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> 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 (i
by stubish 3y ago
> 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.
I think this is the fundamental problem. Too many people trying to increase conversion in their onboarding funnels, crowding out people who want to put interesting stuff on the internet for purposes other than farming people for money.
- jen729w 3y ago> other than farming people for money Which is a beautiful way to live life. Until you quit your job and build some indie thing and try to make money and fuck, that’s difficult. And you’re broke. And you worked really hard on this thing. Turns out ‘farming people for money’ = ‘paying rent’. And you realise, shit man, if I make it a bit worse according to my ethics and taste, I’ll actually make money. And I won’t have to go and take some other job. And I’ll be sad that this is how humans work, but it is how humans work, and am I going to change that or just tag along for the ride?
- tokai 3y agoYeah well my life would be sweeter if I conned pensioners out of their savings. It's always easy to follow how people explain their unethical decisions - but it doesn't make them an inch less unethical though and people that use your line of thought to do harmful things are scum.
- cafeinux 3y agoSign-up popups are annoying, but not inherently unethical. Nobody's on the street because one dev tried to convert people.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoWe’re not talking about sign-up pop-ups though. Those are an annoying fact of digital life that isn’t _really_ that bad. We’re talking about creating a flow and perception that you can use a thing built around an assumption that you then intentionally change at some next step. It’s a breakdown of an implicit contract you create with the user, for the purposes of farming data, getting more signups, increasing conversions, or whatever else. It’s just dishonest. A few years ago a family member contacted me about this very thing. They had found a nice looking website to accomplish a thing. The website had published pricing for packages of their service, and provided a “free” sample. Except after you spent all the time to get that free sample running, you couldn’t actually use it without paying.
- DamonHD 3y agoIf feels to me like estoppel: misleading someone to do something to then use against them later.
- stubish 3y agoIt is a tragedy of the commons. My Internet is shittier because other people are trying to monetize it. Same as my back yard and the air I breath.
- JohnFen 3y agoWhat I hear you saying is that you're OK with harming others as long as it lines your pocket.
- JohnFen 3y agoThat and not enough pushback from devs. Devs, of all people, should be the ones advocating for their customers.