The term “dark pattern” refers to any deceptive practice, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem, that online websites, apps, etc use to get people to do the site/app’s desired behavior, such as in this case, not cancel their Prime subscription. Not all of these examples may apply in Amazon’s case, but some examples would be making the fields or buttons for canceling or keeping your subscriptions different colors or sizes, making the default choice to keep the subscription, making you view a bunch of ads to keep the sub or go through a bunch of other pages before canceling, or hiding the cancelation option in fine print in a corner of the site. The “dark” part means that the average person usually doesn’t notice the deceptive nature of the practices.
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dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I hate Amazon probably more than most people in the world and have been boycotting them since roughly 1999, but… “dark patterns???”
Grangle1@lemm.ee 9 months ago
eleitl@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
If you haven’t noticed, you’ve been not paying attention. I canceled Prime a while ago and they try very hard to get you back. And they try to sneak on you billed expedited shipping when over minimum gratis shipping quota. Dark patterns galore.
It would be a major pain for me to boycott them completely so I don’t, yet.
dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’ve been boycotting Amazon since 1999, so no I haven’t been paying attention.
eleitl@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Ok, if you don’t use their web site you won’t see the UX dark patterns. Trust us, they there and fit with the overall garbagefication theme. Annoy the living shit out of me. At least no more Prime Video UI and ad trainwreck.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yes, dark patterns
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
People should definitely learn about these, they affect an awful lot of our modern digital environment, not just in subscriptions but all the ways companies try to manipulate our behaviour.
Ever see a cookie popup and “Accept” is a big colourful button, but if you want to decline it’s behind a grey “more options” button, then you have to scroll through a dozen different categories and disable them all, then the button has some ambiguous label like “confirm cookie choices” which gives the impression you’re accepting them again? That’s a dark pattern.
User interface design has long known how to streamline a process and communicate with a user to increase the number of people who complete a certain task, so it’s a simple matter of inverting that logic to make a task hard and obscure to reduce that number.
dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Ah, so dark as in evil, not dark as in low light. I hadn’t heard of that, but going through the darkpatterns.org website is basically a laundry list of shit I hate.
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah it’s a catch all term for psychologically manipulative UI/UX
henfredemars@infosec.pub 9 months ago
I like how UX emerged as a dedicated field and profession in my time and then was shortly thereafter used for evil.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
I thought it was dark as in manipulation that isn’t readily visible. For instance, a micro-transaction for a character reskin accompanied by default skins being crap. In Watchdogs Legion all the Londoners you could recruit generally had poor fashion, then money was scant and clothes were super expensive (but you could by more money with micro-transctions).
In one of the Space Quest series, as a joke (black humor in theme with the series) whenever an airlock interface was opened, the mouse cursor started on the Open Outer Door button, so an accidental double-tap was deadly, so dark patterns were known about in the 1990s, though not yet given a name.
Click-wrapped TOS and contracts for software and services were one such strategem, though we’re more aware of it today, and more judges are willing to reject contracts and TOS that didn’t include a clear, announced disclosure of their odious terms.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I like how Facebook intentionally delays spam reports made via Messenger on desktop. That’s after clicking through excessive prompts (which are more understandable due to the general public’s abuse of reporting features).