[cirgue]

I don’t think that any business that makes money by taking advantage of people’s foolishness or stupidity has any particular moral right to be free from regulation. Caveat emptor and all that, but if you cause enough damage to enough people, it stops being an individual’s problem and starts being society’s problem. We’re 100% there with social media.

[FussyZeus]

> I don’t think that any business that makes money by taking advantage of people’s foolishness or stupidity

I think this is a touch unfair to people at large. The common end user isn't keen enough to recognize dark patterns, that's true, but that's akin to saying that the average car buyer should be able to spot flaws in a vehicle that could cause them harm. We don't expect that from people; Car companies are mandated to only sell vehicles that meet safety requirements. And even then, it's generally accepted that when you're buying a used vehicle, you take it to a mechanic you trust to make sure it's well cared for and operational. Same as when you buy a home; you're expected to have it inspected.

It's also unfair, I think, to put people down as foolish or stupid for not immediately recognizing things that are psychological tricks companies use in marketing, to steer users towards the options they want the users to choose. I mean caveat emptor indeed, but to say that, for example fast food marketers holding PHD's in psychological studies, working day in and out to get people to be hungry anytime they see a McDonalds logo are on an even playing field with Joe Consumer is a laughable assertion on it's face.

In the days of yore, marketing was just trying to sell someone something but it's become much more insidious since those innocent times. Now companies use dark patterns in their applications, purposely bury privacy and security options under layers of confusing UI, use all manor of colors and fonts shown to steer people's attention to the goal they want, on and on. This is why I find it so unethical, it feels a hell of a lot less like marketing and lot more like "hacking" a person's brain to get into their wallet.

tl:dr; Joe Consumer is playing checkers, and marketing scientists are playing 3D chess. He doesn't stand a chance and everyone just keeps acting like that's okay.

[ozim]

Not a parent poster, but I think main point still holds. Maybe I would state it differently.

Even if you say 'taking advantage of limited cognitive ability of people' which is true, because everyone is busy, having life problems and is bombarded with all that crap. It makes people stupid, and that is not something to say about particular person.

So second part is about making damage while taking advantage of that created stupidity, which is the same as thieves taking advantage of someone after 12 hour trip. People get tired and do stupid things like not watching their luggage. That is the same as taking advantage of online tiredness, it is also foolishness.

Marketing with McDonalds does not make people hungry, that is of course not the way it works. But when people are hungry and see McDonalds logo, they don't think about alternatives but just go for that option. I fell for that multiple times, when I am tired, I am not going to search for some small restaurant that can have better food. It can turn out that there is one, but food is total crap, so I am not taking chances but going for McD. Getting me tired and hungry to pay them money is taking advantage of my temporary stupidity and foolishness. They have scale and are everywhere so it might look innocent.

[FussyZeus]

> Even if you say 'taking advantage of limited cognitive ability of people' which is true, because everyone is busy, having life problems and is bombarded with all that crap. It makes people stupid, and that is not something to say about particular person.

That I'd agree with, that it makes people stupid. That's better.

> Marketing with McDonalds does not make people hungry

But it does. The color red has been linked many times to feelings of hunger, most likely because our brains link it to both the color of fresh berries and the color of slaughtered meat. That's why nearly every fast food chain uses a significant amount of red in their packaging: McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Topper's Pizza, Wendy's, Hardees, Carls' Jr., the list is nearly infinite. It's not a coincidence.

And that's the relatively low-tech tactics, not even going into how the engineer the taste of the food to be just right, how the burgers in the ads look absolutely nothing like the product you receive, all the way up to the fact that fast food is laden with sugar unnecessarily to make it literally addictive, since the brain responds to sugar in a very similar way to cocaine.

Again, this stuff exists on a very large spectrum from stuff that's innocuous but very effective, all the way to the stuff that was cooked up in laboratories by extremely smart people to manipulate the general populace into buying their products.