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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

We need a better term than "dark pattern." Dark pattern sounds like a colorscheme. It really minimises what is going on.

I like your use of "malicious" there. "Malicious design" It really captures the sense of what dark pattern was supposed to mean.

But can we make it catch on?

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When I want to really convey my point in a discussion, I call it "manipulative pattern". People feel more implicated when you point them their behviour or actions have been manipulated actively.

We need an objective way to tell which things are manipulative. And to whom. Also, ads are manipulative too (for many people), but do they belong to the same category?

The "manipulative" here refers to the UI actively or passively lying to you, and slightly nudging you towards doing something you do not want.

Ads, or the way ads are presented can be manipulative too - e.g. articles which pose as informative, but in fact are written just to push a certain product. But if the ads are presented overtly, they are not manipulative in the sense that is discussed here.

Anti user design?

Pro business design?

It needs to be negative.

The same way I'd never call my opponents "pro-life supporters", I'd call them "anti-abortionists".

You need to control the narrative.

I would favor “anti-user”, “user-exploitative”, or just “deceptive”.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with something that’s “pro-business”, and in fact I see “user-centric” or “user-driven” as being good business. “Pro-business” is bad when it comes at the cost of the user/customer/employee/etc.

I prefer "deceptive pattern". They try to trick you into thinking some option doesn't exist, that some default is the only way to do things, that you'll benefit from some harmful thing, etc.

"Human exploitative pattern" or "human manipulative pattern" makes me instantly pay attention and on edge. They are proactively exploiting/manipulating our brain's cognitive processing/award system/neural addiction pathways on a subconscious level and massive scale, which needs to be identified and categorized for all to see... cause we didn't evolve any cognitive firewalls to stop bad actors from intentionally nudging us to make bad choices that they profit from while pulling our levers that they gathered from data signals to dial up the deception and trickery to a science that predicts our probable actions to a degree of accuracy that is terrifyingly accurate.

This is just like the marketing and advertising industries playing emotional music and showing humans doing things that pull on our "heart strings" to get us to buy their crap they are peddling. We need protections from tech company dark patterns and cognitive processing manipulation/trickery.

Thoughts?

Hostile pattern, à la hostile architecture. Though note that in the sense of hostile architecture, "hostile pattern" would refer to a superset of dark pattern, that can also refer to patterns that beneficially manipulates the user by making it difficult to do things they don't want to do anyway (e.g. turning Wi-Fi back on in phones some time after a user turns it off due to a poor connection)

You can propose to https://github.com/ietf/terminology There's already one for "deception pattern"

The point of the term "dark pattern" is to stop short of calling it malicious, deceptive or downright fraudulent. That's thin ice.

If this article was released with the term "malicious", the Amazon lawyers would come knocking. And the author would be in big trouble, because it's very difficult to prove malicious intent.

ok, malignant. Are the Amazon lawyers going to argue that Amazon is not actually inimical to human existence and an invention of the devil so malignancy cannot be proven?

> We need a better term than "dark pattern."

* Lying pattern

* Soft fraud

* Deception pattern

* Theft pattern

* Misdirection

* Illusion fraud

* Bait and switch

Let's call it Racket UI, and the practice UI Racketeering.

I mean, they get to say that infringing on intellectual property is piracy.

From Wikipedia[0]:

> However, according to the original and more specific definition, a racket or racketeering generally involves extortion or criminal coercion. Originally and often still specifically, a "racket" in this sense refers to an organized criminal act in which the perpetrators fraudulently offer a service that will not be put into effect, offer a service to solve a nonexistent problem, or offer a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it, but that fact may be concealed, with the specific intent to engender continual patronage for this party.

It fits what they're doing with "dark patterns" much better than torrenting a movie fits armed robbery on high seas.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering

There is a programming language called Racket, let's not associate it with bad UI practices.

The whole Lisp family is already associated with a speech impairment, so that PR ship has already sailed...

(Not to mention, the name "Racket" is already self-associating.)

I think they need to clamp down on these sorts of things. We need to advocate for the common user who are susceptible to these exploits optimized for human brain trickery.

How about "manipulation via bad UI?" Because that's what it is: manipulation.

Abuse.

Abusive UX, or for some of them, codependent UX.

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