Hacker News Reader

What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe.

Is it considered dark because they want the users to subscribe to paid version?

I think labelling everything “dark pattern” just makes the term lose its meaning and it actually helps the real dark patterns go scot free

View on HN

I thought that until I got most of the way through the article. It is a long winded explanation that eventually gets to its point that the skip button can appear in various formats making it a tiny bit slower to recognise and use. Without a reasonable explanation to why it needs to change it seems like dark pattern is fair.

Dark patterns are basically brain hacking, hacking someone else's brain to benefit yourself. This looks like some kind of massive A/B test to eke out a small percentage margin on advertising.

I'd give it a few dark points for that but imo advertising itself is the dark lord of dark patterns: not only is it a brain hack, not only has it hacked all the way into social acceptability, but it is the darkness from which so many other dark patterns spawn and spring forth to bring revenue to their master.

> What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe.

Yeah, the old "We want everything for free, and will complain if you spy on us or show us ads along the way"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com