Hacker News Reader

Comment by digging | Hacker News Reader

I'm super appreciative of what we have, but there's absolutely issues.

CAN-SPAM specifies that the link must be clearly marked and suggests using CSS to do so, but the link is still always going to be at the bottom of the email in the smallest font used. It only matters for those of us who know to look for it; many people just have to live with the spam because they don't know it's easy to unsubscribe.

Sometimes it's not even going to be underlined or distinguished at all (that may be a violation actually but I'm not going to take them to court over it).

There's other dark patterns too, like certain unsubscribe pages requiring you to type/paste your email in to actually complete the process. That is 100% intentional friction, like github making you type the name of a repo into the deletion form. It should also be illegal for unsubscribing.

View on HN

I don't really see putting important links in the footer as anti-pattern. For my entire internet life, many important links were put into the footer of a webpage. Careers, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, Citations, etc. They are expected to be there.

Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway. Companies generally know people aren't going to read more than maybe a sentence in a given email. I can get to most unsubscribe buttons without even scrolling. If I do scroll, it's like 3 scroll wheel notches.

>I don't really see putting important links in the footer as anti-pattern. For my entire internet life, many important links were put into the footer of a webpage. Careers, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, Citations, etc. They are expected to be there.

Yes, because after a century of public relations and marketing you expect fine print to be in these locations because you have been marketed to from infancy, which has made you apparently, forget that today's dark pattern creators stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, and the fact that you expect that stuff to be there is because your worldview has been successfully engineered. Important links under the fold, aka the first page are there to be overlooked. What they want from YOU is top of the page.

>Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway.

Careful with that kind of thinking, marketing works on everybody. A seed is planted, by appealing to emotional arguments. If it takes root, then your worldview starts to change, via rationalization. The smarter you are, the better and more subtle your rationalizations and better it works.

This project of social engineering was given to a guy named Edwin Bernays, who wrote several very plain and easy to read books on how he was going to do this project. First one was "The Engineering of Consent."

It really needs to be made a mandatory header or something like that.

I've noticed that many email providers (e.g. GMail, Apple Mail) will actually show an "Unsubscribe" button for some emails, but not all. I wonder if it just heuristics, or there's actually some existing mechanism that is used to communicate it.

Anything that tries to hide the unsubscribe link or makes it especially difficult to unsubscribe, not only gets unsubscribed from, but also gets marked as spam by me in Gmail. I'm guessing that not only does Gmail filter spam by content heuristics (dick pills, Nigerian princes, etc) but also considers the number of times a sender has been reported as sending spam by users. I'm putting out hope that by clicking that spam button, the sender gets closer to being marked as a spammer for everyone.

The one great thing about email is that your email provider isn't paid for delivering spam to your inbox unlike the USPS. There's zero incentive for Gmail to deliver anything but legitimate emails from responsible senders whereas the USPS will gladly deliver presorted mail because they've been paid to do so. I kind of wish I could pay USPS to not deliver junk mail.

You don't have to take them to court over it, but you can report them.

Also most clients provide an unsubscribe button at the top too.

We cant affirm illiteracy though. It might not be anyone's fault but those individuals have an obligation to themselves, their children and to society if they want to engage with society.

Bulk discounts with early termination penalties are still allowed.

This about auto renewal not contracts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com