I just realized, from your comment, how much power companies will have if they start including "emotional manipulation" in their dark pattern arsenal. Which I am sure will horribly backfire in some way if used
The term "dark pattern" is a bit of a misnomer and too soft. How about we just say what it is - manipulation, misdirection, and sometimes outright fraud.
Disagree. "Dark patterns" exist because enough people talking about them are also working in or tangential to marketing, which makes them uncomfortable calling it what it is - lying, abuse, dishonesty, malicious activity, exploiting people. "Dark patters" is just an euphemism.
Dark patterns are basically brain hacking, hacking someone else's brain to benefit yourself. This looks like some kind of massive A/B test to eke out a small percentage margin on advertising.
I'd give it a few dark points for that but imo advertising itself is the dark lord of dark patterns: not only is it a brain hack, not only has it hacked all the way into social acceptability, but it is the darkness from which so many other dark patterns spawn and spring forth to bring revenue to their master.
One thing I don't understand is why we are calling these patterns _dark_ rather than _manipulative_, or even just calling it straight up manipulation?
I feel like manipulation has a clear meaning for a lot of people, which I would define as attempts at making you do things against your best interest. This definitely applies to booking.com's multiple practices of creating artificial urgency, various website's "opt-in" to their tracker cookie policy, etc. I don't believe it "weakens" the meaning of manipulation as a term. The appropriate red flags should be raised when hearing about it.
To me, the term "dark pattern" itself seems like a dark pattern, intended to obfuscate what is really meant to those unfamiliar with internet lingo. But, at least the dot org -is-was still available.
I was about to say something similar. About half of the "dark patterns" on that site strike me as completely ordinary persuasion techniques. They're "dark" only if you think that the art of sales and marketing itself is "dark". (The other half are legitimately skeevy.)
I wouldn't call over aggressive marketing a dark pattern. As with the newsletter pop-ups, they aren't shady or underhanded or misleading or coercive, they're just in your face. I often find them obnoxious and repulsive and they drive me away from a site, but they're in the light, out in the open, not pretending to be something they aren't.
I think there is a fairly bright line in the sand for defining a dark pattern, and the line is between hiding and being open, between being misleading and straightforward, between trying to force someone to do something and seducing them with plain intentions. The later behavior can still really suck, without being dark.
This is not "psychological research", the research has already been done to get the human to fall for it. The dark patterns are designed to sell advertisement and product.
Framing it as simply "psychological research" is what I'd expect from a PR team trying to deceive its users. It's incredibly dishonest.
This is not "psychological research", the research has already been done to get the human to fall for it. The dark patterns are designed to sell advertisement and product.
Framing it as simply "psychological research" is what I'd expect from a PR team trying to deceive its users.
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