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Comment by tomarr | Hacker News Reader

If you want to see pretty much all the most effective measures in action, go to a ticket reseller like Viagogo and follow something through to the basket. It is both impressive and amazing the amount of psychological steers there are on the site.

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Just tried it out, wow does that feel slimy. The waiting queue felt totally fake and the "while you were waiting these sold out thing" was obnoxious.

Of course the psychological aspects might have worked differently if I were actually there to buy tickets for an event I really wanted to go to.

The worst is the bottom banner complete bullshit of

"The website is experiencing heavy traffic - This may result in reduced performance"

For the "too lazy to navigate, add to cart", a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/o8zUP1u.png

Edit: Offtopic, but Floyd Mayweather vs Connor McGregor in a "boxing only" match, with no kicks, submissions, wrestling, etc, allowed? Who thinks that would be fun to watch? Ugh, that's going to be sad to watch. McGregor must be making a fortune to agree to that...he is going to be trounced.

I continued navigating through to the actual point of purchase. The default quantity of tickets selected was, "1" and there was a warning message which said, "About to sell out - only 2 tickets left." When I selected 5 tickets, that message changed right in front of my eyes to, "About to sell out - only 6 tickets left," and so on.

Perhaps they really are experiencing heavy traffic...I have no real way of knowing that for sure. But when you program a robot to scam me, at least put some effort in, right?

Or flight/hotel/car rental booking websites. Google flights is a notable exception.

The easiest way to make me go somewhere else is to adopt these tactics. They make me feel like I'm locked in a battle of wits with an autistic con-artist, or maybe a suspicious Fed - if weird rituals are not faithfully observed under conditions of vast information asymmetry and artificial stress, I will suffer.

There's no hope of avoiding that with airlines for me - I don't fly enough to avoid the prole line. But literally any storefront where I can avoid that shit, I do, and it breeds not just dislike - it makes me want see them to fail.

The people with the knowledge of these tricks are so few that unfortunately in most cases the additional revenue is too much to keep the minority happy. It's fascinating to look at ecommerce storefronts and search for all of the subtle tactics they're trying to use on you.

I don't see these tactics on many airline or hotel owned sites. They seem to be more common on aggregators.

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