deserve this for their moral failings, so what I'm doing doesn't make me a terrible person" How would my mom switch from her crappy bank app? That app that the bank is kind of forcing her to use by making the in person experience so terrible and, well, because of COVID. There is only one bank in her town, I guess she could start driving "to the city" for banking but, surprise, all those banks have equally shitty apps. She could switch from Facebook to ... what exactly? Her extended family are all on Facebook, her grandkids are posting pics of the great grandkids on Facebook. Yeah, she deserves the disaster that is Facebook.

antocv 5y ago
Ironically the "my mom" and "but my grandparents" angle is what has always been used to dumb down and introduce user-hostile patterns. Surprise, after 20 years the developers and managers assume they are building software for retarded un-learnable "grandparents and mothers", the end result is well stupid software.
- nkrisc 5y ago
  If your user base is large enough, some significant faction of your users are in fact “retarded un-learnable,” though I might have put it more delicately. And when there’s money involved, there’s always incentive to cater to your lowest common denominator user. I’ve watched many in-person and remote use testing sessions, some people just have no clue how to use technology, yet you still have to design apps and websites for them to use. These people aren’t necessarily dumb or anything like that, they just don’t understand technology.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Most of the dark patterns are not due to dumbing down UI. They're either because nothing better is available (security), income would be reduced (ads, cookie warnings, software is deliberately crippled for non-professional versions), development is done by lowest bidder.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. It's because it's the same kind of users that tolerated such bullshit on TV 20 years ago: 5 ads or more over a 30 minutes show. The truth is: most people are brainlessly consuming any media (be it TV or the Internet or the latest crappy auto-tuned pop song) and are wandering hyperconsumerists souls. 20 years ago it was more complicated to go on the Internet, so your average "I'll sit in front of TV and tolerate 5 ads over my 30 minutes show" wasn't on the Internet. It's that simple. It takes time and half a brain to not get abused by all these companies. People don't want to spend the time and certainly don't have half a brain. The Internet adapted itself to the masses. That'd be my rant.

ratww 5y ago
I think that's a bit unfair. It's not that the masses wanted that scenario. They would be completely cool with a non-user-hostile TV or web. It's just that TV channels and internet companies are constantly trying to push as much garbage as they can, and the amount we currently got is the amount they can get away with.

Damogran6 5y ago

Not sure why you brought Apple into this, while yes, their walled garden is very pretty, the experience of them extracting money out of your accounts is as friction free as it gets.

nathias 5y ago

we kind of are, because dark patterns get into regulation and become part of law

jclardy 5y ago

Is Apple's case really a dark pattern? I can start a software subscription trial and immediately cancel. Do that with a random third party and suddenly the cancellation page is "down for maintenance" and you have to call in for support where they try to sell you a discounted package (cough Adobe.) Also do you really want to go around typing in credit card details into every app you pay for? for every in-app purchase, for every movie rental, every song purchase? How is that user hostile?

mihaaly 5y ago

Unluckily providers clone each other, designers trying to prove their reason of existence pushing for new or modern approaches just for the sake of it, and technical writers in the fallacy of quantity write about anything different comes their way quickly, judging by first look not by sustainable usability consequently generating the appearance of trend without having any trend (not like a trend is a good measure, not at all! nevertheless, it is used as guideline by too many). I try to avoid as much as possible from the user hostile internet but there is wee choice in an era of rapid cloning of UX with random tweaks for the illusion of novelty. I go away immediately (for many many years now) from pages blocking the view with dialogs of subscription after 10-20 seconds or even less from arriving. I go away from randomly found unknown sites expecting me of configuring 30 cookie settings the 500th of time that month. I do not watch youtube because it is intrusive with ads, suggestions, autoplay (on the top of the usual strident but uninterestingly wicked content). I simply avoid discovering new content because 98% of the time it is just a struggle not useful or entertaining at all. It is the exception that I get what I need instead of being pushed into something others want from me. There is unmanageable amount of content pushed my way and almost zero interest of serving what I need. It is a struggle to use the web. I avoid it more and more in fact only going for reliable locations when I need something. Unluckily there is little choice to choose from approaches when I am determined to do something. Movie streaming sites all have the same intrusive and pushy behaviour. I cannot browse their collection in peace not only because they do not provide real choice but pour their preselected lists on me but when I stop the mouse in some random location an active content pops into my face distracting me from relaxing on entertainment content. Netflix, Amazon Prime and some other I tried works the same. It is not relaxing but upsetting, not entertaining at all. I more and more need to rely on my old collection of movies. Same with music. I am avoiding using social media sites due to the overload of useless content poured into my face following an obscure logic (no logic). Those just block me instead of being helpful or entertaining. LinkedIn is exception, I use it for job search, but don't get me started how sh*ty that is, oh my god! Like if clueless amateurs were given half the necessary time to come up with something whatever. Since Google and all the other job searching sites are even worse I cannot go elsewhere really after finished with know names and organisation and the direct search (which is the only reliable). When I complain about usability they respond nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which is also typical in parallel of the irrelevant empty responses. Unluckily this whole unusable internet is a huge and painful topic that would fill days and weeks of discussions and summarising the negative but completely avoidable experiences, all the user hostility out there. HN is one of my remedies with its reliable and simple approaches and interesting, easy to navigate content, with the lack of obstructive visual noise and manipulation.

ModernMech 5y ago

> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software Moreover, no one is forced to write dark pattern software. It's probably safe to say that most dark-pattern software is the result of a voluntary, monetary transaction between employer and employee. People are knowingly writing this software on purpose, for money. Let's see a show of hands of people in this community who wrote dark pattern software for their boss instead of quitting. Where is this software coming from if not from a community of people like the ones here at Hacker News?

ahiknsr 5y ago

> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. Come on. This is bullshit. https://www.businessinsider.com/unredacted-google-lawsuit-docs-detail-efforts-to-collect-user-location-2021-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/unredacted-google-lawsuit-do... "When Google tested versions of its Android operating system that made privacy settings easier to find, users took advantage of them, which Google viewed as a "problem," according to the documents. To solve that problem, Google then sought to bury those settings deeper within the settings menu."

noncoml 5y ago

Victim blaming much?

deleted 5y ago

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duckmysick 5y ago

> Previously the internet was better since the average internet user avoided scams How long ago are we talking about? Because scams and hostile threats were on the internet as long as I remember. Phishing and carding was present in the 90s, Morris worm was in the late 80s. Perhaps things are worse now because the stakes are higher. Ecommerce wasn't popular back then and computer viruses sent some spam or displayed funny messages. Now that the targets are more attractive (and there's more of them), scams are getting more sophisticated and increased in volume.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> Morris worm was in the late 80s To be fair, that wasn't any kind of scam; it was more like "I started a joke that started the whole world laughing".

buttercraft 5y ago

This must be the attitude that scammers adopt so they can sleep at night. It's like saying that fraud is okay as long as the victim is stupid enough.

wbsss4412 5y ago

I’m somewhat confused by your example here. Are there downsides to Apple having control over the App Store? Absolutely. Is tying your credit card to your Apple account “user hostile”? I’m not so sure. The piece of mind knowing that I’m not going to have to fight with some random company to get a subscription cancelled is worth it for me. (Looking at you, NYTimes, Comcast, etc.)