The term "dark patterns" belongs to the field of UX design. It describes any design that involves manipulation or coercion of the design's user [1]. These patterns have been extensively studied among academics, industry specialists, and policy-makers. Dark patterns are notably problematic due to their exploitation of cognitive biases, often to meet some ulterior motive of the designer [4]. Many analyses of dark patterns lean heavily on manual coding and qualitative analysis [2][5][6]. Some research attempts to analyze dark patterns at scale across thousands of websites [3].
My project attempts to combine at-scale data scraping with small-scale manual coding. I built a web scraper to collect data en masse from Reddit, namely the community '/r/assholedesign'. Then, I performed a manual coding of the data. Finally, I passed the coded data into a basic analyzer to get bar graphs.
This project was conducted as part of WWS 356: Civil Liberties in the Digital Age. I took this course during my Spring 2020 semester at Princeton University, with Professor Ari Waldman. I wrote a term paper about dark patterns, using the results from this code.
For convenience, all the code lies in Dark_Patterns_Trawler.ipynb. It suffices to download the file and run the notebook cells. There is some code in twitter_parser.py, from a failed attempt to parse dark patterns from Twitter.
- Brignull, H. “Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design”. A List Apart. URL: https://alistapart.com/article/dark-patterns-deception-vs.-honesty-in-ui-design/.
- Gray, C. M. et al. “The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design.” CHI 2018, Apr 2018.
- Mathur, A. et al. “Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3.CSCW: Nov 2019.
- Waldman, A. E. “Cognitive Biases, Dark Patterns, and the ‘Privacy Paradox’.” Current Opinion in Psychology 31, 2020, pg. 105-109.
- Chivukula, S. S. et al. “‘Nothing Comes before Profit’: Asshole Design in the Wild.” CHI 2019 Extended Abstracts, May 2019.
- Fansher, M. et al. “#darkpatterns: UX Practitioner Conversations about Ethical Design“. CHI 2018 Extended Abstracts, Apr 2018.