[camtarn]

I find it very sad. I used to work on the team that rendered the front page 'customers also bought' ads, and we were incredibly serious about avoiding dark patterns. We even had a training programme to make sure we knew the personalization principles - erring on the side of over informing the customer, etc.

As a random dev in a different dept, I even got the first iteration of the Amazon app's notification ads pulled temporarily. They were badly implemented (they advertised a product, but linked to something different, and there was no obvious way to turn them off), I felt they reflected badly on the company, so I filed a ticket and it actually got listened to.

All that's gone out the window now. Every time I see the Prime clickthroughs, credit card deals, 'lightning deals' which are only about 20c off the normal discount, etc, it makes me grind my teeth.

[FakeComments]

My favorite is the fake menu on the homepage: the Prime “menu”, ie word with arrow, always shows an ad, no matter if you’re a member or not.