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Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
- totetsu 3y agoThis is how I ended up getting monthly notifications that scribd has tried to charge the virtual card I used to sign up to it with and immediately there after froze.
- DamonHD 3y agoIndeed a dark dishonest practice. I won't touch services that do such things.
- Gordonjcp 3y agoI love services like that. I love entering data into them! In fact, I love it so much that I wrote some scripts to do just that...
- rlpb 3y agoI wish there were a way for users to share the websites that do this and other dark patterns so that I can avoid them. Effectively a reputation system. Search engines used to do this, but apparently not any more. We need a replacement.
- tsuujin 3y agohttps://www.deceptive.design/hall-of-shame https://www.deceptive.design/hall-of-shame
- datavirtue 3y agoI agree, we need a replacement. At the protocol level I would like life insurance policy returns and banking service as a place to store my money that allows me to pay any portion of currency I want at any time. So Facebook can be paid for the time I'm on the site, for instance. The returns from the insurance contract might even make it all free to me (it would, easily). Everyone is happy except those who rely on reaching you via forced advertisements. Oh, and the people who rely on enslaving others. Any such protocol would be labeled as evil, filthy socialism.
- squarefoot 3y agoWhat about a browser extension doing exactly that: a distributed user populated database, karma based abuse prevention (because it will be abused) and a big indicator that turns on from yellow to red according to the level of garbage the site is throwing against its users.
- wruza 3y agoWhat would stop them from abusing the karma itself and/or buying “influence” points from popular users?
- spdif899 3y agoHopefully, the fact that the system would create its own loop, and would rely on the accuracy and usefulness of that loop. If it served inaccurate info to users, they might be tricked into opening something they wouldn't have, at which point they would lose trust in the tool upon seeing the thing it's meant to protect them from.
- wruza 3y agoNot sure if we’re talking about the same. It’s clear that one could block reviews from a bad reviewer and e.g. subscribe to another one. But those who game the system will promote their own reviewer accounts and drown real useful ones in low karma via botnets, making them non-discoverable for new users. It means money to them, and it doesn’t cost much, so it’s basically free money in doing that for sites which would want to pay for a good position in such system. It’s inevitable and there are tens to hundreds of examples of third-party review sites out there. The loop is fragile by design.
- wruza 3y agoAny reputation system is prone to manipulation, with its uselessness correlated to popularity.
- rlpb 3y agoI am optimistic that a social graph can help with this, using transitive trust and making it easy to transitively "cut off" bad parts of the graph with a blocklist. The problem is that commercial graphs do become useless, as you say. But with the Fediverse we now have a graph that is resistant to this. I'm not aware of anyone building a reputation system on top of it, but this is something I expect will develop in the future. The system's opinion about a particular data point would then be personalized based on the people you say you trust to indicate that information, combined with the people they say they trust, and so forth.
- janalsncm 3y agoI have an extension that lets me block websites from Google results.
- gnicholas 3y agoI also dislike websites that get you down a path before requiring an email signup or cell phone verification. But I much prefer the former to the latter; pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? Whereas I won't give out my phone number under pretty much any circumstance (and don't have a spam-only number).
- JohnFen 3y ago> pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? I used to, but I've since taken to just not signing up to things instead.
- 63 3y agoWhen I have no choice, I use a free throwaway email service. Unfortunately it's much harder to get a throwaway phone number so it greatly annoys me when services (Twitter, specifically) require one
- anonym29 3y agosmspool, smspva, etc. not free but not expensive.
- datavirtue 3y agoAll of big tech is checking phone numbers against sophisticated databases to determine if it is possible for an individual to have that number associated with their cell phone device. If it isn't a real mobile number you are not getting in.
- scohesc 3y agoAdobe's web-based JPG to PNG converter is exactly like this. Upload a JPG, hit convert - it uploads the file, processes it on their end, and then refuses to give you the result until you "sign up for a free adobe account that we conveniently didn't tell you about until now!" Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually decide not to purchase from them. They'll then start spamming you without your consent a day later. Ransom sign-ups belong in the same tier of horrible. Modern downloadable software does this too. You download a "free" partition manager or "free" PDF converter, or whatever "free" - you install it, get through their wizard/main workflow to do what you want, but then it says "oops, sorry, you have to pay for this!" Anti-consumer stuff it all is. What a shame software and websites like this are allowed to exist.
- 63 3y agoThis is a little tangential, but your post reminded me that I've struggled with converting images at work because our vpn blocks a lot of those file conversation sites (presumably for good reason, but I'm not privy). Converting common file formats seems like such a common use case that I really feel like there should be a tool built into modern operating systems for it. It seems like an obvious add to me, but then again the Windows search functionality barely works so I'm not sure they're incentived to actually help their users right now.
- asynchronous 3y agoEspecially since almost all conversions can be done in the browser with JavaScript libraries now.
- ryandrake 3y agoA browser + JavaScript seems like a pretty heavy lift to do something as trivial as converting an image from one format to another. ImageMagick is simple, fast, and available for just about every system imaginable.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
- nickthegreek 3y agoMy biggest current peeve is not allowing me to see shipping costs until I’ve given basically all my information to a company before I’ve checked out.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoIncluding your email address. And then you abandon the cart, because it doesn't make sense for you to pay $50 for shipping. But then you get those emails 'you forgot something'. No I didn't.
- badwolf 3y agoAnd you're forever on their "mailing list" because they don't process unsubscribes, since they probably just manually upload a .csv of everyone every time they want to send something to you, whether you ever opted in, or not.
- Tagbert 3y agoThen you are justified to put them on the spam filter.
- Modified3019 3y agoI just got done switching from gmail to fastmail, and it solves this problem beautifully with a nifty feature allowing me to create a new proxy (“masked”) email address for every website but have the mail show up in my mail address. There’s a limit, but it’s like 600+ or something. So when the email gets sold and I start getting spammed, I can easy kill it, and also know who the culprit was. This one is paid, but I’m at the point where $140 for 3 years “standard” package is fine by me. Not to mention I can actually call someone if I have a problem, instead of getting blocked by google for no particular reason without any recourse. I don’t have a huge social media following that can get me special treatment. There may possibly be free options that allow you to proxy/mask emails, but I’ve not explored that. Another useful service is privacy.com, which in a similar manner let’s me create proxy virtual payment cards, setting limits and redacting cards. This kills the possibility of a malicious business like a telecom still charging me for something and having the bank still allow it to go through when they shouldn’t. Now my credit union is pretty good so far, but there are a lot of banks that will happily fuck someone over without a care. It’s nice having no mean _No_
- malikNF 3y agoJust saying, some of these sites don't have captcha or any kind of spam prevention implemented. Something something simple shell script feed them garbage data something.
- s-xyz 3y agoI understand the point; ideally you want to have some free content before you actually need to sign up. However, when integrating a paid solution like OpenAI for example, the tricky part is to limit the number of free requests to prevent going bankrupt by one user. I can imagine that this would be a potential reason to ask for a sign up.
- JohnFen 3y agoI think you might have missed the point. The complaint isn't that an email address was asked for, it's that the ask didn't happen up front. Having someone spend time doing something and then asking for an email address before giving the results is the Bad Thing here. I don't think the author would have complained if the email address was asked for prior to him starting to actually use the service.
- vishnuharidas 3y agoIt's not about being free or paid, but it's all about being honest to the users.I don't have a problem to sign up or pay for the service. But I need to know before I start using it. It's like I install a brand new text editor software, spent some time to write a story, and when click on the "save" option, it asking for the payment - that's dishonest and shows that there can be more such dishonest behaviors in the future. But if the same software asked me for a payment upfront, that's totally understandable. Or, if it said upfront that "this is a limited demo, you can save documents up to 150 words, and if you have to save larger documents, you need to pay", that's being very straightforward to the users.
- lowbloodsugar 3y agoAlso: TV companies, please don't show me advertisements instead of the TV show I want to watch. Car dealers, please tell me about all the expensive feeds and add-ons before I agree to buy the car. Phone companies, gyms, fucking everyone, please tell me about the $50, $150 "sign up fee" in addition to the $X a month cost. etc. I mean, good luck guy. You are a human on a planet run by humans with all the power imbalances that implies.
- cellis 3y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted. It's completely true, everyone wants a reality that caters to them. The harsh reality of online business is that most consumers won't give a product the time of day before trying it for free unless it either comes highly recommended or they are compelled to use it by a higher power. So tactics such as these pay off better than what? the OP is suggesting.
- MathMonkeyMan 3y agoIt comes down to ethics. If you need dark patterns to stay in business, then I'd prefer you weren't in business. Now what if it were _my_ business...
- royibernthal 3y agoCompletely agree.
- Bluecobra 3y agoGlad this post wasn’t hosted on Substack, I really hate that nag window asking me to sign up (thanks Kill Sticky!).
- nvader 3y agoI was one of today's lucky ten thousand[0] because you cited Kill Sticky. I have just enabled it on my browsers and look forward to a much improved web experience. Thank you. [0] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- th33ngineer 3y agoUnfortunately most of the websites willing to engage in this are already aware that this is a user-hostile pattern.
- remram 3y agoIt's hostile to the people who don't want to sign up. In other words, it drives away the "free loaders" and increases conversions. I have to agree, I hate to say this but they are probably doing this because it works.
- flanbiscuit 3y agoI dislike this as well. If I really want to see whatever the sign-up is blocking, I try temp-mail.org. Haven't had any issues with temp-mail yet but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
- xtracto 3y agoThat's what bugmenot was for... but they started blocking all sites and hasn't been useful for years now. There should be a "distributed "replacement" that cannot be bought out.
- fishtoaster 3y agoI hate those too. On the other hand, I've been adjacent to the decision to add them before. You're under a lot of pressure to increase conversion in your onboarding funnel, so you test out moving your email capture up a bit in your conversion flow (ie to before you deliver results) and it works! Conversion increases throughout the funnel! So you keep it. Dark patterns like this persist because they measurably work. Some people (you and me) get extra pissed off, but we're in the small minority relative to the people who sign up at an elevated rate. :(
- falcolas 3y agoJust because a psychological trick works doesn’t mean you must use it. Have some respect for your users, developers. ‘Cause you’re one of them.
- mattigames 3y agoYou are new to this "capitalism" thing aren't you? /s
- kredd 3y agoUnless the playing field between the companies are on the same level (reads: dark patters are deemed illegal, and I think it should be!), or you are in some sort of monopolistic industry, to my understanding you will lose to your competitors. I've never been in a situation to implement such patterns, but play these mental gymnastics to give the implementor some benefit of the doubt.
- Nifty3929 3y agoThis is absolutely it! In the marketplace, only results matter and companies that deliver them displace those that don’t. In this case, result mean profit or at least conversions. The same was true for banks who were over extended on risky loans in the late aughts. If you didn’t do that, you were criticized by analysts and Wall Street for being too conservative, and anyway look how much these other banks are making. And by the government: you’re being too stingy with loans to the buyers who need them most.
- 10g1k 3y agoPopups are the Devil. Every web developed knew this in the 1990s. The fact that modern webdevs are bringing them back is an embarrassment to the industry.
- tamimio 3y agoYesterday I was using a website to generate a logo (not mentioning them they don’t deserve any publicity), and after entering the details, refining what to emphasize on, description, my email and logo requirements, they generated some and refused to show it unless I pay, not just signing up.. literal scumbags, why would I pay before even seeing the logo ffs, what if I didn’t like it? How about all the time and details I put there?!
- tomrod 3y agoInkscape has been a godsend
- chongli 3y agoThey just released a new version too! A bunch of really nice features! Long live native desktop software (FOSS and perpetual licensed proprietary)! SAAS-ified desktop apps and subscription software can’t disappear fast enough, if you ask me. I think most of it will, besides the big players (Adobe and Autodesk), because it relies too heavily on traffic from Google (slowly drowning in SEO spam).
- CrazyStat 3y ago> How about all the time and details I put there?! That's the whole point, they want you to be invested.
- pacifika 3y agoImagine buying an ikea cabinet for cheap and after assembling 90% they want a large sum for the missing bits.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- civilized 3y agoThis "tell me a lot of information in many small chunks before I'll do anything for you" pattern is too obvious now. I notice and leave almost immediately.
- matthiaswh 3y agoI've been trying to order from non Amazon sites as a habit lately. A large percentage of them use the same platform, maybe it's Shopify? During checkout, they have a checkbox asking if you also want to receive promotional emails. It's annoying that this is checked by default, but I can tolerate it to some degree since I still have the ability to opt out. I always uncheck it. Always. Almost without fail, I end up receiving marketing emails from these companies. (And not just followups from my purchase or even review requests, which would be bad enough.) I never buy from those brands again.
- polysaturate 3y agoThis... My assumption was always that there are two separate systems at play, and once your email is entered, it gets put into some sort of cart rescue campaign..which sends...promotional emails.
- koverda 3y agocart rescue campaigns technically qualify as "transactional" campaigns, rather than promotional campaigns. that's why that happens
- spondylosaurus 3y agoDo these stores' checkout pages have a section to enter your billing/shipping details on the left, and then a pane displaying what's in your cart and any active coupon codes on the right? If so, it's almost definitely Shopify. I know what checkbox you're referring to, and another fun thing is that if you use PayPal (or, I assume, another non-credit card payment method), it bypasses the "Sign me up for promotional emails" checkbox entirely... but it still checks it for you. So if I check out with PayPal I have to select the PayPal option, sign in to PayPal, confirm, then in the store's checkout page go back a page to manually uncheck the box. Drives me crazy. Unchecking it beforehand does nothing.
- miki123211 3y agoI don't really understand who this post is addressed to. The people that decide to do this just want more money. they won't stop because of some rant by a random stranger on the internet. The programmers who implement this have to do what their boss tells them to, or change jobs, and this isn't something worth changing jobs over. Everybody else already knows that it's a thing, knows why it happens and can't do anything about it.
- burnished 3y agoWhat a bizarre attitude. If you change people's minds they behave differently. Hell even in your example, there is a difference between some programmer who tells themselves this and some person who raises a stink; suddenly doing unethical shit slows you down, costs political capital, and approaches being more trouble than its worth. Fewer shit things will get done because there will be less energy to pursue them. I'm not even suggesting you go out and be some citizen activist - just be normal. You'd have feedback for other kinds of stupid idea.
- ryandrake 3y agoIt's ultimately on developers as the last, ethical line of defense: They're the ones typing in the code at the end of the day. Without them, the bosses couldn't implement these things. Unfortunately, for every good developer who draws a line in the sand, there's Bob, two desks down, who is happy to implement whatever dark pattern boss tells him to. Fuck Bob. What we really need is some kind of Hippocratic Oath for Software, that we all agree to and can collectively use to resist this shit. Not going to happen, but one can dream.
- lamontcg 3y agoOr a Union like the writers/actors guilds.
- _vertigo 3y agoI don't think asking for a sign up is unethical, at least not on the same magnitude as the actual Hippocratic Oath is concerned with. I'd envision the Hippocratic Oath for Software might have something to say about writing software for ICE or despotic regimes but not asking the user to sign up. One is unethical, the other is just annoying.
- LordShredda 3y agoAlmost every 'online tool' you can find is just a very inconvenient frontend to a command line tool you can find and use by yourself. These file converters can all be replaced by ffmpeg or magick. Every single pdf tool online is a bloated proxy to libpoppler
- jellyblade 3y agoThe only upsides I see are for infrequent or one-off conversions where you might not want to go through the hassle of finding/downloading/learning the tool, and for unsupported platforms like mobile phones. I suppose it brings awareness to the tools too if credited properly. Ezgif is one converter I've used a few times, and one of their info pages lists all of the CLI tools they use on the backend. That was quite handy to learn that gifsicle existed, something I was not aware of before.
- mvkel 3y agoIf it didn't convert, it wouldn't exist
- bunga-bunga 3y agoDear user, No. Unfortunately these patterns work great so they will never stop. As more dark patterns are “discovered”, we’ll see the web becoming more of a dump. You see it every day, successful websites and socials become successful thanks to these pattern, not in spite of them.
- archerx 3y agoThere are people out there who do whatever pop ups tell them to do. I was in a meeting once and we need to check something on a site the other person just clicked yes on the cookie banner without reading. I told him “You should click no on those” and he replied “I know, every keeps telling me that but I just click yes anyway”. I just blankly stared at him for a couple of seconds and returned the focus to the meeting. This experience reminds me the “normies” use the internet very very differently than techy people and it explains a lot of the weird quirks on the web. We are at the mercy of the lowest common denominator which happens to be a majority
- bunga-bunga 3y agoTo be fair, you’re often punished for clicking No (it takes longer, may cause a reload), so you’d need a very good reason to not click Yes.
- royibernthal 3y agoThe only problem is - it works well. Websites get you invested before sigup on purpose to increase their conversion rate. I'm afraid it's gonna fall on deaf ears.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- GabeIsko 3y agoThis is why tempmail exists.
- n_ary 3y agoSadly, the most shady ones will not accept anything that is not one of the gmail, outlook, yahoo and some doesn’t even accept custom domains, only gmails! There is a lot of cheap (and even free) APIs that can accurately guess when you enter a fake e-mail! A place I worked previously used several of such APIs and generated consensus among all to determine if a signup would be allowed and eventually only focused on “must be a gmail” because few of these APIs decided to ramp up prices post COVID-19.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- parentheses 3y agoI benefit a lot from free internet services. This is preying on that convention. The web would be a very different place if people felt OK paying for the value brought into their lives by services that are free today. I also feel that in that world, this would not be necessary. So, the state of things is the state of things... :/
- n_ary 3y ago> The web would be a very different place if people felt OK paying for the value brought into their lives by services that are free today I believe to contrary. A lot of services paid-only doesn’t have a decent customer support even and subpar product while registering billions in profits. We can always assume “what-if” about paying, but if it was very easy for getting people to pay up, we’d have way too many subpar things and standards would be bottom the drain. I like that services work up their standards and people interested will be very happy to pay. See kagi search, fastmail, google/fb ads, netflix, all vps hosting. If you offer some good value, you’ll get paid, if you are dubious, paying will just increase the bottom line and promote bad behavior from vendors.
- vishnuharidas 3y agoPeople are ready to pay for something if they find it useful and worthy. But the problem is not clearly saying this beforehand. I invest a lot of time on the website and to my surprise it asks me for a payment - that's like cheating. Imagine I spent a lot of time writing a story in a brand new text editing software, and when trying to save the document, it asking me to pay to save the file!
- kazinator 3y agoDogs, stop barking!
- ecf 3y agoNot exactly the same situation but I immediately uninstalled the Arc browser after it auto played some video with music and asked me to create an account before I could even see the UI.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoIn the example given in the article, if the website had generated 3 blog post ideas and then 7 more that were blurred and required an email sign-up, that would have been a happy medium.
- MathMonkeyMan 3y agoOr generate three and then blur out lorem ipsum, and never point out until the user has paid that you only ever generate three ideas (or maybe just one).
- wkat4242 3y agoI hate this too. However it's important to note that the old bugmenot.com still works! And, you're polluting the database of these cowboys by using it. Win-win
- pjmlp 3y agoWhat about going back to paying for stuff instead then?
- mo_42 3y agoAs the author mentions PNG to SVG conversion, there is Potrace [1]. I think you need to convert to BMP before. It's a pretty nice tool. I have used it a couple of times. [1] https://potrace.sourceforge.net/ https://potrace.sourceforge.net/
- dreamcompiler 3y agoWe desperately need a browser plugin that gardens search results to exclude websites that use dark patterns and allows a user to add a dark pattern website to the globally-shared list. Like ublock origin but for different categories of shady crap like content farms, AI-generated blogs, "product comparison" sites that slant results to the highest bidder, Cloudflare "checking your browser for security" sites, etc. SEO experts and conversion seekers need to become very afraid of their sites getting on that list. Of course then the problem becomes vetting the people who add sites to the list and making sure they're not just trying to shitcan their competitors. And ensuring that the maker of the plugin doesn't sell out and take $$$ to remove a site from the list. If those problems could be solved I'd pay $5/month for such a signal-to-noise improver for search results.
- 93po 3y agoI only search Reddit these days and assume the rest of the internet is garbage, which it is 99% of the time
- Xorakios 3y agoIt's largely forgotten and ignored, but in the US it is illegal to call something "free" if it requires an email signup. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-251 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
- RF_Savage 3y agoAh, sites that make me reach for BugMeNot.
- dvsjr 3y agoApps and white papers on tech topics too.