Re:Dear Websites, Stop Asking for Ransom Sign-Ups
by tokai on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @07:32AM
(#36969441)
Yeah well my life would be sweeter if I conned pensioners out of their savings. It's always easy to follow how people explain their unethical decisions - but it doesn't make them an inch less unethical though and people that use your line of thought to do harmful things are scum.
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Re:Dear Websites, Stop Asking for Ransom Sign-Ups
by cafeinux on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @08:03AM
(#36969689)
Sign-up popups are annoying, but not inherently unethical. Nobody's on the street because one dev tried to convert people.
Re:Dear Websites, Stop Asking for Ransom Sign-Ups
by TheNewsIsHere on Friday August 04, 2023 @09:33AM
(#36999804)
We’re not talking about sign-up pop-ups though. Those are an annoying fact of digital life that isn’t _really_ that bad.
We’re talking about creating a flow and perception that you can use a thing built around an assumption that you then intentionally change at some next step. It’s a breakdown of an implicit contract you create with the user, for the purposes of farming data, getting more signups, increasing conversions, or whatever else. It’s just dishonest.
A few years ago a family member contacted me about this very thing. They had found a nice looking website to accomplish a thing. The website had published pricing for packages of their service, and provided a “free” sample. Except after you spent all the time to get that free sample running, you couldn’t actually use it without paying.