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Comment by serg_chernata | Hacker News Reader

There's no search but I'm curious if LinkedIn is included. I never took screenshots, unfortunately, but I feel like they've had close to 5 in my own experience alone.

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LinkedIn is one of the most common examples when talking about dark patterns, their most famous being the number of ways they tried to get you to invite your gmail contacts.

I'm just realizing why the manager of the local Grease Monkey once endorsed me for "parallel algorithms".

Just reinstalled Skype and can see that they're trying to get access to my contacts also. They tell you to set up access so you can use the app.

First up is microphone, and you click allow. Second is camera, and you click allow. Third is contacts, and you click—wait a minute, why do you need this? Disallow.

Don't know what they would do if they got my contacts (hopefully not spam them like LinkedIn), and don't intend to find out.

Well considering that Skype is mainly a way to, you know, contact people it doesn't seem actually insane to consider it.

Skype should be a little more private than your cell phone number is. If I add someone's phone number to my contacts list, that DOES NOT mean I want them automatically added as my Skype contact.

Of course. But for them to ask doesn't seem like a dark pattern, since the main use case for the app is contacting people you know and it's reasonable to think most users don't want to micromanage different contact lists as you describe. The dark pattern stuff is more like when your app for rating ice cream flavors is asking for your entire address book.

I don't recall skype ever asking me for my permission to do this. I updated the app and then suddenly all my phone contacts were skype contacts and I had to go through and change the settings to never do that again and I had to manually delete each contact it had created.

To me this would be akin to facebook automatically adding the local chinese restaurant as my friend simply because I had their number saved in my phone.

Like many people, Skype is a fallback communication channel for me. I don't care if my brother or best friend is on Skype because I call them on the phone to talk, text message if I want to chat, or Facetime if I want to video chat.

I'd say Skype is a way to communicate with people, not a way to contact people. And for me, it's a method of last resort for people I can't call/text/Facetime/Hangout. I understand some people might say yes, but it's still somewhat deceptive to put this in the same category as "enable mic" and "enable camera", which Skype cannot operate without.

Airbnb also wants access to your entire Google contacts or Facebook friends list if you want to use the mobile app. Let's just say that I refuse to use their mobile app and only use the desktop/browser version for this reason.

You want permission to access my entire contacts/social network? No thanks.

> You want permission to access my entire contacts/social network? No thanks.

Too bad dozens of your contacts did not care about it and they have your data anyway.

Here's the one of the most egregious examples of LinkedIn's dark UX. The transition from "I'm accepting incoming invites" to "I'm inviting people to connect or join LinkedIn" is intentionally subtle: https://goo.gl/photos/ncnTiMWeSBJfg3rZ6

That link itself is a dark pattern. It tries to get you to sign into Google; you can't see the photos otherwise.

works fine for me in incognito tab

Not sure what you're seeing. I opened the link in an incognito window (therefore, no google signin), and everything works fine without signing in: http://i.imgur.com/ZKhACZM.png

Also tried a different browser with a clean slate, no issues.

Maybe the link was edited?

If it were truly the case that you couldn't see it without signing in, that would not be a dark pattern - there's nothing misleading about that, it's just a policy you don't like. using the buzzword of the moment to criticize something you don't like, without considering whether it really applies, is how phrases lose all their meaning.

(of course, that's not true here and you don't have to sign in)

The distinction is subtle, because there is a common dark pattern where websites try to trick you into creating an account to access public content, even though you don't actually need to.

I'm thinking of Dropbox, which does this when you try to access a link that someone shared with you by email https://a3nm.net/share/2016-12-07_548165.png

This is a dark pattern because it's trying to make me believe that I should create an account when obviously I just want to get the file that my friend sent me. The link to download the file directly is at the bottom of the message.

Here's another one I found recently: The email spam they send you is categorised into a bunch of categories. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to each individually. The 'unsubscribe' link at the bottom of the emails sent will unsubscribe you from the first category only, no matter which category the email is from! And the web site doesn't tell you this, it just pops up an almost content-free 'unsubscribed' message. So you keep getting spam until you manually load the site and dig through the settings pages and uncheck the other categories.

I was going to say, you could read this site, or you could just go to LinkedIn. It's an case study in obnoxious dark patterns.

But you learn more this way, linked in is just frustrating!

A company that tries to be clear on everything is Google, but I still find they morph so rapidly that their documentation is often 2 or 3 generations behind.

Previous discussion on LinkedIn dark patterns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11063178

And the linked article to it: https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...

I've seen those as an HN lurker. I just like the idea of a central repository like this one.

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