[meltedcapacitor]

They used various dark pattern marketing techniques to try and convince people to pay and make the site look like a legit library, so clearly some commercial intent even if it was always possible to download for free (maybe to provide some deniability?).

[dghlsakjg]

I disagree.

The only thing approaching a dark pattern is asking you to sign in for advanced features. A free account gets you a bunch of those features.

The main page has a single 'donate' link in the upper right corner. A contribution as low $1usd was enough to unlock all features except higher daily download limits.

What dark patterns did you see?

[meltedcapacitor]

- Making the service look like a legit library instead of clearly saying it's a repository of stolen books. Was confused myself for a while when I first stumbled on it, had to infer from it being too good to be true and doing some due diligence search.

- Various tricks to get the user to give an email (even if not necessary, similar to cookie boxes making "accept everything" very much easier than "only essentials".)

- After some time (download count or delay?) spam emails to try and get some payments out of the punter, again under false pretence.

Not saying it was bad value for money. Possibly not much worse than tricks average legal businesses employ. The point is someone sat down and devised that part of the UX with no other purpose than extract more money from users, by lying to them.

[dghlsakjg]

Fair enough.

It never occurred to me that people wouldn’t realize that it was a piracy site, and not a “library”. I guess I’m just too tuned into the internet. Haha

I see your point now. It’s sort of disappointing that I'm so used to even worse dark patterns on legit sites that I don’t really see this as dark.