Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I use "Ryanair check-in experience" to describe naggy interfaces because everyone understands exactly what it means. With my last easyJet flight, I counted the number of times I had to say "no" before I could get the ticket I wanted at the price I was given. It was something like a dozen.

The internet feels like that. Our devices feel like that. Everything feels like that. It's as if the entire world is turning into a Marrakech bazaar with aggressive kiosk owners. We normalised treating users like marks for aggressive sales tactics.

As a teenager I worked at a box store, and I had to keep pushing extended warranties on threat of creative dismissal. I saw how disingenuous pitches changed the relationship with customers from trust-based to adversarial. If this upsell is bullshit, how trustworthy is the actual service?

When I went freelance, I practiced radical honesty, and it worked great. Once people accept that you're honest and on their side, they'll sign blank cheques. Trust is incredibly valuable in an increasingly trustless society.

Amazon (at least in Germany) does this if you don’t have prime. 2 clicks are required during the order process just to deny getting prime, and then they still have advertisement for it all over, including on the final page.

They had already pushed me away from prime because of their lack of customer service, but this has made sure I’ll never get it again.

Then when you try to cancel they play word games to say you want to "lose your benefits" not cancel, etc.

Yeah, but at least canceling is only something I had to do once.

British Gas no longer prints their bank acc details on the invoices. They want you to create an online account and force you to set up a direct debit, so they can take money directly from their account. Disgraceful behaviour.

Not convinced that that, in and of itself, is a dark pattern.

Now using that to essentially get customers to overpay over the year, feels like it might be. Guess it depends on how much you save with them in the first loads using DD.

You save nothing. There's a manager who needs to show more people switching to online accounts and they want to achieve it by brute force.

You save money when you pay energy bills via monthly direct debit, the direct debit unit rate is slightly cheaper.

https://www.britishgas.co.uk/help-and-support/bills-and-paym... says nothing of the sort.

That page is for their home services (e.g. insurance). For energy it's: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/help-and-support/bills-and-paym...

> Savings: Gas and electricity unit rates are lower if you pay by Direct Debit, saving you £100 in comparison to paying when you get your bill.

This is a fairly common discount to receive from energy suppliers, as direct debit payments have reduced administrative overhead compared to payment on receipt.

Fair enough, but given how crap utilities are at securing user accounts, I do not want to have an account with them. Just send me the invoice and I'll pay it. End of story.

Bills not paid in time is definitely an issue. Having access to charge you when needed reduces the proportion of upaid bills, so you get more money in time.

My experiences with British Gas are infinitely worse than anything Ryanair has done....

Did you know that suppliers like British Gas can randomly assign you to another supplier, without you asking or even being told? And the other supplier has to requirement to ask if you want to be a new customer of theirs?

A colleague from work couldn't move house for a year because they would not accept meter reading. Another has his meter in somebody else's name and BG refuse to transfer it. Their support team in a bunch of ladies in Nigeria (kid you not, when you call them you get a message "please note that it may take a while to connect you to one of our support team" this is played after it's your turn to talk to someone). There are good reasons not to create a user account with them online or allow them free access to your bank account via Direct Debit. They are incompetent and disjointed as an organisation.

I pay them quarterly online with a credit card.

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