What Kind of Work Do "Asshole Designers" Create? Describing Properties of Ethical Concern on Reddit

Dark Patterns and the Legal Requirements of Consent Banners: An Interaction Criticism Perspective

“…Previous scholarship has revealed markedly different discourses regarding ethical concerns, with the academic community largely focused on arguing in relation to moral and ethics theory (e.g., [41,42,86]) and the practitioner community focused more on tangible and problematic practices (e.g., [18,22,49,50]). While there has been substantial interest in ethically-focused design practices in the HCI community for decades, most of this work has been subsumed into one of three categories: 1) the development and maintenance of a code of ethics in the ACM, including relevant use of this code in education and practice [46,72,101]; 2) the construction and validation of methods to support ethics-focused practice, most commonly within the methodology of Value-Sensitive Design (VSD; [41,42]); and 3) the use of practitioner-focused research to reveal patterns of ethical awareness and complexity [25,49,84,85,87,88,92,99].…”

“…In other complementary work addressing dark patterns, scholars have described how dark patterns are perceived from an end-user perspective [48,68], how these patterns appear in non-screen-based proxemic interactions [52] and in mobile interactions [32], how these patterns can impact online disclosure [98], and how these patterns can be used to motivate design discourses and argumentation about ethics [33]. Finally, Chivukula and Gray [26,50] have recently shown how interest in dark patterns can reveal larger patterns of coercion and abuse in digital technologies, building on the popular subreddit "r/assholedesign" to define properties of an "asshole designer. "…”

End User Accounts of Dark Patterns as Felt Manipulation

“…While in the original source, these authors also seek to distinguish manipulation from persuasion, nudging, and coercion, due to the lack of literature relating user experiences of felt manipulation to existing known dark patterns, we use the term manipulation in a broader sense, while also recognizing the need for more work in this area to connect end user experiences with designer intent. We also rely upon recent work that describes the role of crafty psychological nudging through the incorporation of "dark patterns" [12,32,41] and instances where coercion is blatantly described in ways that often force users to make decisions against their own best interest-what Gray and colleagues describe as "asshole designs, " [31] building on a subreddit by the same name.…”

“…Mathur et al [41] also expanded Brignull and Gray's vocabulary, identifying instances of cognitive biases in e-commerce settings, with additional patterns that relate to social engineering such as urgency, scarcity, and social proof. Gray et al [31] have recently described connections between dark patterns and "asshole design, " identifying the former strategy as a sneaky and surreptitious form of persuasion, while the latter properties reveals themselves in overtly coercive ways. These patterns leave an emotional trace as users experience them "in the wild, " with negative sentiments attached to experiences with interfaces that are later identified as deceptive.…”

“Why lose control?” A Study of Freelancers’ Experiences with Gig Economy Platforms

“…Due to their dynamic environment in which members share experiences and receive social support [63], researchers in HCI have studied online communities to advance the understanding of sensitive topics, such as adolescents online sexual experiences [55], mental health disclosure [6], and women's health concerns [41]. Other research has shown that online subforums enable an advantageous space for engaging with communities in particular areas of interest, such as ethical design [26] and online currencies [36]. These examples illustrate the relevance and opportunities for using online data to understand the impacts sociotechnical systems have on particular communities.…”