Speaking of 'sign up to our newsletter', one of the latest dark patterns I've found that astounded me was adding a checkbox to the login form [0], where you'd normally expect the 'remember me' checkbox to be. You almost click it out of muscle memory if you don't read what it says.

[0] https://i.postimg.cc/HW89hs7r/Screenshot-2022-07-12-145957.p...

Email marketing in general blows my mind. Marketers typically have absolutely no respect for consent, and the costs are completely borne by the recipient. The whole industry depends on dark patterns, shady list sharing, and scraping your email to add it to their lists despite you having no relationship with them. I know it's not simple, and it's just my frustration speaking, but I don't understand how my mail host can't ban all Mailchimp et al IPs for me, or implement some standard such that it costs them a penny to send me an email.

beware that Meta/FB and Tiktok scripts are among those that siphon off email data even before a web form is submitted

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/05/some-...

This is a good reminder to keep your hosts file updated to block at least some of these sites' attempts to take your data.

https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

> Email marketing in general blows my mind

My favorite thing is when the companies outsource the email marketing, so that it has absolutely zero relevance. I've been using the same online tax preparer for 10 years, and I've had exactly zero refunds, yet their emails during tax season always let me know that "my refund is waiting".

The point of email marketing is to hit the right targets. If they overspray and hit 100000 wrong targets.., oh well, they lost 3 cents. So this overspray isn’t a sign that they are dumb, but they are effective.

That's why the only email subscription service on my site is completely transparent and details exactly what we're storing, and it's impossible to click by accident. Everything I do for myself I try to build like a service I'd like to use myself. But the second managers or marketers are involved it's all out the window. I remember early in my career my boss had me add every email included in a TED booklet to their marketing email list. I told him that morality issues aside he could likely catch a fine for that, especially since the type of people listed in a TED booklet are likely more litigious than the average bear. Didn't care, wanted more eyes on the marketing.

> That's why the only email subscription service on my site is completely transparent

Sorry, but honestly speaking even checking your profile does not reveal what your web site is. Probably you are marketing person from your words, but that's not clear.

Hope this feedback helps!

That's intentional, I'm not trying to plug my website I was just talking about my approach in non-specific terms. I'm a dev.

I'm not a big fan of ipv6, but fan or not, I bet if all spammy mailchimp type provider IP ranges were confiscated and freed, we'd be in ipv4 land for another 20 years.

And as a second thought, the way China amd Russia are going, maybe we should just reclaim all their ipv4 addresses, and just give each country 1 IP, they can proxy through it on their end.

Then say goodbye to the internet and hello to a mesh of country-specific networks.

Finally, true decentralisation!

? That's my point, as this is China already, and Russia is not far behind.

We already have that. It’s just we are in denial as a society about it.

Globalization is over. The post Berlin wall fall consensus undermined and ruined.

The last to realize, loses.

The quickest way to achieve defeat is to convince yourself that you have already lost.

One address should be enough for everyone? Bill Gates just reached zen.

Mostly, it doesn’t even seem to matter whether you agree or not. Inevitably you end up receiving affiliate emails regardless.

This is why every company gets a different address for me. If junk starts coming in, that address is blocked, and I stop doing business with that company (if I haven't already).

This sometimes falls foul of spammers adding some random addresses of the form [email protected] or <commonname>@mycatchall.domain.tld into their lists, but that hasn't happened often enough to be a problem. That it isn't much of a problem surprises me a little, given how much <commonname>@domain.tld (no sub-domain) addresses are used this way. I have considered trying the pattern somename@<sub-domain-per-company>.domain.tld as an alternative if that becomes a problem, but before implementing that I need to change my email setup (doing that anyway soon as running Zimbra's OSS version is going to get more difficult next year) and maybe my DNS server of choice (if wildcard MX records are an issue, I've not looked into that).

Sometimes I get funny looks for addresses like this, especially as I usually work the company/other name in there somewhere. I had one website refuse to accept an address based on their name, which was a rad flag and I backed away from going any further into dealing with that organisation.

You can just use [id]-[sha1 hmac]@domain.tld

The id could be anything, and the SHA1 HMAC takes 32 characters in base32 (which is an email-address-safe encoding). Then just configure your spamfilter to reject any address where the HMAC doesn’t check out.

Of course, the drawback is that you’ll need a computer to generate a new address… At which point you may as well store an explicit whitelist of valid addresses.

You can do that from a phone app though, or even a static webpage that loads on phones. It doesn't have to be 32 characters either, putting ~4 characters is probably secure enough, unless a ton of people start using this exact scheme.

This is a great idea, I might implement it. The difficult part is hooking the validation in the mail server I guess.

I typically do it with

<emanynapmoc>@mydomain.tld

Spelling the company's name backwards makes it easy to match to a company for use by my own spam filter without setting off their pattern detectors.

> If junk starts coming in, that address is blocked, and I stop doing business with that company (if I haven't already).

AND CALL them, if possible: “I’ve received marketing emails from your company recently, how is this possible, I’ve never signed up, yaddayadda… “

Generate some cost on their side.

Support calls will probably cost you more than the company unless you value your time very little - most companis don't post numbers answered by anyone paid highly enough for this to have an impact. Instead, call them out publicly or mail/call a someone in a leadership position if you can find contact information.

You don't have to use the company name in the email address, just use a unique email. If you start getting spam on a certain email address, search your email archives to see what company was associated with that address to link it back to them.

Yeah my mortgage company sent me a letter saying to opt out of affiliate marketing Emails or snail mail I have to send them a letter requesting it. This was 4 months after they bought my mortgage so the most the letter woulda done is stop them after selling my info for 4 months.

I had a coworker who sent those letters as a side hustle. He had a few different ones and would send the letters certified mail. Companies are very poor at compliance, and certain violations allow you to sue the company.

Everything in that except the unspoken end point where I end up with money sounds awful

"Remember me in your newsletter list" is the next one. Send me money!

Yes! I just noticed this for the first time yesterday and thought, "I hope this isn't another terrible trend in dark patterns."

Heh. I’ve stopped clicking remember me boxes because they never work.

Yeah, I booked a flight on WizzAir two days ago, and this felt like a low blow even from WizzAir.

Predicting the flight will be cancelled in 3.. 2.. 1.. But then the newsletter will haunt you for far far longer..

Not a burnt WizzAir customer at all! /s

Happened to my dad on Sunday, and the only replacement flight they would offer is for this Friday, what a complete joke air travel is in 2022.

I mean you're complaining about an ultra-low cost airline. why would you expect it to have a good customer experience?

Yes I am. They also overbooked seven people on that flight, delayed it for hours, and then completely cancelled. There were people in wheelchairs left stranded at the airport after waiting there all day. This is just plain incompetence.

atlassian does this as well: https://i.postimg.cc/zfwbG5Ft/atlassian-login.png

I knew Atlassian hates their users. But that much??

Thats one of the things I REALLY dislike about GoG lately. It tries really hard to bait you into signing up for the newsletter when buying stuff.

I never check "remember me" so maybe that's good for me?

A lot of this happens because different managers have different metrics/KPIs they are optimizing around and they all find "good places" to do things to help meet their goals. The secondary effects aren't considered. One managers quest for outperforming their goals comes at the expense of another managers goals.

There was a point a few years ago where you could not see a single piece of user-generated content above the fold on the reddit home page. A bunch of teams had jockeyed for having their little carousels and banners put on top, and of course, metrics were always cited.

I left a screenshot in slack and it ended up causing a couple of teams to have to roll back their widgets, but it always baffled me that we were able to focus so much on the individual trees of metric optimization that we would miss the forest to that extent.

> but it always baffled me that we were able to focus so much on the individual trees of metric optimization that we would miss the forest to that extent

Always look to the decision maker's incentives and you'll almost always discover why things are the way they are. And often, to your point, there's an aspect of tunnel vision associated with it because considering the bigger picture is difficult as a company grows and becomes more complex and creates friction in achieving goals.

Ultimately, this is the purpose of senior leadership. But the Peter Principal really begins to kick in at that level and the truth is, many senior leaders are in over their head and are unable to materialize the broader strategy and understand how their various units are affecting it. So we end up with crappy products.

Gervais principle says that senior leaders work for themselves, not the company, up to the point of working against the company.

That was an interesting rabbit hole I hadn’t been down before. Interesting!

The best metric is the end of year bonus, tided to yearly total company financial results, but that only gets measured once per year. I can measure many things on every transaction, but how they in total work out to my end of year bonus and paycheck are much harder to see.

Of course if my bonus is some small KPI I can optimize that at the expense of overall performance.

It seems like every company goes through some version of this. At Twitter there was a channel called #ios-six-bars or something like that that started when an engineer posted a screenshot of the home timeline with six bars of things on it, all from jockeying teams trying to grab a spot on that page: Home, Spaces, all the new features just had to be thrown in the face of somebody who probably just wanted to read some tweets. Discussions were had, product cohesion was brought up, then things went quiet for a bit. Until someone posted a new screenshot a couple months later with seven bars on the screen.

This is why any good org will make sure to observe all important KPI’s while doing an A/B test. If your “email signup” KPI went to the moon but tanked your “bought shit” metric… you should probably roll back.

It's really easy for this to be noise from false negatives. On an A/A test with five guardrail metrics and a threshold of p>0.05, you'll get a false negative 22.6% of the time.

Having experience design expertise at the executive level can mitigate this. If nobody is advocating for good user experiences, nobody is advocating for the usefulness of your online product as a whole, and it shows.

The primary not secondary effect of random sampling is noise.

Recently I got an account on a developer tool (Checkly) because the company I joined uses it. I then got 5 different emails from them in a 48 hour period.

Like I'm sure many users sign up then drop out of your funnel but I'm part of an organization that's a paying customer. I'm already going to use your stuff. What possible business benefit could there be to you spamming me? If anything you're risking the inverse - it made me want to migrate away from the tool.

Sounds like they are optimizing for a KPI on time to full integration. Someone else paid for it, now they want to make sure that you are actually using it.

Still absurd, but I know this is a problem friends of mine have had.

The "here's how to use the product you paid for" emails that trickle out over a few weeks or a month is vastly different than "throw you into every single marketing email bucket we have" but companies seem to lean toward the latter.

The 'cost' of email is borne by the recipient, mostly.

Hey CSMastermind, I'm founder at Checkly and I got a ping we were mentioned. We do send out some "getting started" messages on autopilot. We also did a product launch Thursday and then our regular changelog on Monday. That probably was overwhelming. If you could email me on tim -at- checklyhq -dot- com I will track down if we hit the the spam cannon too hard.

I know this is well-intentioned and not an automated message, but I find it ironic that you managed to get an additional message to him over here.

one asking them to establish contact for communication to continue, no less. xD

I can't help be reminded of those "if you'd like to unsubscribe call us so we can harass you with offers even more" you see in some company terms and conditions.

> if we hit the the spam cannon too hard

Maybe consider, oh I don't know, not deploying a spam cannon in the first place?

The good news is that this sort of thing is enough to trigger the spam filter in my email program so I'll never see it.

Companies have this astonishing arrogance assuming they should be able to interrupt actual humans with robot messages from [email protected] - typically marketing messages that cannot actually be replied to and do not qualify as respectful communication.

>Maybe consider, oh I don't know, not deploying a spam cannon in the first place?

I'm not at all related to the people you are talking to, but I am a dev who has accidentally built spam cannons before. It is surprisingly easy to spam people - you need to deliberately build in checks - and put them in the right places to prevent spam cannons.

I don't use your tool and I'm unrelated to CSMastermind, but I can tell you that you absolutely hit the "spam cannon" too hard. 5 messages in 48 hours? That's absolutely ridiculous. They could all have been 1 message if it was important that they get that info, and it could have been 0 messages if it wasn't.

You are correct. I will figure out two things.

1. Why our fancy expensive mailing/marketing tool (Intercom) does not spread these messages in a relaxed fashion (it should)

2. If of those five messages, maybe two were the obligatory "confirm your email" and standard "Welcome to Checkly, this is what we do"

TL;DR we should not spam.

We checked our Intercom. We spammed. One user got six emails in a 5 day span. There were some separate initiatives going on. We didn't check the settings and current outgoing mail. We will change it.

BTW: all of this was done without any bad intent. It's 100% us being stupid and not coordinating and being diligent enough.

This is such an impressive series of responses. I know some folks are flipping you shit here, but I’ve seen a lot of people try to “engage” with customers, in HN and elsewhere, and I think you’ve done it really nicely. You sound like a human; you admit mistakes; you follow up. Good on you.

Send a seventh to apologize! /s

(on a serious note, good on you for taking action though. +1)

You only get one chance to make a first impression.

>You only get one chance to make a first impression.

Well, this person had 6 first impressions.

tnolet, if I get five emails from a company with 48 hours, I will set up a spam rule for them. If I really need to get that much help to get started, your UX design is likely not very good.

You are correct. I’m the same. Our emails are even pretty good. Our UX is pretty damn good. Somehow we dropped the ball here.

When you fix it, write up a post mortem so others can lesrn from your mistake!

Since it's distressingly common.

Let me propose a different possibility.

Suppose the site isn't concerned about the sale very much at all?

Suppose the thing that the site uses to reel people in, is a good deal that isn't very profitable to the site but what the site then tries to sell is a very profitable near-scam/ripoff. Scaring off half the ordinary customers becomes worth it to get even 10% of the customers buying the scam.

What seems like "poor optimization" can easily optimization for something and could be seen as "the scammification of the web".

Exactly this.

Many here are focusing on a single interaction. While the outcome of that single interaction is negative to the company, the aggregate outcome must be positive somehow, perhaps in the way you said, but it doesn't even have to be a scam or ripoff. Some products just have a higher margin and/or customer LTV.

As an individual, it is annoying, but the company is focusing only on the macro effect when it does something like this.

> I'm signalling interest in product X as hard as I can, and you've AB tested that this is a great time to jangle your keys over there instead?

If I may... I have seen data from a big retailer that shows any user that doesn't immediately purchase an item, is actually not that interested in the product on the screen. If a customer is going to buy something, they will do it promptly. Anyone else is just browsing.

YMMV, grain of salt, context dependent, etc, etc.

In this case, what I'm referring to is:

    1. Clicked on page.
    2. Took maybe 10 seconds to take in what is "above the fold".
    3. Scrolled down to see what else there is.
    4. BAM! Popup triggered by scrolling down.

While I understand what you're getting at, they do not yet have the info to know that I'm browsing or whatever. They were so excited about their stupid popup that they didn't even get that far.

I will say, generally, when I'm to the point that I'm entering credit card info, I've put up with it, but I have been chased off of sites by this use case before. Especially if that popup also crosses with some other popup and now I'm chasing down the tiny little 6pt light-grey-on-white little "x"s to click away the popups in the right order.

Actually, let me add that to my touchstone list. OF COURSE hiding the dismissal icon for the popup increases "engagement" with the popup. You don't even need to run a test for that, because what other result could it have? "We shrank the close icon, moved it to the lower right corner where nobody expects it, and made sure to kill the constrast even harder, and customers dismissed it 2.5 seconds more quickly on average"? Of course that's not possible. But... that's the wrong question! And AB testing is really good at answering the question you're asking, it has no mechanism in and of itself to see whether you're asking the right question. If you're getting down to this you've overoptimized.

Or a popup that triggers for moving the mouse towards the top bar. I constantly highlight text for reading purposes (A habit I have) of course that moves the mouse. Not a reason to annoy me with that shit.

They know you clicked on a page that is for a given (set of?) product(s). They know you stayed on that page for longer than a moment, then scrolled down.

They may also have data that >90% of customers who make a purchase choose/click in <10 seconds, and never scroll. Or may even take a different path entirely or similar.

They could interpret all of that as you inspected the product(s) on the page, didn't choose/click one, and _now_ is the best time to prompt you with suggestions to maintain engagement in >75% of instances.

You could also be one of the lucky few customers in a sacrificial control group unknowingly testing their new shitty popup to measure its impact on sales.

Whilst I can't say for certain that any of this is your case, I absolutely guarantee there are many retail sites that do this - I've worked at several now - and this is bread-and-butter material to data teams working with customer engagement.

In fact, you want the dismiss button to be easily discovered and used. Dismissals are an important signal about the quality of the content; just as important as clicks. When you make the button impossible to use you rob yourself of that signal while simultaneously making click data far less reliable.

Unless you're a manager, not getting the results desired.

Then the problem is people, and "they're just clicking close out of reflex!".

Cue hiding this, and results you wanted appear! Success! Raise! Promotion! Or, maybe more funding, due to signs of greater engagement.

Sure; until a company that actually understands this stuff comes along and eats that company's lunch. In the long run, reality eventually wins.

The number to figure out is how much time do you wait to interrupt. Also wonder if it's person dependant. Some people aren't impulsive buyers.

>I have seen data from a big retailer that shows any user that doesn't immediately purchase an item, is actually not that interested in the product on the screen.

Fuck that. Unless it's an emergency (in which case I'll go to a shop), anything i purchase online is carefully considered, sometimes over several weeks. My revolving user-agent, vpn etc may give the illusion I'm not interested....but i am indeed, just browsing...

Could the popup be a punishment for reading the fine print?

I love to sign-up to news letters and get a discount. Of course I am giving you my spam account I set up for this exact purpose.

Honestly instead of a cookie law I wish GDPR has imposed a rule that required all those stupid interstitial pop-ups to conform to a standard that could be easily blocked by the browser. I mean they are asking for emails, which is a massive and totally unnecessary proliferation of personally identifiable information.

I hate them so much. It makes it feel like so much more of a chore to try to do research or look for things online. I'd honestly prefer 56k page-load speeds if the pages were free of this garbage.

Pet peeve: GDPR is not the cookie law, and is fact a very sensible collection of restrictions on how companies can collect and process personal data. The annoying banners you see are against the spirit of the GDPR, and quite possibly against the letter of it, too.

Amazon does this in a horrible way.

1) I open a product in a tab. I click "add to cart" and a "related products" sidebar slides in. I close the tab in annoyance.

However, some items exhibit a similar pattern, EXCEPT...

2) I open a product in a tab. I click "add to cart" and a stupid extended warranty sidebar slides in. I close the tab in annoyance.

The difference?

Item #1 gets added to my cart

Item #2 doesn't make it to the shopping cart.

Amazon just silently deleted my purchase.

I actually don't know when it dawned on me that this happened, but amazon lost money on me because I didn't buy certain things.

The thing is, you haven’t really shown that these sites aren’t successfully optimizing for conversions. Couldn’t it very well be the case that UI which annoys some high-intent users by interrupting them or adding steps to the checkout process also increases overall conversions?

True, A could be “annoy users” and B could be “don’t annoy users”, and A could perform better overall, but in this framework you might be missing C which is “annoy users except those already deep in the funnel”.

My point is more that there can be two groups of users with mutually exclusive desires, and it can be practical to choose to satisfy one group over the other based on your particular goals. There's not always some monotonically increasing function where you can over time satisfy a higher and higher portion of your users.

Most people are just browsing so it's optimizing for that when it should be optimizing for sales

Maybe your money is no longer the most important thing for them at that moment? Given that you’ll probably proceed with the purchase anyway, they could be making more overall from the crowd which also signs up for updates.

I would really warn you against thinking your intuitions are going to be a good sign for whether or not something is a good retail decision.

Indeed, quantitative data without qualitative understanding is useless. You can't understand data without understanding mechanisms, because there's an infinite number of possible confounding factors that you can only dismiss through your qualitative understanding of the dynamic you are measuring.

What you describe could actually be an artifact of "flaw of averages" (an article was posted here just few days ago, TLDR: air force discovered that nobody fit the body dimensions of an average pilot and therefore created adjustable seats for jets). If promotion banners are just segmented to general millions of people then that's exactly what will happen. But not sure if better segmenting is even possible with data available.