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Comment by garren | Hacker News Reader

> It says I can continue to read if I sign up. So that's what I did. But then... I have been tricked into creating an account! This is a dark pattern, and I don't like it.

The screenshot literally says, “Read the rest of this story with a free account. Already have an account? <sign in>” and prompts you to link your google or Facebook account.

The Wikipedia dark patterns linked describes them as, “A dark pattern (also known as an anti-pattern or ‘Deceptive Design’) is ‘a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.’”

I don’t want to defend Medium, but their approach hardly strikes me as deceptive or particularly tricky. Annoying? Yes. Dark pattern? No.

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You left out the content of the screenshot located between “But then…” and “I have been tricked into creating an account!” Like you said, the message said op could “read the rest of this story with a free account.” When op made an account, suddenly a paid membership was needed to read the rest of the article. You can argue whether it’s a dark practice but it’s certainly more deceptive than you make it out to be.

You are missing point - the dark pattern is that medium told the user in exchange for creating an account, they could read the rest of the store. They created an account and then were told they could not read the rest of the story. The sign up flow lied to them. It's the equivalent of an e-commerce site saying "Sign up to get 50% off any order" and then when you signed up there is no discount on your order.

I would say it's worse than a dark pattern. It's fraud. They say if you create a free account you'll be able to read the article, but then when you create the free account, you still can't read the article.

You don't need an account to read stories on Medium (?) I was never required to log in.

I mean it does say "You have 2 free member-only stories left this month." at the top but the counter never actually decrements.

(If you have cookies enabled on all websites by default maybe it would decrement, but you really shouldn't.)

>(If you have cookies enabled on all websites by default maybe it would decrement, but you really shouldn't.)

That's a very rare configuration. You should have instead said "if you clear your cookies, you can read as many articles as you want".

Is it? This is "Hacker" News ...

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