A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns.
Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests.
↫ International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network
Dark patterns are everywhere, and it’s virtually impossible to browse the web, use certain types of services, or install mobile applications, without having to dodge and roll just to avoid all kinds of nonsense being thrown at you. It’s often not even ads that make the web unusable – it’s all the dark patterns tricking you into viewing ads, entering into a subscription, enabling notifications, sharing your email address or whatever, that’s the real reason.
This is why one of the absolute primary demands I have for the next version of OSNews is zero dark patterns. I don’t want any dialogs begging you to enable ads, no modal windows demanding you sign up for a newsletter, no popups asking you to enable notifications, and so on – none of that stuff. My golden standard is “your computer, your rules”, and that includes your right to use ad blockers or anything else to change the appearance or functioning of our website on your computer.
It’d be great if dark patterns became illegal somehow, but it would be incredibly difficult to write any legislation that would properly cover these practices.
I use dark themes everywhere. Then there are dark patterns, completely different.
The most annoying ones are when you get linked to a MSN article, but it hides the text with a “Download Microsoft News app” in blue. But underneath it much less prominent is a “continue reading text” that you can tap to see the rest of the article.
Most mainstream news outlets are simply unreadable any more. I’ve stopped reading WaPo, NYT, and several local newspapers because of these behaviors. They are complicit in their own demise, and the rise of “alternative” media sources, the downfall of democracy, etc. Nobody wants to be bothered with popups and ads when Drudge Report will give a “curated” synopsis of everything going on with clean black Serif text on a white background. Hey, we lost democracy but we had a few quarters of profits that mostly went to the executive suite.
The entirety of the internet is more viewable with JavaScript disabled. So on a Chromium browser, just disable all JavaScript by default, and then whitelist the sites you have to trust with filters like [*.]edu:443, [*.]gov:443, [*.]osnews.com:443, [*.]google.com:443, [*.]bankinginstutition.com:443, etc. and then run an adblocker on top of that for the sites where JavaScript is allowed to do its nasty stuff. Running the web like this, you can still get by with a 15-year old Core 2 Duo, imagine that.
I feel that f*****g “Legitimate Interest” bullshit should be included here, which would increase that percentage…
The 2 dark patterns I see most, and IMHO, are the most annoying.
1. Websites that will popup a modal when you scroll down a little to start reading to see if it will interest you. Bang! Modal in your face breaking your focus.
2. Many sites will have a video near the top. I block auto-play where ever I can – not always successful. As your reading the article and scroll down away from the video, the video gets smaller and scrolls itself to the bottom right of the screen. I then have to click the close icon to continue reading. If I wanted to watch the damn video I would have clicked on it in the first place, you annoying idiots!
Drukula,
Those are both gripes of mine too!
In terms of the autoplay videos, it’s annoying that web developers presume videos should autoplay, but I also have to blame mozilla somewhat for not giving users the ability to forcefully turn that off.
Many news sites autoplay and I hate it. Even youtube does that, and while youtube itself has a setting to disable autoplay, youtube autoplays by default and so the unwanted autoplay happens anyways. Again, it’s just incredible that FF doesn’t provide a way to disable this. It’s on the exact same nuisance level of websites that autostarted flash content. Flash blocking extensions gave us better control back then.