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Jakub Górnicki. Blogger, reporter, technologist. Combines new technologies and storytelling with journalism, blogging, government accountability and transparency. Founder of Outriders.
To be honest, reading this article shocked me quite a bit. For a long time I was a huge fan of Booking.com. A great service, allowing people in many countries to book a hotel the most simple way, it survived the rise of Airbnb by always maintaining its quality and not allowing strange offers onto the platform.
But the level of manipulation exposed in this article even surpasses that to be expected from some airlines. Maybe the whole travel industry has this dark approach to luring us into making decisions?
Many of the aspects highlighted by the author seem obvious once you understand how we are being tricked, but then as a user I don't want to use the web and think that everybody out there wants to trick me. Yet, it happens.
What to do about this? Read the article, and, to quote the author: "As I learned from several commenters on Hacker News, these manipulative tricks are called “dark patterns”, and they are catalogued over at darkpatterns.org."
At least I don't use Booking anymore since (when advertising our holiday flat myself there) I know about their profit margin on every booking... it's quite above industry average I would say at least for holiday flats.