Ask HN: How can I make my startup's website ethical? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I make my startup's website ethical?

14 pointsducul_sfant16 comments

I am building the website for my startup and I think it's very important we pay a little bit more attention to the ethical side of how we do business. We're a very small team of 3 co-founders and the other 2 have been very supportive of me pushing in this direction.

I'm already committed to a few things:

- Not to use Facebook Pixel for marketing or any other similar social media mechanism

- Not to use Google Analytics and switch to a self hosted alternative

- Avoid any design dark patterns

- Don't store any data that is not absolutely essential and for the data that we store, always ask for permission clearly and using clear language

What are other mandatory items that I should add to this list and commit to?

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You have covered most of it, perhaps just expand the scope of the 3rd party tracking to make sure your users aren't being tracked by CDNs, cloud hosting etc owned by the ad networks.

You mention dark patterns, I think its good (and honestly healthy for business) to implement better-than-average product transparency. So have pricing very obvious and easy to find, little Q&A on refunds with refund process quick and fair.

Finally -the obligatory - talk to your customers :P What do they think an ethical site is? What do the crooks in your industry do that annoys them?

Think about accessibility maybe?

Also, make stuff that don't need Javascript to work when Javascript is off. Privacy-minded people might disable Javascript.

Yes. Furthermore, ensure that if JavaScript is needed or used for something, that even if the script is disabled, documentation and/or other relevant information is available (e.g. "JavaScript is needed to use IRC" isn't helpful; instead, display the host name, port number, and channel name; another example is if something uses a API, ensure its documentation is available even if scripting is disabled).

Also ensure it works fine with Lynx; if it does, then it will probably work fine with others too, even if users change the settings. Specifically, it should work well without CSS.

Accessibility is important too; use ARIA, and use the HTML commands (e.g. <H1>, <STRONG>, <TABLE>, etc) properly, rather than misusing them.

It is also a good idea to make it fast. This is done by not including too many pictures, CSS, video, etc (you will rarely need any included in the document itself).

It would be possible to do much better, but the design of HTML gets in the way.

Avoid lying and unsubstantiated hype: don't say you can do something you can't. Some people are tempted to do that with investors, hiring, PR. It's a short-term optimization and no good will come out of it in the long run, even from a purely amoral standpoint.

In my experience, the conversations we had with our clients, advisors, investors are really good because even when they make a mistake assuming something, we correct it on the spot: "No. We are not able to do that right now because we have B issue and we're working to solve it given we do not have expertise on this. It will take some time. For now, we're doing Y instead because of X. We don't have Z capability".

The trust that grows from having these conversations is invaluable. You can't build it back when it's gone. Even if you're not in a managerial or executive position and your manager makes the mistake of wrongly claiming something, you pull them aside and correct them. They most likely thought what they said was correct, and will follow up on that and send an erratum/clarification.

I mean firstly know what "ethical" is, ethics is extremely complicated, and what is ethical is obviously debatable. Is it purely utilitarian? Or is it something more complicated? People will clearly and not reasonably argue that any non-violent commercial endeavors is ethical, others that anything that consumes resources unnecessarily isn't ethical.

If ethics were something we could relate to use in an actionable way it would be so simple it wouldn't be necessary to do so.

Thank you for your answer!

It's true that "what is ethical? " would be just as good of a question and I would absolutely be interested to find out more answers to it. In my point of view and in this case, ethical means that our website should focus on facilitating our users to achieve the goal THEY set for themselves and we don't use any mechanism that is deceiving, hidden, makes use of human vulnerabilities to our benefit (or third parties benefits) or has consequences that the user has not intended.

An example to that would be with Facebook Pixel: users don't know it's there, will be benefiting a third party without consent and will further have consequences outside our website that most of the time users don't want. Therefore, I consider using it unethical.

I think relating to specific contexts, like websites in this discussion, ethics might be something more actionable and straightforward, helping people like us create environments that are more mindful towards our users.

I think the best way to make the website more ethical is to respect user's time, clearly provide the content they are looking for and don't put psychological triggers (such as LIMITED DEAL 90% DISCOUNT, 30 SECONDS LEFT) or annoying newsletter pop-ups.

If you want to go self-hosted with the analytics, but still need enough user data to test hypothesis or improve conversion rates you can check out the self-hosted platform I'm working on: https://www.usertrack.net/

I think this falls under not applying dark patterns?

Ideally, websites should load zero third-party resources. Every third-party resource is another third-party that can track users.

This includes avoiding CDNs.

Have a fair refund policy. Refund unused months if a paid user purchased the yearly subscription.

Do not ask for the credit card during the free trial signup.

Plant a tree for every visitor. I dunno.

Make it screen-reader friendly. The modern web sucks for the visually impaired!

Avoiding Facebook Pixel / GA / probably other retargeting vendors is cutting off one of the (by far) most effective marketing channels available to companies. It's your decision, but if you don't like advertising, you're relatively unlikely to succeed at sales.

S•he may prefer more ethical advertising.

LibreJS compatibility comes to mind.

Turn it off?

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