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Comment by sethbannon | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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