Done this several times. It's always been when I've had to take paid employment between building and failing at my own startups. I will always argue up and down

Done this several times. It's always been when I've had to take paid employment between building and failing at my own startups. I will always argue up and down with the client and almost always will get significant reduction in the nastiness of whatever thing they were trying to do, through education. I think a lot of this dark patterns would be even darker but for the push-back by some developers. Though I've been at companies where some workers are like robots and will carry out management's desires down to a T, even when the idea is total insanity. Some workers are immigrants who cannot afford to lose their employment or they will be thrown out of the country and potentially lose their partner and children. When I have to work on my own projects, I generally avoid all dark patterns - I try to go as far in the opposite direction as possible, while still generating revenue. Though, with the torrent site I built once, it was "Anything Goes". You're already running an illegal site, might as well write something that bleeds the users dry if you can. EDIT: I want to add that most of it was down to lack of technical knowledge by management. They were business guys who didn't know the Web. Most of the time they weren't trying to be assholes, it just appeared that way.