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I agree. My biggest gripe is these new pop-up financial institutions that provide insight into your credit history or loans. It's impossible to find the contac

I agree. My biggest gripe is these new pop-up financial institutions that provide insight into your credit history or loans. It's impossible to find the contact info of a real human being and in many cases the only obvious way to even open a ticket is by creating an account first. If I have evidence someone is trying to commit fraud by pretending to be me and signing up for your services do not force me to sign up for another just to contact you about it. You're trying to use identity theft as an enrollment tool.

mannykannot 5y ago
I am not a lawyer, so I am posting this as a question in the hope that someone who knows the law will reply. In the situation described here, if you "sign up for another [service] just to contact you about it", are you potentially putting yourself in a worse situation than before, by accepting terms, such as arbitration clauses, that limit your options for redress through small-claims court or other legal action? If this is so, then there is an obviously exploitable dark pattern here.
xemdetia 5y ago
This is something I see as a middle ground. I don't really think having the 'right' to a human fixes the problem. I just think the right to actually being able to get a conversation without becoming a member of the service to obvious bad behaviour from another actor or if the service decides to arbitrarily terminate service, and that to actually mean something. Right now it's clearly 'just sue' if you want things actually done. So many people are invested in social media or services in a way that a random misplaced ban can leave them stranded from actually getting help. On the other side the people in most orgs that deal with those category of issues are the janitors doing unwanted work, or that work is not prioritized. There's no fun catchall term like UX to even get people excited about fixing this class of problem. Example of weird semi-positive was from reporting a particular serial scammer using a YouTube+Cloudflare combo where I would get always a submission receipt but then seemingly arbitrarily feedback that the situation was dealt with.

mannykannot 5y ago

I am not a lawyer, so I am posting this as a question in the hope that someone who knows the law will reply. In the situation described here, if you "sign up for another [service] just to contact you about it", are you potentially putting yourself in a worse situation than before, by accepting terms, such as arbitration clauses, that limit your options for redress through small-claims court or other legal action? If this is so, then there is an obviously exploitable dark pattern here.

xemdetia 5y ago

This is something I see as a middle ground. I don't really think having the 'right' to a human fixes the problem. I just think the right to actually being able to get a conversation without becoming a member of the service to obvious bad behaviour from another actor or if the service decides to arbitrarily terminate service, and that to actually mean something. Right now it's clearly 'just sue' if you want things actually done. So many people are invested in social media or services in a way that a random misplaced ban can leave them stranded from actually getting help. On the other side the people in most orgs that deal with those category of issues are the janitors doing unwanted work, or that work is not prioritized. There's no fun catchall term like UX to even get people excited about fixing this class of problem. Example of weird semi-positive was from reporting a particular serial scammer using a YouTube+Cloudflare combo where I would get always a submission receipt but then seemingly arbitrarily feedback that the situation was dealt with.