[benologist]

I think whales are just a bunch of companies selling a lie that combining all the dark patterns = great customers.

You say they're happy to do it but just to "find" a whale you must disassociate real spending and transactional cost, obfuscate real currency, create inconvenience etc. Nobody went in wanting to spend thousands and 99.99% opt-out of paying. That's 0.01% of customers being happy and a generous use of the word since they were never offered a version that wasn't a sales funnel of dark patterns.