Even the cheesiest, most cloyingly overearnest romance movies lack the pathos of the pop-up notifications you get when you cancel an online subscription. “If you leave us now, you’ll take away the biggest part of us” is a message I’d expect to receive from a spouse upon being served divorce papers. It’s actually Spotify’s farewell message, spelled out by the song titles included in the playlist it shows after users cancel their subscription. The billion-dollar company isn’t ready to say goodbye.
“Where did we go wrong?” Hulu asks in the mandatory seven-step questionnaire that appears when you try to end your subscription. Earlier versions of its cancellation process embedded an autoplaying Simpsons supercut, edited so that Lisa, the show’s youngest speaking character, says, “Please don’t do this … Are you really, really sure?” Until last year, any users who tried to deactivate Facebook were met with photos of their friends above the caption “[Friend’s name] will miss you.”
Some sites employ other forms of guilt as a means of maintaining loyalty. When given the choice of subscribing to the Women’s Health newsletter, a user who’s not interested does not click “No,” but rather “No thanks, I don’t need to work out.” At the popular food blog Delish, to decline the newsletter offer, users must click “No thanks, I’ll have microwave dinner tonight.”
This is just one of many tactics retailers use to manipulate consumers. Dark patterns are the often unseen web-design choices that trick users into handing over more time, money, or attention than they realize. A team of Princeton researchers is cataloging these deceptive techniques, using data pulled from 11,000 shopping sites, to identify 15 ways sites subtly game our cognition to control us.