Amazon's attempts to get users to unwittingly sign up to Prime is one of the most egregious examples I encounter on a regular basis. As a European I cannot wait to see it gone.
If it's easy to accidentally sign up for something, does that mean it has to be easy to accidentally cancel something? Because that would be hilarious.
I’m imagining a scenario where you’re about to check out, and decide not to finish the transaction because you wanted to add something else to your very first.
After the last iOS update, Apple nagged the shit out of me to setup Apple Pay, for two days. No way to say ‘fuck off’ - only ‘remind me’. No obvious way to stop the nagging. Finally I gave them just the tip, and then pulled out before the money shot, and that seems to have shut them up for now.
Apple Pay is legitimately useful though. You can use it to pay at physical businesses if you forget your wallet (double click and face ID to turn your phone into a "tap to pay" card basically). There are also lots of apps/sites that support it so you don't have to type in your card number or even your shipping info sometimes.
That you think it's useful isn't relevant; he doesn't wanna use it and yet nevertheless has continuously been nagged about it. That's not a good experience.
Fwiw I don't use Apple Pay either. There's a lot of things I don't use, for various reasons, and "you should just give in and use it" isn't the right response.
How is that even relevant? Your phone was trying to onboard you to a _free to use_ feature. If you can’t see the difference here, then I suspect there probably was a button labelled “fuck off” and you didn’t see that either. Honestly.
My other peeve is when streaming apps put a button in the bottom-right of an ad, same size and style as the ‘skip’ button one reflexively clicks. Except it turns out to be an ‘engage even moar’ button.
Apologies for the implication you’re stupid, I didn’t really mean that and it was uncalled for at any rate.
I don’t disagree regards dark patterns, your example just felt a bit irrelevant to the specific topic being discussed (Amazon pushing a paid for product / cancelling a paid subscription).
I can understand why you would make the distinction. Making distinctions is good, in general. However from my perspective as a frustrated user being antagonized by ‘my’ devices, it’s all the same battle to me.
People who think that money is the only thing that other people want are doomed to be repeatedly exploited by people who understand that there are more forms of exploitation than directly monetary.
"Free to use", but presumably comes with a user agreement that opens you to some financial liability. There's a (granted small) chance that a bug, security incident, or fraud lands you in a Kafkaesque debt nightmare.
I had a bit of a nightmare where one of the credit reporting agencies was convinced my residential address was inside my bank. Their online system referred me to their phone system or sending them mail. Their phone system referred me to their online system or sending them mail. I sent them mail 3 times and got no reply. An online cheat guide for getting to an actual human through their phone system didn't work, and I eventually just started hitting random keys in their phone system and got to a human who was able to sort it out.
You can't even get a secured credit card (backed by a cash deposit) without a credit check (I looked into it), which is going to fail if your residential address is wrong.
Opening a financial account that might misreport something to a credit agency shouldn't be taken lightly.
Yeah you’re right, there was no need for the last bit. I’m still struggling to see the relevance though, trying to get me to buy things is very different from trying to get me to use a feature you profit from (in my opinion). You also have to bare in mind that HN represents the more technical users, plenty of people probably do need the popups to discover these features. Saying that, a “no thanks, don’t remind me again” button would be a nice inclusion - perhaps with a secondary confirmation.
You feel you profit from facebook tracking as well?
Regardless, these dark patterns are truly disgusting and how some can defend them so mindlessly just because they apparently found a use for a product is quite disturbing.
“You” in that context was the entity pushing the feature. I’m not sure what point you think you’re making about Facebook tracking tbh, but I don’t use Facebook so you’re asking the wrong person; to claim I am mindlessly defending dark patterns is nonsense.