| > it's not a 'dark pattern', it's just a feature that you don't like It's a similar sort of dark pattern to the practice of putting the important details of a contract hidden in a massive block of text rendered in a tiny font. Yes, they are technically being upfront about what is going on, in the same way that two pages of 8pt legal boilerplate informs the signer of the details of a written contract. If it weren't a dark pattern it would be very easy to turn off the undesirable bits, and users would rarely be surprised by the consequences of the default settings. Let's not forget that contrary to our poor performance on abstract logic puzzles, humans of all levels of intellect are superbly good at reasoning about potentially embarrassing social situations. Hence FB must work hard to de-emphasize the way FB actually works to make people consent to many of the default permissions. That is in my opinion the definition of a dark pattern. It is the gray area enabled by these practices that makes FB's content interesting... because accidentally over-shared content is interesting to us about a small percentage of the people we are friends with. It's nearly a law of human nature that we are fascinated by obscure details of a small percentage of people for all sorts of reasons (sexual interest, jealousy/aspiration, schadenfreude, stalking, etc.) and we all have some small group of people who are interested in our obscure likes/posts for the same reasons. Rarely do we overtly interact with such people (in either direction) because it is socially awkward, but FB generates revenue/engagement off of the lurking that we all do and the blindness people have that they too are the target of such lurking by others (which is why the dark pattern works)... it's what makes FB scratch a particular voyeuristic itch for people and why it's been so successful. LinkedIn works the same way but for things like job changes, promotions, etc. |