First, yes they do work in the short-term. You run an A/B test with some adversarial flow that blocks mobile web traffic users from doing certain things. Most of them get pissed, but enough of them download the mobile app (which allows you to build up their engagement via phone presence and notifications) that the A/B test is positive. Rinse and repeat. A few dozen experiments later, and now these patterns are pervasive across your product.
Apart from whether they work (in the short-term), there are three other questions readers of this thread should think about because I'd hate for people to walk away thinking "these patterns are normalized and they work so, sigh, i should just do them too".
One is whether they work in the long-term. Yes, you can juice your metrics in the short-term, and sometimes that translates to long-term growth, but it's harder to measure secondary effects. Can you accurately measure product brand damage and quantify the long-term impact?
Second, and as an EM you should appreciate this, can you measure secondary brand damage like _recruiting brand_ damage? Dark patterns (and threads like this with hundreds of passionate engineers talking about how much they hate those dark patterns) _will_ damage your ability to hire the type of engineers you want to help you build your product.
Finally, there's some subjective ethical question in here. Even if these patterns work in the short and long term, do you _want_ to spend your life, your intellectual energy, your time turning the internet into this? Do you want to go out and hire smart, passionate people and get _them_ to spend their time and intellectual energy turning the internet into this?
(side note: I have no affiliation with the author of this post, but I wrote the original Disrespectful Design post he links to in his first paragraph)
We also worked with growth consultants (read: Bay Area B2C product leads) in scoping out some of these ideas. We accrued what I call "product debt" where we launch the MVP but never followed up to polish the feature[0] as they don't improve KPIs.
I assume this is the same with Growth teams everywhere but am happy to be corrected.
Regarding long term impact, we measured this through various dimensions in marketing, recruiting, and user research. The outcomes are largely positive.
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0: One feature I argued for was an opt out of the mobile app interstitial. It makes sense to show it once or twice, but users aren't going to download the app just because they saw it 50x.
That said, they can work. Twitter famously did something like that for their time-based vs algorithmic feed and I think YouTube does it pretty regularly.
The biggest issue, though, is that by the time you get results from any long-term experiments, most of the decision-makers (PMs, EMs, etc) have probably moved on away having taken credit for the short-term wins they delivered.
But yes, a revolving door of product leaders and decisions is going to bias towards short term optimization.
The audacity to claim “it works”, in italics no less.
The real shame of the current tech companies is they have no principles, no long term vision. They all feel like they follow the same curve, a bunch of managers hitting KPIs during their 2-5 year stint before trading up, ending in some PE firm diving in at the end for the final squeeze.
They’re lemons being juiced dry, when they should be a garden of lemon trees.
“But we got 20% more juice than last year!!”
Yea, you did.
You almost make it sound like this is something the users like and want.
As a long time Reddit user I can say that if they force the new site on to me along with their mobile app, I'm gone. It's not worth it.
Following the links from your blog, it looks like you worked at Quora. Outside of news websites, Quora and Reddit are probably the two worst offenders of pushing dark patterns onto the Internet. I still don't understand why Google hasn't deranked Quora for cloaking its pages, a dark pattern that would get any other website banned from the SERPs.
I like your point about recruiting. I can't imagine many engineers would choose a job offer from Quora or Reddit over one from any other company. You're basically selecting for candidates who can only attract one offer.
That said, they are far from the worst offenders. Facebook has done some really shady things around inviting your contacts, recommending people you may know, sharing/exposing your data to other apps, etc. LinkedIn has done some lawsuit-worthy shady things in that area too (e.g. [1]). News sites (and others) are paid to put tracking pixels on their sites so data can be harvested via data brokers and sold back into the ad/tracking ecosystem.
All around, Quora had some of the smartest, most passionate engineers / PMs / managers I've ever worked with (some of which have gone on to start very successful companies themselves). I'd be lying if I said I didn't think some product decisions affected recruiting at all, but it's a far cry from "candidates who only attract one offer".
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3051906/after-lawsuit-settlement...
Considering these dark patterns translate to growth (and thus more money), I don't know why they wouldn't. Lots of people are still working for the tobacco industry.
You can literally see communities go to shit because of this. Actual content is pushed away as low effort content, easy-to-view-in-a-timeline content, claims the frontpage, because of what you said. It infuriates me to no end when communities I've frequented for years literally get supplanted by faceless non-contributing vagrants who never contribute, comment, or post. They just see funny picture, blow air out their nose, and upvote, not knowing that they're incentivizing behaviour that's killing the community that built the space in the first place.
I just noticed a few users below mentioning that i.reddit.com exists, which seems to be a similar UI to old.reddit, but for mobile. From the couple minutes I've spent browsing it seems to be a massive upgrade from the current mobile site.
(I know this is starting to sound like an advertisement which was not my intention, I just really enjoy using that app).
Actually, unhealthily for what Reddit used to be (long form content and discussion), healthily for what it’s becoming (social media a la infinite scroll, chat, and notifications galore).
The point I’m trying to make is I don’t think this sort of effect is preventable - any community which encounters growth will see an influx of shitty content, unless you keep the community exclusive purposefully. Reddit just decided to roll with the punches so they could make some stacks on a nice IPO I imagine in the future.
This is so annoying. The bell has a number on it and you think "Oh, somebody answered me or sent a DM" ... but no. Some post is trending on XY sub.
I think Reddit doesn't realize how much they lose in the longterm from hollow 'engagement'.
It works for metrics. It works for making more money than you know what to do with. It absolutely doesn't work for keeping your user base loyal. The moment you implement the dark patterns, the users immediately start looking for alternatives to your platform that respect them.
That said, I still use reddit. Except I use the old design and RES. And a third-party app on my phone.
Same. And should that no longer be an option I'm fairly confident I'd stop using reddit.
Did they think people use dark patterns for the fun of it...?
People don't start businesses because it's cute and fun. Reddit needs to turn a profit or demonstrate ridiculous growth, and it seems to be working.
Of course they do, that's the whole point, dark patterns trick users into increasing your metrics. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to use them. That's like saying not allowing users to unsubscribe really decreases the unsubscription rate. No shit.
Apt.
This was the exact situation digg just before the mass migration to reddit happened.
Reddit killed the old Internet forums but was a good replacement for them to an extent, and now they’ve destroyed and stopped trying to be that replacement leaving the internet with a serious lack of niche communities for discussion. I’ve tried putting together ideas for something that could fill that niche and not be susceptible to becoming overran with low quality meme content but I don’t really have the time to work on such a thing with the attention it deserves right now; and it isn’t a trivial problem to solve.
I wonder if some of the tech like Cloudflare Workers will eventually allow someone to build competing products that crush the existing platforms. IMO it’s dangerous (business wise) to get addicted to revenue that comes from treating your users very badly. I think we’ll eventually see companies like Facebook and Reddit get conquered. At least I hope so.
$5 / month gets me the same scaling capabilities as someone paying $50000 / month. I can build stuff with a low cost of operating since most stuff is never going to get massively popular, but if I get lucky and win the popularity lotto I can scale with a credit card instead of an architectural change.
AWS, Azure, etc. are similar, but they get expensive really fast. The traditional cloud platforms have a "hump" in the pricing where you're too small to get discounts, but too big to afford it.
So basically what I'm saying is that as compute / scaling improve to the point where you don't have to sell your soul to venture capitalists to pay for everything, we might see a lot more "fair value" minded entrepreneurs start to succeed.
I think it frequently happens. Reddit built a better Digg for instance. It's just that once the new companies supplant the existing ones they seem to start doing the same things.
That's the thing. I don't doubt that it does. But certainly there are _other_ things that work as well that may or may not be as profitable but are certainly more ethical.
And that's basically what bugs me.
They don't seem to be in earnest trying to do anything else that might provide much more value.
> power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not.
And that's what makes it worse. That's effectively exploiting the fact that most users are not well informed about privacy.
At the risk of sounding too hyperbolic, a similar but more nefarious example is that power users didn't fill in Cambridge Analytica's quizzes, but casual users did.
It doesn't help that the kind of person who lets a google sign-in type flow suggest a username for them is probably a lazy commenter.
Perhaps an announcement in the future when a user-facing identifier is auto-generated would be wise.
How did this metric come into use? DAU/MAU has been a popular metric because of Facebook, which popularized the metric. As a result, as they began to talk about it, other consumer apps came to often be judged by the same KPIs. I first encountered DAU/MAU as a ratio during the Facebook Platform days, when it was used to evaluate apps on their platform.
Which practices, though? A number of the practices you note (e.g. streamlined signup flow) are not user hostile at all, and others are a mixed bag. (E.g. one could argue that AMP + a properly featured mobile site and 'official' app were necessary steps with a subpar implementation). But when looking specifically at the dark patterns that power users are most likely to complain about, it's unclear that they would help DAU/MAU much, if at all. Casual users might not complain overtly all that much, but they're almost certainly discouraged by many such practices.
It was more streamlined before. You literally only had to input a username and any password, no policies, email or anything else you had to adhere to/provide.
I stopped using reddit back then after using it several hours daily for years, so not every power user ignored these changes
Anti-scam/fraud account identification can rely heavily on inputs up front. I'm honestly surprised reddit went so long without requiring other inputs, despite their rising popularity.
People get real sad when you have to tell them that if they forgot a password, their account is simply gone. Email fixes that.
Power users of sites like Reddit are already hooked. They’re already logged in, already have an app installed, and they don’t see all of the nags and pop-ups that appear to users who aren’t logged in.
It’s the unregistered users and those who aren’t logged in who have to suffer the nags and pop-ups and limitations. And as the site constantly reminds them, they can fix the problem by downloading the app and joining the ranks of trackable users.
When a website makes their money from advertising, user metrics are king. The more app installs, DAUs, and unique registered users you can show, the more money you can collect from advertisers. Advertisers would rather show their ad once to 1000 people than 100 times to 10 people. They want to use unique user counts, not just guesses based on volatile IP address, to support that.
As a result, it’s more beneficial for a company to alienate 1 user who won’t register (and therefore won’t contribute to metrics) in exchange for gaining 1 other user who will register. If I had to guess, I suspect Reddit is gaining more like 10 or more users for every 1 user who is alienated.
The unfortunate reality is that when it comes to free sites and services, power users (who generally install ad blockers or have been trained to ignore ads) can cost more than they bring in revenue. It’s the casual users who don’t have ad blockers and don’t have any aversion to ads that ultimately bring the revenue.
The problem with this strategy is that it's easy to add so many nags that many more users will bounce away from the site than will install the app, or otherwise engage at all. Given what we know about user behavior on the Internet, Reddit is almost certainly on the downward slope of this weird Laffer curve, well beyond the point of "optimally effective" nagging. Add even more, and you become just another Experts-Exchange that no one cares about all that much.
If your internet bubble is largely composed of power users who have such a deep disdain for pop-ups that they will refuse to engage with this sites, you might think that.
But looking at Reddit's growth numbers lately, it appears their gamble has clearly paid off.
The key to understanding this is this: Mass-market, advertising-supported websites don't cater to picky power users. They cater to whoever they can get to sign up. If someone refuses to use a site because they refuse to sign up or install the app, then that's a positive, not a negative, for their numbers. They only want the users who will accept the conditions of the website.
Except it's the power users are the ones that "make Reddit". They share the links and add comments
I think even the lurker/commenter ratio is something like 10x (can't remember where I saw this so I can be wrong)
But sure, the number of users go up. Until it doesn't.
We try to appeal to power users when possible. For example with the current signup flow has optional emails, though intentionally non-obvious.
This means new users sign up with an email which means we can reduce churn through digests and also reset passwords / prevent account takeovers, a large burden for Reddit's anti spam teams.
It's advantageous for Reddit to have accounts with emails, why shouldn't they incentivise users to supply them during the registration process? It's their website nonetheless.
Any and all social media is poison.
this summarizes the way i feel about every single application out there.
This screams of power play. Good on you for moving your neck before the axe came down.
The fact your engineering higher-ups didn’t push back or failed to push back is really scary.
Why does Reddit use AMP pages and a mobile site that look exactly the same? For speed/SEO benefits? Disabling AMP would still look mostly the same for normal Reddit users but would make "old." users much happier.
Almost definitely SEO.
When I was 10 I bought Pokemon cards, which looking back on, was a huge waste of money, but at least it wasn't all that much money in the end. I was a newbie to the scene, and I got taken advantage of. Lesson learned.
10 years later when phones were just coming into everyone's pockets, a whole new wave of gamers emerged. Game companies could either develop for the previous wave, by building games like Starcraft II, or they could build for the current wave, and build games like Candy Crush.
Gamers who prefer games like Starcraft want to pay once for a game that lasts years and expect perfection. Candy Crush, like the Pokemon cards before it, expected nothing and were willing to spend a bunch of money for ultimately nothing. The business should clearly move to making Candy Crushes. The ROI is insane.
But the more you bleed the users, the more they get fleeced, the more they start to learn, the more they regret. Yesterday's Pokemon cards buyers were todays Starcraft gamers, and today's Candy Crush players are tomorrows expert gamers. You want to build your platform to grow with them. Build a Candy Crush, then build it slightly more complex. In 10 years, they will be ready for Starcraft.
You can continue to seek the bottom of the skill zone, but we had that one wave where adults of all ages were getting new phones and experiencing things that they had never done before. We had that one time where kids were able to ask their parents and their parents were not skilled and did not regret so they did not say no. Using a peak oil metaphor, we've reach peak sucker. We'll never have this opportunity again.
So cutting back to Reddit - Reddit, like Digg and Slashdot and Usenet before it, released to the Starcraft level of the social commentors. They are hard to deal with, they expect everything for nothing, but the quality of their content brought along with it the slightly less expert commentators. Eventually that filtered down and the entire internet was on Reddit. The entire internet was incredible for their ROI.
Digg was ruined because they abandoned the Starcraft commentors. When they left, everyone left with them. Reddit has been smart in this regard, as the old features and the old API still exists, the power users can use power user tools and keep the same experience. But understand, that if given the opportunity to move elsewhere, even somewhere that has less features like say... Hacker News, they will do so. They have done so. If Reddit keeps chasing the bottom of the market, when someone does show up with actual innovations like what Reddit had over Digg, you need to be afraid because just like Digg the site will be dead over-night.
When you should be looking at bringing those casual users into moderate users, you keep trying the dark patterns. But each time you go back to the dark patterns they get weaker and weaker. That strong dark pattern that used to get you millions of dollars now only get you hundreds of thousands. Next week it will be tens of thousands. Your users are developing dark pattern tolerance. You don't yet have a valid competitor, this is exactly when you should be experimenting to disrupt yourself.
In your terms, a huge chunk of the population want to be suckers for life.
Plus not everyone is competitive and wants to excel at a game.
Cancer.
Growth, especially at all costs, leads to a cancerous organization that cannabilizes itself.
But hey,the shareholders!
I apologize for the Freudian slip as my edit window has passed.
Also if anyone doesnt like the new mobile redesign they should probably try using "i.reddit.com"
(which is a light mobile client)
There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned in or let go[0]; I immediately transferred to a different org.
Now let me explain the other side of the story. 4 years later, Reddit's DAU, MAU, and revenue have all grown at ridiculous rates[1]. Yes, power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not. These dark patterns have been normalized on other websites.
These practices are done because it works.
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0: They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only instance within the company ever.
1: Many friends are startup founders and I've been at a few startups myself—a byproduct of being in the Bay Area—and Reddit's growth numbers are impressive. As a former employee, I am quite happy about my equity growth.