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.
Most cookie consent dialogues:
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".
🙄
"We care about your privacy. We absolutely hate it, but it counts as caring, doesn't it?"
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.
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.
AFAIK this uses UX design rules
Stupidly enough, that's illegal in the places this ruling is from. What's going on there?