Clearly reciprocity is a good part of social interaction. So it’s not necessarily a dark pattern. But it can be if games use it as a mechanism to get you hooked. Maybe by punishment or guilt, or by encouraging extra in app purchases so you can donate to your guild mates. This is addressed a bit in my FAQ.
https://www.darkpattern.games/faq.php
It’s always shocking to see one of my sites pop up on HN.
For context around my motivation to make the site. I was really addicted to a certain mobile game to the point that it was affecting my work and family life.
I stumbled upon an article about how game companies hire psychologists to make the games more addicting. This led me down a rabbit hole of researching dark patterns. It was very eye opening and by learning about the dark patterns they lost their power over me. I was able to quit playing the addictive game. I still play games, I just pick better games and the dark patterns don’t work on me anymore.
The research and education that I gave myself was so helpful in restoring balance to my life that I wanted to share it with others. Hence the website. It’s about 7 years old.
The most important part of my site is the text descriptions of the dark patterns. The crowd sourced game reviews are probably spam and rubbish and I’ve been meaning to remove them. I had written code to scrape the iOS and android stores to automatically add new games but this code broke ages ago and I never fixed it. The game listings are years out of date. I had plans to include console and pc games but never got around to it. I moved on to other projects.
I have received many emails over the years from people who say that my site has helped them stop or avoid playing addictive games. This makes me happy.
The thing I don't understand is how unethical stuff like this comes to be built. Take the example where nurses with debt get lower wages because they are desperate. Some manager had to come up with this idea and then get various people to agree and then get a team of engineers to implement it. Thats a lot of people agreeing to do something so clearly evil (to me at least). Are there that many people who just don't care? Whenever I read stories similar to this I always wonder how many people went along without objecting.
I became interested in complicated watches several years ago and knew I could never afford one, so I made a website with simulated watch dials. Just for fun and education. It was also a great way for me to learn svg animations.
https://www.complication.watch/
I tried adding deep zoom to mine, https://www.zazow.com but it became way too slow. Arbitrary precision math is just orders of magnitude slower, at least in the way that I understand it. I am not a mathematician.
It would be cool if Apple made something like this for public events with a way to browse local events. I acknowledge that moderation of spam would be an issue.
If I lose access to my Apple account (via hacking, being banned or otherwise), do I also lose access to all my saved password? Thats what I want to know.
My brother laser worked great for years. Then I decided to save money and get generic toner. A week later my brother printer bricked itself. It won’t even turn on. Probably a coincidence, but still makes me angry.
I did this exercise last year called “8760 Hours” which is a series of prompts to help refine your values and goals for the year. I then reviewed my answers at the beginning of each month to make sure I hadn’t strayed off target. It was very helpful for me and I’ll do it again for 2024.
A regenerative CO2 scrubber that people could install inline with existing whole house AC systems would be a big success. I would buy it in a heartbeat.