[palata]

My theory is that companies are not the sum of their employees. Employees are generally good; toxic humans are a small minority (unfortunately they tend to be over-represented at the head of companies).

But put employees together into a profit-maximisation machine, and the machine will try to maximise profit, with dark patterns and downright evil things.

Similar with our species as a whole: nobody is actively working to break the climate so much that their kids will die long before they reach the age of retirement. But that's what we as a species are doing together, somehow. Individually, we don't want that, but that's not enough.

[OkayPhysicist]

That explains passively malignant processes, like not radically overhauling your business to address climate change. It doesn't explain actively malevolent things like "let's bury the "Decline Cookies" dialog under 3 layers of clicks. That's a proactive choice, that some software developer chose to implement.

[palata]

I'm guessing that in many cases, it's not one software developer who decides. Most people are told what to do, and for many websites I'm guessing that it's just some kind of Wordpress add-on.

Someone realised that they sold more add-ons if they implement those dark patterns, so they did it ("it's not me, I offer a good one but they buy the evil one"). In my experience in startups, the website was managed by marketing people who honestly had no clue: they seemed to genuinely believe that they needed those cookies ("I am in marketing, I need the data") and they did not understand the consequences. "I just install this Google thing, and then Google gives me nice data for free".

Why do people build weapons? That's a lot worse than a cookie popup, but I'm sure every single person in that industry will tell you that they "save lives".

[zelphirkalt]

That's why we need to realize, that decisions in the small constitute what happens in the large. If some person comes and tells me to implement dark patterns into the consent popup, I'll tell them that this is illegal. I'll also tell people, when their current consent is manufactured or when their cookie/consent popup does not conform with GDPR. Been there, done that. Only unfortunate, that it was not my role to deal with that. It was simply that most people didn't care (I must assume frontend developer knew better, otherwise they were utterly uninformed about their job), some people who should have known better didn't (everyone else in the engineering team), some people wanted dark patterns to be in there (project management and marketing/sales, as usual), and I was the only one pointing out the tiny problem with the law. Of course no one ever thanked me for that.

[int_19h]

It's not that people who implement those things don't care, per se. It's that they care about getting their paycheck more (or, in the current climate, retaining their job). And they are also acutely aware that if they refuse to do it, a replacement that won't is easy to find.

[1718627440]

Your moral integrity is tested, when your paycheck depends on it, not when it doesn't have repercussions to you.

[palata]

I have been in that situation in a startup. The boss would come to me and ask for some dark pattern (not cookies, I don't remember exactly what it was). I said I wouldn't do it. They literally asked a guy in the adjacent room, and he took it as a new task and did it.

He was not a bad guy: I did not care about getting fired (I was young and single), he did (he had a family). And in his opinion, if the boss wanted it, anyway it would end up being done. His job was to implement what the boss wanted, not to contradict the boss.

[zelphirkalt]

Both understandable and good that you stood up to it!

Sometimes though bosses need some contradiction, for the business to be successful. It is not the best approach to have no opinions or ethics.