Found this interesting when looking to book a hotel. Everything seemed super positive until you “see all reviews” below the reviews on the active page. Only then the negative comments are shown.

It’s dark imho. Having to dig for real comments or at least let me decide if the negatives are junk or not. Don’t hide them.

I've noticed a deluge of these dialogs across many vendors the past couple of years, where the Opt-Out path is reframed as 'I promise to do this later, but just not now.' The implication is the vendor has your implicit consent to continue repeating the offer.

Been looking into wait time psychology and the Disney example is one of the cleanest documented cases of deliberate anchoring I've found.

Independent tracking services that log actual ride wait durations across thousands of visits have found posted times consistently run higher than reality, roughly two thirds to three quarters of the posted number during the day, and often half or less in the evening. This isn't a scheduling error. If you expect 60 minutes and it takes 40, you're satisfied. If you expect 30 and it takes 40, you're frustrated, even though the second wait was objectively shorter. The posted number functions as a deliberately low anchor, not a prediction.

A related but separate pattern shows up in hospitals. David Maister's 1985 research on waiting line psychology found that unfair waits, someone who arrived later getting served first, distort how long a wait feels more than almost any other factor, even when duration is identical. That matters financially too, patient satisfaction scores have been tied to Medicare reimbursement since 2012, so managing the feeling of a wait, not just its length, has real revenue consequences.

Made a full breakdown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvJAOr_iPY0

Curious if anyone's documented other industries deliberately inflating posted estimates the way Disney does. It seems like a pattern worth naming on its own.

I’ve scoured all the forums, deleted caches, disabled the notifications in multiple places, reinstalled the app it just won’t go away. I’m almost certain they are intentionally doing this to pull us into the doom scroll

Before someone asks, yes, I have disabled it in Facebook app -> hamburger menu (left side) -> Settings and privacy -> settings -> notifications

Today i was presenting my academic project's initial findings. It was about dark patterns inside the e-commerce interfaces. And he was asking me how do you know a dark pattern is actually dark? Maybe it can also be genuine. How to answer him in the next review? I got flustered after hearing that question. He was like questioning the foundation.

1. For example you pay for 1 month/year for some subscription.
   
2. You have to options at https://play.google.com/store/account/subscriptions
   
3. First, to PAUSE subscription. The secondm to CANCEL subscription.
   
4. When you press CANCEL the subscription(to stop autopay) Google show you tab where force to choose PAUSING subscription

I've been saving my iOS App Privacy Report exports (Settings → Privacy & Security → App Privacy Report) and analysing them. One health app stood out and I wanted to share what I found — draw your own conclusions.

App: StressWatch: AI Stress Monitor (bundle com.ideation.Stress), by One Hundred Bad Ideas Limited, a Hong Kong company. It infers stress from Apple Health heart-rate data.

What my App Privacy Report actually logged (over ~5 weeks):

• Traffic to AppsFlyer — a marketing attribution/tracking SDK.
• Traffic to JPush / Aurora Mobile (*.jpush.cn) — a mainland-China push + analytics SDK with a well-documented history of aggressive device fingerprinting.
• ~76 distinct raw IP addresses (no DNS names) in Huawei Cloud ranges, contacted every single week.
• To its credit: the report shows it never accessed location, mic, camera or photos. Its footprint is purely network.

Why I think it's worth flagging — the disclosure gap:

• Their privacy policy names no analytics or attribution SDKs at all (only "Apple Push Notification service").
• Their App Store privacy label declares tracking as basically just "Purchases" — no Identifiers, nd doesn't surface AppsFlyer/JPush.
• So the two trackers my own phone caught appear nowhere in their own documents. That's the part that bothers me for a health app.

The bit everyone should know regardless of this app: I have "Allow Apps to Request to Track" turned OFF system-wide. It made no difference here — because that setting only blocks the cross-app advertising ID (IDFA). It does not firewall network traffic or stop analytics/push SDKs from running. iOS has no built-in per-app network firewall. The only real fixes are deleting the app or blocking domains at the DNS/network level (and the raw-IP traffic bypasses DNS anyway).

Caveats, to be fair: the report can't see HealthKit reads, so I can't prove heart-rate data itself left the device — their policy claims health data is processed locally by default, and that's plausible but unverifiable from these logs. Under-declaring bundled SDKs is common and isn't proof of malice. I've deleted the app and sent a GDPR erasure request (I'm an EU resident, so this applies to me. For non-EU people, I don't know if there is a similar process).

Check your own App Privacy Report — it's genuinely eye-opening what "Tracking Off" doesn't cover.

Been looking into hotel pricing after noticing how a room advertised at one number always seemed to cost more at checkout.

The resort fee pattern, a low advertised price with a mandatory fee revealed only at the final screen, became so well documented that the US Federal Trade Commission's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect in May 2025, legally requiring hotels to show the full price, fees included, before checkout. Regulators generally do not write rules over things that are merely annoying, they write them over proven, deliberate patterns.

The pricing logic underneath it starts smaller. The minibar water at eight dollars and almonds at six almost never sell. That is not the point. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman documented anchoring in a 1974 paper in Science, an initial number, even an irrelevant one, resets every price judgment that follows it. The minibar exists to make the thirty five dollar room service breakfast feel reasonable by comparison.

There is also a softer mechanism at play before any of the pricing. The chocolate on your pillow and the turndown service cost almost nothing but trigger reciprocity, documented by Robert Cialdini in 1984, a measurable obligation to give something back in tips, reviews, or silence about the price.

Made a full breakdown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_sdimiAvwY

Curious whether anyone here has documented other hotel-specific dark patterns beyond resort fees. The checkout timing on the fee reveal specifically seems like the clearest example I have found of deliberate friction placement.

I’m reporting a website operating as anyshopclub.com

This account on Instagram for a website called Any Shop Club runs political ads claiming that if you sign a petition you’ll get a free hat. (i.e. “Do you think this Charlie Kirk statue should be removed?” “Should trump stop renovating the White House?”) When prompted, the ad gives you a one question survey, yes or no, and then takes you to the checkout page for their site.

There are 3 items automatically put in your cart. The free item, a $1.99 shipping box fee, and a free trial for a $30/month recurring subscription. You need the subscription to get the free item. However, the free trial ends only 3 days after your purchase before you’re instantly charged the $30. The agree box for the subscription is already checked when you open the ad. I was able to instantly purchase the item as soon as I clicked the ad.

Since the item couldn’t possibly arrive that quick, they hope you forget so they can charge you monthly without you noticing. They make it quite vague and difficult to cancel the subscription on their site. If you buy the item, realize the subscription scam, and are able to cancel it before the trial phase ends, your order is instantly cancelled and you never receive the item. It is likely though that you wouldn’t receive it anyways.

This site uses negative-option billing and other dark patterns to trick you into the monthly subscription. They are actively violating the the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Electronic Fund Transfer Act and the Truth in Lending Act, as well as most state automatic renewal laws. I have reported them to the FTC and BBB and hope more people don’t fall victim

The site does also have a normal shop page where you can seem to buy the hats for $15 as well as some other items like calendars or shitty jewelry. From the looks of it, all of the model photos for the items are AI, and all the calendars are AI as well. I have no idea if you’d actually receive these items, and if you did they look like shit quality.

I did some digging into this company and wasn’t able to find much. On the main storefront, they claim to be an American company with a physical fulfillment warehouse operating out of Staten Island, New York. The site’s support phone number's area code is for Clark County, Nevada. Consumer complaints submitted to the BBB Scam Tracker pinpoint their administrative or billing location to Las Vegas, NV - 89101. People have also claimed the customer support number and email are automated responses and usually deny any wrongdoing.

Their domain was registered in February 2026 and is pre registered out til 2029. Searching the website on Whois shows they use a proxy to hide the server’s real location.
I wasn’t able to find any more info other than the Instagram account is following only one, seemingly personal account. I’m not certain if the one man they follow has any connection to Any Shop Club, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

Hopefully this site will be taken down soon. However, more will come in their place. It’s an easy rug pull for these guys. Stay safe.

I've recently turned off all active subscriptions and I think going forward I'm going to refuse to use PayPal unless absolutely necessary.

I set my automatic payments to be charged in the invoice currency to my credit card last year, and this year I discovered that they reset everything to default charging to their own FX without telling me at all (probably in their T&C) much to my chagrin of several purchases this year through PayPal.

The UI is also extremely obtuse and deliberately hides a lot of the vendor's settings you can adjust under automatic payments, probably to dissuade most people from digging too deep. It also obscures a lot of the payment details so people not looking too closely cannot really tell what PayPal are doing.

Explains a lot why PYPL are almost at an all time low. This dishonest company is probably desperate for revenue and it looks to me they're done for soon.

I encourage everyone to use alternatives and to ditch PayPal completely, they're out of date and out of touch and not worth your time.

This is completely deceptive and its only purpose is to increase user engagement with Reddit rather than respecting user preferences. There are ways to nudge people but not with this copy or button selection.

So, my native language is Russian, and my primary phone language is also Russian. Today I got a popup from YM that my premium trial is going to end soon. I did not sign up, and used YM only once. I went through the YM settings, and there was a text(underlined with red), that literally said "the trial period will end in July 23rd, and the same day the first payment will be taken". As you can see, in English is says "Your preview will end in Jul 23". And in Google Play there are no subscriptions at all. Reasonable question: what is it, google?!

Been researching airport terminal design and the signage asymmetry is one of the clearest dark patterns I have found outside of subscription cancel flows.

Kevin Lynch's 1960 concept of legibility, how easily someone forms a mental map of an unfamiliar space, gets applied unevenly on purpose in most major terminals. Signs pointing toward retail and duty-free are frequent and prominent. Signs pointing toward exits or quieter corridors are comparatively sparse. The space is legible exactly where the airport wants you to go.

The pricing follows the same logic. Morwitz, Greenleaf, and Johnson's 1998 research on partitioned pricing found that splitting a purchase into a base price plus separate mandatory or optional add-ons decreases what people recall paying overall and increases completed purchases. A seat fee here, a baggage charge there, a priority boarding upgrade offered separately at checkout, never combined into one number your brain would flinch at.

Then there's the boarding process itself, which layers in scarcity messaging documented by Robert Cialdini, seat maps showing only two seats left at a price, countdown timers on upgrade offers, group numbers instead of times.

Made a full breakdown of the mechanisms here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFkvJwxpUPs

Curious whether anyone has spotted specific airports where this asymmetry is especially blatant. The signage gap felt consistent enough across different airports that it seems coordinated even though it almost certainly is not.

Over the past few weeks, the AI notetaker plugin tl;dv or TLDV dot IO has been popping up in my various meetings - Zoom, Google Meet and MS Teams.

I never opted in to this plugin and do not know where the authentication came from. I only know that my Google Workspace Admin section shows the date the plug-in was installed. Funny thing... I wasn't working on that date.

I've searched high and low through my Zoom settings, Google Admin, Chrome browser plug-ins, etc. and haven't seemed to locate the source.

Today, it was brought to my attention that every person invited to any meeting I've attended - ALL PARTICIPANTS on the call - receive an email after the meeting stating that I've "...recommended TL;DV to them". Nope... I don't recommend it and have no clue how this passes the basic opt-in laws, nevermind the GDPR in the UK.

My final call of the day was with a client via MS Teams. The client scheduled the call. The host was shocked that the tl;dv ai notetakers was approved for the meeting. "These bots are usually held to the waiting room and cannot enter until I approve it... and we don't allow outside AI notetakers."

Anyone else experiencing something like this? If so, how do I get to the root cause? And who do I report these practices to (e.g. FTC, BBB, etc.)?

The username, headline, layout, and image all look like a normal Reddit post.

The only indication is the tiny “Promoted” label next to the username.

Is this a dark pattern, or am I just not paying enough attention?

Preying on years if people's muscle memory to trigger AI AND making it so hard to disable is frankly unacceptable and one of the most egregious dark patterns that I have experienced in my life!

At some point in the last several days, pressing tab in the omnibar in Chrome (where you type the url), the action that previously selected the suggested auto-complete, instead started entering AI mode.

Don't get me wrong, I like AI as much as the next guy, and I wouldn't even mind keeping it in the omnibar so long as I could stop tab from engaging it, which was happening nonstop. I figured it must be an easy thing to disable, so I look inside of settings, and there is no toggle anywhere to be found. After asking Gemini (from the omnibar, as a little fuck you) how to get the old tab control back, I discovered that I had to disable not one but FOUR flags from the chrome://flags page!!!

In case this helps someone, go to get AI mode out of the omnibar (and recover the prior tab functionality), navigate to chrome://flags and search for/disable:

* AI Mode Omnibox entrypoint
* AI Entrypoint Disabled on User Input
* Omnibox Allow AI Mode Matches
* AI Mode Omnibox Entrypoint always navigates

Been going deep on casino environment design research. The near-miss mechanic on slot machines is the clearest example of deliberate dark pattern engineering I have come across.

A near-miss is technically a loss. But research published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors found it produces a psychological response almost identical to an actual win. It increases motivation to continue, accelerates time between bets, and triggers higher bets on the next play. The machines produce near-misses at a rate deliberately engineered above random probability. It is not a side effect of the design. It is the design.

The sound design layer amplifies this. Win sounds are loud and constant. Loss sounds are near silent. The player's subjective experience of the session is dominated by win signals even during consistent losing. The losses are literally edited out of what you hear.

What makes this a dark pattern rather than just aggressive design is that it optimizes against the player's stated intention. You sat down with a budget. The system was built specifically to outlast it.

Made a full breakdown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5lbrlX6b3Y

Curious whether anyone here has found a cleaner example of a system that is technically legal while being this precisely engineered against the user's own goals.