[Ozzie_osman]

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)

[wting]

One of the ways to measure long term impact is through the use of a golden cohort that is never opted into experiments. Unsurprisingly, I could not get this work prioritized on the roadmap.

We also worked with growth consultants (read: Bay Area B2C product leads) in scoping out some of these ideas. We accrued what I call "product debt" where we launch the MVP but never followed up to polish the feature[0] as they don't improve KPIs.

I assume this is the same with Growth teams everywhere but am happy to be corrected.

Regarding long term impact, we measured this through various dimensions in marketing, recruiting, and user research. The outcomes are largely positive.

______

0: One feature I argued for was an opt out of the mobile app interstitial. It makes sense to show it once or twice, but users aren't going to download the app just because they saw it 50x.

[Ozzie_osman]

Yeah, golden cohorts can work, but they are really hard to pull off, especially for logged out traffic (which is where you'd use most of these patterns anyway). Good luck tracking me over 6-24 months across different devices and locations. And cross-contamination is hard to prevent (for instance, the golden cohort might suffer from global effects like worse content due to loss of power users or even from stumbling across brand-damaging threads like this). It also just adds a lot of product complexity to keep behavior around that long.

That said, they can work. Twitter famously did something like that for their time-based vs algorithmic feed and I think YouTube does it pretty regularly.

The biggest issue, though, is that by the time you get results from any long-term experiments, most of the decision-makers (PMs, EMs, etc) have probably moved on away having taken credit for the short-term wins they delivered.

[wting]

The person who created Twitter's experimentation platform is also at Reddit, and heavily influenced Reddit's experiment design and review process.

But yes, a revolving door of product leaders and decisions is going to bias towards short term optimization.

[nwienert]

It’s shocking to me how people sell out like this. You have to know deep down that all these hostile short term juicers destroy the brand, each malfeasance creating more room for a competitor. I mean you guys replaced Digg, cmon.

The audacity to claim “it works”, in italics no less.

The real shame of the current tech companies is they have no principles, no long term vision. They all feel like they follow the same curve, a bunch of managers hitting KPIs during their 2-5 year stint before trading up, ending in some PE firm diving in at the end for the final squeeze.

They’re lemons being juiced dry, when they should be a garden of lemon trees.

“But we got 20% more juice than last year!!”

Yea, you did.

[MomoXenosaga]

It is not shocking when you realize it is about self-interest. You get your bonus and salary in the short term who really gives a shit what happens 7 years from now?

[nwienert]

Not shocking for the managers, just sad. Shocking that executives don’t get it so consistently.

[Flow]

> Regarding long term impact, we measured this through various dimensions in marketing, recruiting, and user research. The outcomes are largely positive.

You almost make it sound like this is something the users like and want.

As a long time Reddit user I can say that if they force the new site on to me along with their mobile app, I'm gone. It's not worth it.

[TechBro8615]

> I wrote the original Disrespectful Design post he links

Following the links from your blog, it looks like you worked at Quora. Outside of news websites, Quora and Reddit are probably the two worst offenders of pushing dark patterns onto the Internet. I still don't understand why Google hasn't deranked Quora for cloaking its pages, a dark pattern that would get any other website banned from the SERPs.

I like your point about recruiting. I can't imagine many engineers would choose a job offer from Quora or Reddit over one from any other company. You're basically selecting for candidates who can only attract one offer.

[Ozzie_osman]

Honestly, yes, Quora and Reddit both have some bad patterns around their signup flows (esp mobile). I won't defend those.

That said, they are far from the worst offenders. Facebook has done some really shady things around inviting your contacts, recommending people you may know, sharing/exposing your data to other apps, etc. LinkedIn has done some lawsuit-worthy shady things in that area too (e.g. [1]). News sites (and others) are paid to put tracking pixels on their sites so data can be harvested via data brokers and sold back into the ad/tracking ecosystem.

All around, Quora had some of the smartest, most passionate engineers / PMs / managers I've ever worked with (some of which have gone on to start very successful companies themselves). I'd be lying if I said I didn't think some product decisions affected recruiting at all, but it's a far cry from "candidates who only attract one offer".

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3051906/after-lawsuit-settlement...

[noduerme]

As a consumer of posts who wants to occasionally read Quora on my phone's DDG browser, I just no longer bother to click the link. Ditto with Reddit unless I feel like fighting their popups. Logging in or downloading the apps? You've gotta be kidding. Nothing would be a bigger waste of time or storage on my phone. FB is obnoxious in that they only let you view one page w/o logging in, but I never had a FB account so I just ignore any links to them. I suspect a lot of other people as consumers - not privacy advocates or engineers - find these login/download walls annoying enough to drop engagement. Quora is particularly obnoxious and I've never had an account with them, but removing a few invisible divs in the dom editor usually lets me read what I need to.

[soco]

And I thought I was the only one ignoring Quora links.

[Zababa]

> I can't imagine many engineers would choose a job offer from Quora or Reddit over one from any other company.

Considering these dark patterns translate to growth (and thus more money), I don't know why they wouldn't. Lots of people are still working for the tobacco industry.