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by wting 1821 days ago

I was the EM for Reddit's Growth team around this time. I am responsible for / contributed to a few features like the current signup flow, AMP pages, push notifications, email digests, app download interstitials, etc.

There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned in or let go[0]; I immediately transferred to a different org.

Now let me explain the other side of the story. 4 years later, Reddit's DAU, MAU, and revenue have all grown at ridiculous rates[1]. Yes, power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not. These dark patterns have been normalized on other websites.

These practices are done because it works.

_____

0: They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only instance within the company ever.

1: Many friends are startup founders and I've been at a few startups myself—a byproduct of being in the Bay Area—and Reddit's growth numbers are impressive. As a former employee, I am quite happy about my equity growth.

22 comments

Ozzie_osman 1821 days ago

I ran Product Engineering at a competing startup (hundreds of millions of MAUs) that tested/employed similar flows. And yes, they work in the short-term, and unless you are very principled, it's hard to avoid them. I'm glad you heavily protested them. But I'd like to further the argument for why they should be avoided.

First, yes they do work in the short-term. You run an A/B test with some adversarial flow that blocks mobile web traffic users from doing certain things. Most of them get pissed, but enough of them download the mobile app (which allows you to build up their engagement via phone presence and notifications) that the A/B test is positive. Rinse and repeat. A few dozen experiments later, and now these patterns are pervasive across your product.

Apart from whether they work (in the short-term), there are three other questions readers of this thread should think about because I'd hate for people to walk away thinking "these patterns are normalized and they work so, sigh, i should just do them too".

One is whether they work in the long-term. Yes, you can juice your metrics in the short-term, and sometimes that translates to long-term growth, but it's harder to measure secondary effects. Can you accurately measure product brand damage and quantify the long-term impact?

Second, and as an EM you should appreciate this, can you measure secondary brand damage like _recruiting brand_ damage? Dark patterns (and threads like this with hundreds of passionate engineers talking about how much they hate those dark patterns) _will_ damage your ability to hire the type of engineers you want to help you build your product.

Finally, there's some subjective ethical question in here. Even if these patterns work in the short and long term, do you _want_ to spend your life, your intellectual energy, your time turning the internet into this? Do you want to go out and hire smart, passionate people and get _them_ to spend their time and intellectual energy turning the internet into this?

(side note: I have no affiliation with the author of this post, but I wrote the original Disrespectful Design post he links to in his first paragraph)