[wrboyce]

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.

[psyc]

Windows regularly tries to nag me into free features I don’t want too.

At no time has the term ‘dark pattern’ ever been necessarily dependent on getting you to pay money.

Your argument is that I sound stupid, so I must be wrong?

There’s no button.

https://www.cultofmac.com/538999/apple-under-fire-apple-pay-...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-insists-iphone-users-enro...

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.

[wrboyce]

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).

[psyc]

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.

[jholman]

Paid vs not-paid is not an important distinction.

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.

[wrboyce]

How an Earth are you being exploited by putting a copy of your bank card on your phone?

[KMag]

"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.

[ClumsyPilot]

There ought to be penaltues for negligebce causing damage to you

[joe_guy]

Apple makes money off the interchange fee. It might be "free" to the end user, but the corporate motivation is the same as Prime's -- money.

And please don't ad hominem attack people you're responding to.

[wrboyce]

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.

[tjoff]

Feature you profit from?

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.

[wrboyce]

“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.

[tjoff]

You don't think amazon thinks prime is beneficial to you? Or that facebook doesn't think tracking is beneficial for their users?

[wrboyce]

You’re clearly determined to twist my words, I don’t particularly care what Amazon or Facebook think and have never claimed otherwise. Hell, I haven’t even defended either of your examples.