Examples of "dark design patterns" -- aka, asshole designs

You’re not kidding with that handle, are you?

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Remember when the ‘Phone Cops’ said you couldn’t OWN a phone? All phones were their property and you were only LEASING them? They could send an electrical pulse out from a switching station, and tell by the impedance if you had more than one phone hooked up.

My parents bought a house to flip back in those dark ages, and when they discovered a sky-blue rotary phone had escaped detection, they started jumping around like they had found a gold ingot.

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They’re both fully functional! The left one is a Cisco VoIP phone which is not bad (although I cannot recommend the UCCE system behind it). The right one is a General Electric from the 50s, rewired with a paperclip to work with a two-conductor POTS line (standard household wired phone line).

My father disconnected the ringers in the extra three phones we had, so the telco couldn’t detect them. :slight_smile:

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Why do people say “not worth his salt?” I mean, who gets a salary in salt anymore? We shouldnt even use the word salary! Am I right?

:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Since no one else is answering your question…

I believe the ‘touch here’ button is authorizing the last line you read: “$ forever starts Apr. blah, blah…” when you THINK you’re confirming Cancel Subscription.

If I’m wrong, the Happy Mutants will trip over each other to answer your question now.

Nice! I had an issue with international long distance once and it went into a dispute file. They never followed up and it never showed on my final bill. It was around $359-400 iirc.

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One place where I work has had IP phones for 15 years or so, but after a power-failure incident a single 2554 “Touch Tone” wall phone appeared in the office of the production department, connected to a real working POTS line.

Some department was having a weekend event on-site with an outside planner involved, and for some reason they required an analog telephone line, which was duly ordered and installed in the place required. They called to have the line checked ahead of time, and somehow this task ended up in my lap.

I asked all the logical places and people where someone might have saved or forgotten a vestigial analog phone, and came up with nothing to test the line. Then suddenly I remembered the wall-set in the production office, so I went in and shouted to no-one at random “hey, can I use this phone for a few minutes?” while pointing at the 2554. Someone nodded assent, so I quickly removed it from the wall and carried it away to complete my task.

It was only upon return of the phone that I learned that they had misunderstood my question.

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I have FIVE phones in a house smaller than 1,000 square feet. When I moved in, the phone lines were…well, they weren’t.. I bought a spool of CAT5 and went to town. Now, when I do get paid work, it’s usually cleaning out Dead Guys’ Houses, and no one ever wants the phones with cords. I can reach every corner of the house with a corded phone, which, either means I have a lot of phones or I don’t have a lot of house.

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I like the one on the right. Good for angry dialing.

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Global thermonuclear war will have some downsides; but I’ll take comfort in the fact that this sort of thing, and its authors, are also being scourged from the earth in cleansing nuclear fire.

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A record Album was like photo album, but with records in it. Then the long player came out and they could fit all the songs onto one disk so there was no more need for albums, you could just use a sleeve.

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My grandmother continued paying the ‘rent’ on the phone they put in her house until her death about 5 years ago. So she paid a couple dollars a month for about 70 years, for the ancient old ringing beast in her bootroom.

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Yeah, I don’t really get it… it says, right there, that they’ll charge you $50/week starting in three days. It’s pretty clear. If people don’t read what’s right in front of them, that’s really their fault.

If people don’t read what’s right in front of them, that’s really their fault.

I see this explanation all the time for actual fraud because people are so willing to assume that end users make mistakes and not that companies (gasp!) make money from dishonesty, and are strongly incentivized to make money, all the time, no matter what.

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Yeah, this isn’t a “dark design pattern,” it’s a “charge children exorbitant prices and hope their parents don’t bother using the various parental control features Apple has added over the years for exactly this situation.”

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Is there something unclear about the language or what will happen when you accept?

Records were a record of an event, like a record of a song you wrote, or a concert, or a speech. I base this knowledge solely on the Ani DiFranco song “Fuel,” from the album “Little Plastic Castle” (1998).

The fourth verse is:
People used to make records
As in a record of an event
The event of people playing music in a room
Now everything is cross-marketing
It’s about sunglasses and shoes
Or guns and drugs
You choose

Good album, I recommend it.

That’s part of the joke in the WKRP episode - I think Johnny Fever smashes a phone while he and Venus are working at the transmitter (not realizing that there’s a bomb there and not at the station); when he hears the sirens of the bomb squad coming to save them he thinks it’s the “phone cops” coming to arrest him for destroying phone company property. (It might have been Venus who destroyed the phone - it’s been decades and I’m too lazy to search YouTube for it.)

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And here I am! :slight_smile:

Reading the article - the complaint is purely that it claims to be FREE! (for a few days).

I agree with jong:

Some of the other examples in the article though are genuinely shitty ploys.

I would say apart from that one and examples 3 and 4, they are all genuinely deceptive and crappy.

It is probably the only one that actually makes any sense as an image to head up the article. All the others are either embedded moving images or would be really hard to see what’s going on in.

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Show me some footage of that.