It’s pretty easy to spot dark patterns when you look out for them, but I found a pretty obvious example of this.
Stoofie is a brand that sells water fountains for your pet (I don’t know what the problem with a water bowl is, but I digress). WayBack Machine
Plastered at the top of their website is “33% OFF Ends Today- Free Shipping” with no way to dismiss it. There is a scrolling text under the main image “FAST AND FREE SHIPPING 60-DAY FREE RETURNS”
If you scroll down, you’re immediately introduced with a product with the option to buy two preselected. The rest of this section explains itself:
Other things are sprinkled in the main page, but it really is the prime example of dark patterns. I am personally sick of finding them, but would love to see more examples of what others have found. Please, share your favorite examples of dark patterns. Don’t forget to archive them first so they can never be lived down.
(I don’t know what the problem with a water bowl is, but I digress)
(cats are more likely to drink moving water than still water since moving water is less likely to have bad things growing in it)
Huh. I always wondered. When I’m poiring our dog water to the bowl when hiking, he always prefers to drink “from the bottle” - the bowl is there basically to catch the rest to return to the bottle (or for the other dog to drink). Guess now I maybe know why he does it.
Good to know, thanks for the insight!
They also (generally) don’t like to have their water next to their food because when they drink they put their head down and can’t see predators that might be attracted to the food.
For some reason one of my cats only drinks water that she scoops up with her foot.
It means we have to clean her bowl way more often than should be necessary because the debris her feet collect gets deposited in the water bowl.
We have a cat that scoops her food out of the bowl, walks a few feet, drops it on the ground and eats (most of it). It’s very annoying to constantly have to sweep up cat food. Maybe this is related.
That does sound very annoying! The first time I noticed my cat doing this, her food and litter box were in the basement, which was stone and dirt in that house. (We put them down there because it was the only place in that house where we could practically prevent the dog from getting to them.) Nowadays the cat stuff is in, essentially, a much cleaner sun porch; as a result, we still have to clean her bowl more frequently than seems reasonable, but it lasts a lot longer than it used to.
I’m curious, what if you move her bowl to the place where she drops it?
We have a cat that does that too. She’ll drink normally as well, though. I view it as her cleaning her little feet.
That could be, but the bowl is communal between our four animals. I wish she wouldn’t.
Most cookie consent dialogues:
- There’s only one big accept button
- If the decline button even exists, it’s grey whereas the other one is green.
- The decline option could be buried deep under other menus.
- The sizes of the buttons
Most companies are trying to actively manipulate you to accept all cookies, but nowadays there are a few companies that don’t resort to any of these dirty tricks.
The one that scares me the most is:
Accept all or Settings
And you have to opt out 5-10 buttons and at the end there is a “save settings” or the “accept all” button again in green.
Who has time for this shit? Just for a stupid article? We need laws against these.
With a heading “We care about your privacy”.
🙄
Oh they care. They care a lot. Particularly that you don’t have any so they can sell all your details to any bidder.
They care about it so much that they probably have a full time UI designer whose job is to figure out new ways to trick and manipulate users to hand out even more data.
“We care about your privacy. We absolutely hate it, but it counts as caring, doesn’t it?”
Pretty sure EU law says that the buttons should be identical
Exactly. It should be as easy to decline all cookies as it is to accept. And user’s consent can’t be implicit.
I wish it was legal to ddos the sites that violate this law.
That’s actually a nightmare
Who has time for this shit? Just for a stupid article?Won’t using reader mode ( if your browser supports it ) help you avoid this ? or those browser add-ons like " I don’t care about cookies "
Oh I remember those thoroughly cursed menus where you have to manually disable 256 cookies one by one. Haven’t seen those in a while though, so I guess some piece of legislation is doing its job.
I’m honestly surprised no-one has built an extension to automatically opt out of them, or at least the major cookie providers interfaces.
I realise there are many extensions which outright block cookies, etc; I’m meaning specifically the annoying dialogues you describe
In ublock origin settings. There is an “annoyances” group with options. It should take care of most of those popups.
Aarhus university has done exactly that! https://consentomatic.au.dk/
It doesn’t work 100% of the time but it’s pretty good
You forgot a million switches for each “partner”. More like prostitution.
Based on the number of partners some companies seem to have, they are far more promiscuous than most humans.
Yeah, EU fixed that somewhat, it has to be privacy-by-default now, the save choice being pre-selected and obvious and etc. But most dialogues are now illegal; no legal entity complains, nobody fixes it.
Site has cookie consent dialogue?
immediately leave site (Most Popular)
That’s what my mother does because she’s senile.
Having the dialogue is a good thing.
AFAIK this uses UX design rules
Stupidly enough, that’s illegal in the places this ruling is from. What’s going on there?
If they sell to anyone in australia let our consumer protection agency or whatever they called know. They tend to actually follow through with fining companies shit like this.
Working for a certain big fucking corpo(that I utterly hate from bottom of my heart but don’t really have an option to leave), I see those patterns all over the product. Not just that, its practically impossible for non tech savvy to choose a non bundled or cheaper product or plan because it’s burried somewhere out of your sight
One of the worst shopping basket designs I have ever seen, was where they added additional items together with the thing you wanted, forcing you to remove the thing they added before paying.
Water bowls are stagnant water and animals can sense that and do not like it. In nature, stagnant water is dangerous and kind of a last resort. Heck, even humans can taste this and probably don’t like it. Try leaving a bowl of water out for 24 hours and drink it yourself, you might be able to tell it’s not good.
Fountains keep that water tasting fresh, though tbh they might fill it with micro plastics or something so who knows if it’s really an improvement.
Cats are also extremely sensitive to smells (and not the kind that humans can smell). Often it’s just the location, especially if it’s somewhere where some ghost of food long since expired lingers.
I’m not sure what you mean by “dark patterns” in this context. Isn’t this just marketing?
Is it that the more expensive choice is pre-selected? That the discounted price is likely just the real price and it’s never sold at the higher price? (that one got Saatva in trouble! - https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/open-lawsuit-settlements/11-5m-saatva-com-false-advertising-class-action-settlement/)
I read recently that the phrase “noticing patterns” is a racist dog whistle but I don’t have a firm handle on how or why.
I don’t know if dark patterns are exempt but the timing is weird.Dude what are you on about lol. Wikipedia on dark patterns
Oh hey greycat.
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Those are pretty bright patterns in my book. More of the usual BS.
my favourite is Amazon’s:
- buy without prime (2$ shipping fees)
- buy with prime (free shipping)
exept you must pay amazon prime 10$ and it’s a monthly recuring subscription.
