Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites

1,841 instances of dark patterns on ecommerce sites, in the categories of sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, and forced action. You can browse this overview, read the paper, or look at the raw data.

We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.

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Responses

Aaron Parecki

This doesn’t seem like a problem unique to the web. Plenty of these tricks are done at physical stores too!