[ivanbozic]

I run a development agency, and on a few occasions, we've had clients ask us to build features similar to what you've outlined above. One of those clients had a pretty thorough specification document that outlined how this behavior should work.

When you open the listing, it should wait a few seconds and then show you a number between 8 and 20 of people who are actively looking at this listing. If it was night-time, it shouldn't really be that much, so let's put in a number between 2 and 8.

This was of course all fake since the platform didn't launch yet. There was also a lot of other "building fake anxiety" tactics, but this one and all other got buried way in the backlog and never actually implemented thankfully.

I'm not saying that Booking.com is doing this, but I definitely hate this pattern.

[gnud]

Isn't this basically false advertising?

[Cthulhu_]

Arguably; it's not advertising the product itself (e.g. hotels). There's no rules against misreporting user or activity statistics as far as I know.

[nickjj]

It is an interesting topic.

I never worked in a brick and mortar store but I wonder if they purposely only place 1 or 2 items onto a shelf to create a false sense of scarcity. Meanwhile they have a whole pallet of them in the back. As a customer you would never know but if it came down to taking legal action, it would probably be pretty hard to prove without a doubt this was done on purpose.

Scarcity or feeling like you're going to miss out on something (especially a deal) is a really powerful trigger. I generally ignore most advertising but man when you see that there's only 2 left of something you want on an online site, I would be lying if I said it didn't affect me. Luckily this tactic is less potent now for a number of things because so many online stores sell the same items.

[asdff]

Next time you go to a restaurant notice where they seat you. Usually its in the front so the place looks crowded from the street.

[smueller1234]

See my comment further up the tree. At least some years ago when I had access to the code, it wasn't deliberately misreporting statistics.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

You're lying to make it seem more desirable; is there a difference between "20% more effective" and "20 people are looking at this"?

[tomrod]

Maybe no explicit rules, but seems to run against ethics nonetheless.

[ivanbozic]

As the other reply said – it's not, since no information regarding the actual listing is false.

So technically, it's not. But I agree with you that it should be labeled as such.