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Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

"Dark UI patterns" seems a little over the top to me, I think it might be attributable to Hanlon's Razor. Probably some lazy programmer at Verizon stubbed in some code then forgot about it or moved on and no one remembered to go back and put in the actual code to find the actual wait time, or they couldn't figure out how to do it so just put bs in.

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I would say that's a little generous. I've also worked at companies of similar size to this where it isn't uncommon for managers to just ask programmers to randomly generate a number so they can lie and claim they've implemented some functionality.

Lying to your customers to make yourself look better is malice. "Lazy programmer" excuse is just as shitty as "rogue engineer". Who is in charge of QA and feature testing? "That sounds hard to implement correctly, let's lie instead."

This guy's conjecture comes somewhat close to an explanation: https://twitter.com/rikschennink/status/736618354098737152.

But even so, why bother putting any number at all unless the user is there for long enough to care? No information is better than false information.

Yeah, usually with Dark UI Patterns I associate a bit more hostility to users=like tricking someone into buying or downloading something. This seems more like someone had a good idea, but found out it was too hard to implement so fudged it.

This is tricking you into staying on the page, pursuing a route that may or may not be in your best interest.

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