I'm not referring to "soft asks". The dark pattern is creating a fake dialog that mimics the real system dialog in order to mislead, and circumvent a feature designed to protect users from spam/abuse.

Telling a user why they're about to get a permissions dialog, and displaying a real system dialog, is obviously not a dark pattern.

They're common as hell, but I can't seem to find a live example of what I'm talking about right now.

Reddit does this on their IOS app.

Almost every small local news website that wants to send you push notifications has started doing this—a sticky popup that they can show you as many times as they want, providing only a little more information then the actual permissions pop-up would, allowing them to bypass "only request permissions after user interaction" schemes and reducing their (UA-visible) decline rates.

> This is commonly referred to as a “soft ask.” The reasons for it are not always nefarious. On some platforms you cannot provide any commentary on why you want to send push notifications and so the soft ask provides a way to give more context on the next (real) permission dialog.

What I'm reading here is that you (not you specifically) want to ask for my browser permission, but know that the popup is non-descriptive and your one shot.

If you are nefarious, creating a fake popup makes perfect sense. You lower the risk and increase your chances.

If you are not nefarious, why even go for fake popups? Why not have a button in the corner? A choice in some menu? "Hey? Want updates from us? Click here!"

Wanting to do more commentary on why you want to send push notifications never non-nefariously leads to creating fake popups.

Why not make a user who wants notifications click a special button taking them to a special page where you show the notifications popup?

I'm sure if you asked, everyone who does this is going to tell you that "MY use of it is not nefarious. It's everyone else's fault that technique is abused."

Stop breaking the users browser. If you are, regardless of your intent; you are making a shitty experience for somebody, somewhere.

An informative prompt explaining why permissions are needed with a single continue button is not a dark pattern.

If you have a "decline" button that bypasses the browser, then you are using a dark pattern.

As long as it doesn't mimic the browser. (Another reason why user agent strings and other ways websites can identify the user's browser are a bad idea).

It doesn't matter if it mimics the browser. If you are trying to stop the browser from protecting the user as intended, it is a dark pattern, regardless of how well you camoflage the attempt.

In principle yes. But why would you imitate the browser if not to mislead the user? And who wants to mislead the user but has qualms imitating the browser?

People do all kinds of mental gymnastics to justify doing stuff they know is wrong. I would be unsuprised that people use the lack of camoflage as an excuse to justify using a dark pattern.