Comment by yomlica8
3 years ago
I want to say some webpages actually do this to make you accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.
3 years ago
I want to say some webpages actually do this to make you accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.
We A/B tested it, and the 750ms accordion produces maximum revenue. Why do you hate evidence-based decision making? /s
You jest, but that's exactly how you get plausibly deniable dark patterns. It's a numbers game.
Worse, sometimes the people who do it are completely unaware they are making a dark pattern, because they see the result of A/B test and convince themselves it's superior to what they think.
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A/B testing is so gross. In other domains human experimentation of any kind, no matter how low risk, involves getting fully informed consent and ethics board approval before going ahead.
Experimental behavior manipulation, without even telling the subject they are part of a manipulation experiment? You would be chased out of the room and your reputation destroyed! Utterly unacceptable. But in webdev universe this is somehow seen as a totally normal practice.
This is exactly how users felt when Reddit ran A/B testing on their "feature" that forcibly signed out people on mobile browsers and said they needed to use the Reddit app to sign back in. I saw a crazy long thread of straight backlash about how messed up it was and how they aren't cattle to experiment on and how they didn't consent to that (which they prolly did in the T&C but no one reads that and actually understands what they're agreeing to).
Seeing as they were posting the backlash on Reddit, I'm guessing a lot of people downloaded the app to log in and Reddit said "Big Success!" when they checked the stats.
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It maximizes their revenue until I decide to stop using Google. Joke's on them for not measuring long-term effects.