I think it does work in the long run: People as a statistical entity will continue to fall for things, because at the very least there are a lot of people and there are always new people (people grow up and grow old)<p>As a trained designer, over the years, I found "Dark UX" to be a somewhat simplistic way to think about a complex issue. As with most things in life, most of the time it's not a thing that overtly evil people do, but a mix of confusion, frustration, incompetence, lack of empathy, economic pressure and a honest believe that, surely, this is in the interest of the user that pushes us in that direction.<p>And that is not to say, there will always be poster-boy examples of this, but it's a continuum. Any advertisement will by design not be a 0 on the dark ux gradient.