Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

I hate those too.<p>On the other hand, I&#x27;ve been adjacent to the decision to add them before. You&#x27;re under a lot of pressure to increase conversion in your onboarding funnel, so you test out moving your email capture up a bit in your conversion flow (ie to before you deliver results) and it works! Conversion increases throughout the funnel! So you keep it.<p>Dark patterns like this persist because they measurably work. Some people (you and me) get extra pissed off, but we&#x27;re in the small minority relative to the people who sign up at an elevated rate. :(

Adobe&#x27;s web-based JPG to PNG converter is exactly like this. Upload a JPG, hit convert - it uploads the file, processes it on their end, and then refuses to give you the result until you &quot;sign up for a free adobe account that we conveniently didn&#x27;t tell you about until now!&quot;<p>Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually decide not to purchase from them. They&#x27;ll then start spamming you without your consent a day later.<p>Ransom sign-ups belong in the same tier of horrible.<p>Modern downloadable software does this too. You download a &quot;free&quot; partition manager or &quot;free&quot; PDF converter, or whatever &quot;free&quot; - you install it, get through their wizard&#x2F;main workflow to do what you want, but then it says &quot;oops, sorry, you have to pay for this!&quot;<p>Anti-consumer stuff it all is. What a shame software and websites like this are allowed to exist.

Yesterday I was using a website to generate a logo (not mentioning them they don’t deserve any publicity), and after entering the details, refining what to emphasize on, description, my email and logo requirements, they generated some and refused to show it unless I pay, not just signing up.. literal scumbags, why would I pay before even seeing the logo ffs, what if I didn’t like it? How about all the time and details I put there?!

I don&#x27;t really understand who this post is addressed to. The people that decide to do this just want more money. they won&#x27;t stop because of some rant by a random stranger on the internet. The programmers who implement this have to do what their boss tells them to, or change jobs, and this isn&#x27;t something worth changing jobs over. Everybody else already knows that it&#x27;s a thing, knows why it happens and can&#x27;t do anything about it.

I wish there were a way for users to share the websites that do this and other dark patterns so that I can avoid them. Effectively a reputation system. Search engines used to do this, but apparently not any more. We need a replacement.

Dear user, No.<p>Unfortunately these patterns work great so they will never stop. As more dark patterns are “discovered”, we’ll see the web becoming more of a dump.<p>You see it every day, successful websites and socials become successful <i>thanks to</i> these pattern, not <i>in spite of</i> them.

I also dislike websites that get you down a path before requiring an email signup or cell phone verification.<p>But I much prefer the former to the latter; pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right? Whereas I won&#x27;t give out my phone number under pretty much any circumstance (and don&#x27;t have a spam-only number).

The only problem is - it works well. Websites get you invested before sigup on purpose to increase their conversion rate. I&#x27;m afraid it&#x27;s gonna fall on deaf ears.

We desperately need a browser plugin that gardens search results to exclude websites that use dark patterns and allows a user to add a dark pattern website to the globally-shared list. Like ublock origin but for different categories of shady crap like content farms, AI-generated blogs, &quot;product comparison&quot; sites that slant results to the highest bidder, Cloudflare &quot;checking your browser for security&quot; sites, etc.<p>SEO experts and conversion seekers need to become very afraid of their sites getting on that list.<p>Of course then the problem becomes vetting the people who add sites to the list and making sure they&#x27;re not just trying to shitcan their competitors. And ensuring that the maker of the plugin doesn&#x27;t sell out and take $$$ to remove a site from the list.<p>If those problems could be solved I&#x27;d pay $5&#x2F;month for such a signal-to-noise improver for search results.

Glad this post wasn’t hosted on Substack, I really hate that nag window asking me to sign up (thanks Kill Sticky!).

Indeed a dark dishonest practice.<p>I won&#x27;t touch services that do such things.

Almost every &#x27;online tool&#x27; you can find is just a very inconvenient frontend to a command line tool you can find and use by yourself. These file converters can all be replaced by ffmpeg or magick. Every single pdf tool online is a bloated proxy to libpoppler

If it didn&#x27;t convert, it wouldn&#x27;t exist

In the example given in the article, if the website had generated 3 blog post ideas and then 7 more that were blurred and required an email sign-up, that would have been a happy medium.

Just saying, some of these sites don&#x27;t have captcha or any kind of spam prevention implemented. Something something simple shell script feed them garbage data something.

This &quot;tell me a lot of information in many small chunks before I&#x27;ll do anything for you&quot; pattern is too obvious now. I notice and leave almost immediately.

This is how I ended up getting monthly notifications that scribd has tried to charge the virtual card I used to sign up to it with and immediately there after froze.

It&#x27;s largely forgotten and ignored, but in the US it is illegal to call something &quot;free&quot; if it requires an email signup.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecfr.gov&#x2F;current&#x2F;title-16&#x2F;chapter-I&#x2F;subchapter-B&#x2F;part-251" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecfr.gov&#x2F;current&#x2F;title-16&#x2F;chapter-I&#x2F;subchapter-B...</a>

Also:<p>TV companies, please don&#x27;t show me advertisements instead of the TV show I want to watch.<p>Car dealers, please tell me about all the expensive feeds and add-ons before I agree to buy the car.<p>Phone companies, gyms, fucking everyone, please tell me about the $50, $150 &quot;sign up fee&quot; in addition to the $X a month cost.<p>etc.<p>I mean, good luck guy. You are a human on a planet run by humans with all the power imbalances that implies.

I understand the point; ideally you want to have some free content before you actually need to sign up. However, when integrating a paid solution like OpenAI for example, the tricky part is to limit the number of free requests to prevent going bankrupt by one user. I can imagine that this would be a potential reason to ask for a sign up.

As the author mentions PNG to SVG conversion, there is Potrace [1]. I think you need to convert to BMP before. It&#x27;s a pretty nice tool. I have used it a couple of times.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;potrace.sourceforge.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;potrace.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a>

Unfortunately most of the websites willing to engage in this are already aware that this is a user-hostile pattern.

I benefit a lot from free internet services. This is preying on that convention.<p>The web would be a very different place if people felt OK paying for the value brought into their lives by services that are free today. I also feel that in that world, this would not be necessary.<p>So, the state of things is the state of things... :&#x2F;

My biggest current peeve is not allowing me to see shipping costs until I’ve given basically all my information to a company before I’ve checked out.

This is why tempmail exists.

I dislike this as well. If I really want to see whatever the sign-up is blocking, I try temp-mail.org. Haven&#x27;t had any issues with temp-mail yet but I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s only a matter of time.

Not exactly the same situation but I immediately uninstalled the Arc browser after it auto played some video with music and asked me to create an account before I could even see the UI.

I hate this too. However it&#x27;s important to note that the old bugmenot.com still works!<p>And, you&#x27;re polluting the database of these cowboys by using it. Win-win

Popups are the Devil. Every web developed knew this in the 1990s. The fact that modern webdevs are bringing them back is an embarrassment to the industry.

I&#x27;ve been trying to order from non Amazon sites as a habit lately. A large percentage of them use the same platform, maybe it&#x27;s Shopify?<p>During checkout, they have a checkbox asking if you also want to receive promotional emails. It&#x27;s annoying that this is checked by default, but I can tolerate it to some degree since I still have the ability to opt out.<p>I always uncheck it. Always.<p>Almost without fail, I end up receiving marketing emails from these companies. (And not just followups from my purchase or even review requests, which would be bad enough.)<p>I never buy from those brands again.

What about going back to paying for stuff instead then?

Ah, sites that make me reach for BugMeNot.

Apps and white papers on tech topics too.

Dogs, stop barking!