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Comment by lynx23 | Hacker News Reader

Not really surprising. The only time my world was rocked was when I figured out a middle-class high-priced spa my partner and I are regularily visiting since more then 10 years is using hidden divs to hide pr0n-akin SEO on their main page. We only "saw" it because a screen reader we were using ignored the visibiliy of elements. Felt pretty surreal, but helped me to understand that everyone is doing fowl-play these days.

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> but helped me to understand that everyone is doing fowl-play these days.

No, not everyone, and it’s important to not think that way and just give up. According to the report, they found no dark patterns in 24.30% of cases. That’s almost a fourth, which is nothing to scoff at. That fourth should be rewarded with our business while the remainder are shunned.

Sorry, but 75% bad apples is way too high for me to still be willing to filter out the good ones. My personal self-defense measure is currently to only subscribe to things which I can subscribe to through Apple. A single menu for cancelling everything you have subscribed to is really gold. I even dont care if the occasional sub costs me more via apple. The protection against dark patterns is worth the extra money. If your service can not be subscribed through Apple, I am sorry, but I am not going to do bussiness with you. And if you find that unfair, I am sorry, talk to the other bussinesses that created this situation...

I don’t understand why (or to whom) you keep saying “sorry”. I have no skin in the game and don’t care how you subscribe or to what. It is your prerogative to bundle the good actors with the bad because you don’t want to trouble yourself with the filtering, that is perfectly valid. But the fact remains that a fourth are good actors, and that is large enough to not be considered “everyone” (especially in italics, as per your original post), and that is the one point I wanted to make.

> pr0n-akin SEO

What is that?

Using porn sites to enhance your search ranking. SEO = Search engine optimization.

Didn't know this is a thing. How is that even beneficial, when porn is usually shadow banned?

"How is that even beneficial"

Linking works by linkbacks and other factors, there are specific organizations that reverse engineer googles alogorithms and there's an entire industry dedicated to hacking who gets listed on the first 1-3 pages of googles search results. AKA you can pay an SEO company to tell you what you need to link to get your webpage/company to float up the list of google results when people google for certain keywords. You have to understand there is big money in exposure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-...

Just see what google pays to be on apples iphone, thats a tonne of money, and we can be certain the bean counters have run the numbers.

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