Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/03/a-glossary-of-dirty-tricks-web.html
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Roach Motel
You get into a situation very easily, but then you find it is hard to get out of it.
Many a roach has said the same thing…
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Heh, I played Two Dots for a while, until I finally realized there were levels that you could only finish if you were insanely lucky, or yes, shelled out $$$ for boosters.
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Are these “Dark Patterns” or standard design? Sadly, there’s not one website I use where you can easily delete your account or turn off auto-renew. This is how EVERYTHING WORKS.
Boing Boing had a great link a couple years ago (maybe it was a TED talk?) from a speaker about how web design is the only area where innovation and improvement is meant to make the user experience WORSE. For whatever reason I can’t remember the guys name and haven’t hit on the right google fu to find the lecture.
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Yesterday I bought a plane ticket. I always skip all of the extras but one of the options was only 63 cents for some cancellation insurance. The included qualifying causes were plausible so why not add it on? After the transaction went through I was shown a breakdown of the purchase and the insurance was now listed as $63.83. I’m not sure what happened. Did both I and my gf misread it or did they list the price incorrectly or in a confusing manner? I tried calling them but gave up getting through the phone tree. I sent an email to customer service. We will see. If nothing else it was a great reminder to me to skip the extras.
ETA: And of course if they don’t refund me then I won’t use them again.
For reference they are FlightNetwork.com whom I hadn’t heard of before.
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Don’t forget when they entice you with mostly wonderful things.
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Solutions (to the examples)
Confirmshaming: either have no guilt or have no shame. Opt in to nothing no matter how they plead.
Forced Continuity: never sign up for a “free” trial. of anything. ever. TANSTAAFL.
Sneak into Basket: the second a site tries to sneak something into any transaction I’m doing is the second I leave and never come back.
Roach Motel: see “Forced Continuity”
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I like how responsive bb is. I saw a mod personally reply to a bad ad report with an email to get in touch more quickly in the future.
I also wish they’d add a patreon since I’m all set for cool tools for a while and unfortunately for security need to block ads.
(It’s not BB I don’t trust)
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It’s difficult to sit down and think through good, helpful and improved design. Even harder to actually implement it. And yet harder to find funding for such a thing. It’s way easier to fuck with people through bullshit and scams. Sad but true.
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Luckily for all of us Max Roach found it very easy to get into drumming and impossible to get out.
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Confirmshaming. I get attempts at that every few weeks or so when given the choice of having password managing added to my security suite; I click (in so many words) ‘no, I don’t want that protection’, then ‘are you sure you want to stay at risk’ pops up.
Of course friggin’ NO. As if I can’t manage my own passwords and so must leave it in the hands of another system that is the obvious target of hackers?
I like when I buy from Amazon and there’s a big jolly yellow button for “FREE shipping!! in month 1 of your lifelong financial commitment to Prime”, and instead of a No button, there’s a plain hyperlink that says “continue without signing up for Prime, like some kind of dumb baby”.
What they don’t realise is I don’t need prime, because it makes no difference whether it takes the local courier one day or two to drive past my building without even slowing down, let alone leaving a note or - lol - actually delivering the package. Also, I use a friend’s account to watch their TV shows.
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Totally agree here. I really liked it but then it just became impossible to win and I just quit. Especially know all the talk about the dark patterns in game play to get you to buy in app purchases. Bummer that such a cool game was ruined.
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Guess I should add… yeah yeah, I’m whining about a free internet app. But if you make a game, either explicitly require people to pay for the thing, or make it realistically solvable for free, (with, sure, $$ addons that make it easier.) None of this half-assing garbage.
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You can dodge auto-renew by using a credit card gift card. Enroll in the trial service, using a gift card. In the mean time, spend the gift card. When it’s time to renew, you’ll probably get an email asking your to put in a valid credit card. I wish I could remember who the BB user was who first posted about this.
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They may sell the debt to a debt collector if you do this. And you’d lose if you fought it. Don’t risk your credit score.
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“Image: YouTube”? Sure, the image is a still from a video hosted on YouTube, but YouTube did not create it and does not own it in any meaningful way. I thought BoingBoing, of all sites, would respect the intellectual property of creators enough to give them credit correctly. (I’m currently writing an email to my bosses to explain to them that the “Image: Wikimedia Commons” that they keep writing on their training slides, under pictures they found on Wikipedia, is analogous to adding a graph from a book and writing “Source: Seattle public library”. The book lives at the library, sure, but the library does not own it and is not the “source”…)
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Agreed. Also, I use the Brave browser which sends tips to the sites you visit the most, but alas BB isn’t signed up 
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