Aside from the accessibility issues pointed out by another comment, this was mostly an annoyance upon our users that the higher-ups decided converted well. FWIW we did try to argue against it but profits dictate behavior in a large corporation. :-/

Either way, it doesn't exist any more and if you were ever bothered by it (I apologize), there are no over-arching effects that you have to worry about.

I doubt it leads to actual profits but the morons at the top think it will for some reason.

Most of the dark patterns lead to more profits, or sign ups, or something measurable. That's why they are everywhere, they really have a purpose.

I believe the key word is 'something measurable'. People remember their obtrusive ads more so they think mission accomplished even though they now try to avoid them as 'the guys with the obnoxious advertisements'. It might be ultimately detrimental to the company but their bosses think it is a good thing and they get rewarded for it.

Metricitisis is a major management disease of our times and neither corporate, nor government nor nonprofits are safe from missing the point completely in the quest for meeting irrelevant metrics so they can say they are a good manager.

Also, the question is, who did the measuring?

I worked once for a small company that had a social media marketing side (separate from what I did for them, but we sat in the same open space). From what I've observed, the social media marketing business mostly boiled down to our people writing reports which shown nicely growing metrics to customers who then happily paid. The metrics might or might not have been correlated with any real-world increase in profits, and really neither side understood any of that. But it looked believable, so customers paid.

I suspect a lot of that is happening in adtech these days - people with no understanding of statistics bullshitting each other with pretty charts.

From my perspective, at least you could stop going to the website if they did stuff like this, and TBH anyone's free to do whatever they want on their website. A lot of these other stories are doing things without informing customers, or using customer data illegally, and stuff like that.

It's sure not great if you want people to come back to your site, but it's not morally bankrupt.

>TBH anyone's free to do whatever they want on their website

That's where you're wrong, kiddo. There's laws now.

Insultingly diminutive language aside, you're just wrong. Assuming you're referring to the ADA, "there's [been] laws now" since the 90s. The line you quoted is clearly referencing personal websites, which are not bound by ADA.

No there aren't, none relevant to this conversation at least.

Check out the Americans with Disabilities Act.

ADA applies to companies with 15 or more employees. Nobody is under any obligation to make their blog ADA compliant.

The ADA isn't relevant with respect to auto-playing videos, but is it relevant with respect to forcing a volume increase? I think that's a hard sell.