I'm pretty sure that Duolingo one is photoshopped. The mascot's name is "Duo", not "Language Bird." (The image, however, is what you get if you get too many words wrong: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bc9NiTxCUAA1Qek.png)

That was the only one up there that I thought was reasonably humorous and good natured.

https://imgur.com/iIK58E0 (From dsfba.com)

Reminds me of mobile apps that periodically ask if I like the application. If I say yes, then they inevitably ask for a review on the app store.

There's no winning with some of them. If you select 4 stars or higher "Great, please continue to the app store and review us!". If you answer with 3 or fewer, "Oh no! Please visit our contact page and tell us how we can make it better!"

You can almost smell the "growth hacker" desperation.

Every app does this, and I hate it. What grinds my gears is the negative review dark pattern funnel (i.e., ask a user if they like the app, if not, keep them in the app and get feedback. If they do like the app, forward them on to the app store).

I was in the middle of using your app, don't bother me.

Related to http://passwordshaming.tumblr.com/.

When a site insists that certain characters are not allowed in passwords, that is strong indication that they are storing them clear-text in text files.

Those characters are disallowed because they would cause delimiting issues for the shell/sed/awk/perl/php crap they are using to process those files, or db injection attacks.

A proper password hashing function takes any byte string.

It's often just a reflexive behavior on a website. Fields which have to be displayed back to the user naturally tend to have reasonable restrictions on what characters they can contain (no linebreaks is a common one, for example). The fact that passwords will never be displayed back to anybody (ideally) is no deterrent to your typical business analyst writing a hundred page spec for the account management pages, and just like every other field on the site they will place some arbitrary length restriction on the field, and pronounce that certain special characters are off limits. Programmers will then implement the restrictions because hey, it's an easy two points.

There are, actually, a couple of reasonable UX reasons for placing some restrictions on the characters someone can use in a password. If you hope that they will be able to enter the same password from another device later, you want to encourage them not to exploit all the wonderful input possibilities afforded by their plug-in emoji keyboard on their phone. Sadly I don't think this kind of reason underlies any restrictions I've ever seen in the wild.

Password has to be compatible with phone input -- legacy 0-9 phone, not mobile computing devices.

Just today, I tried to return something on staples.com. They have a field called "optional comments". I left it empty, and got an error saying "Sorry, but an error has been made. Please check the following highlighted field(s)." with the empty box highlighted in red.

Did you report the bug? (Perhaps in the "optional comments" field.)

I expect the amount of effort it would take to find someone who could do something about it is more than it's worth.

I've reported bugs in Google products before, but it's usually just not worth chasing a company down for something that doesn't really impact me, and often they'll just refuse to acknowledge the problem or refuse to fix it anyway. E.g. the issue I described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478264. Since then I usually won't bother unless it's hard to work-around or the company has a known bug-tracker.

I don't think it's safe to compare every internet site to Google. Google is notorious for not having good support, but many other companies take customer feedback very seriously.

Probably the weirdest password requirement I've seen was the one for my college's email: it had a maximum of 10 characters, and required it to contain no dictionary words or reverse dictionary words. I never figured out why they would have such strict requirements, and also force it to be so short.

My university required us to change passwords every semester, and the password couldn't contain a similar enough substring of any of your old passwords. (I think 4 characters was the threshold, it would also detect reversed substrings).

I didn't really know much about web dev or security at the time, but thinking back to it now, there is no safe way they could have done that.

If anything, I get a little chuckle when I see this stuff. I'm sure we've all been there trying to make things clearer for the user.

That said, I'm more concerned with the fact that I can't go to any web page these days without getting one of these pop-ups.

It's even worse when the pop-up comes 20 seconds later since loading all of the Javascript takes a while on mobile - and then shows up halfway down the page.

It's even worse when being scrolled down the page prevents the widget from rendering correctly.

The internet is quickly becoming a ghetto, and other parts of the internet (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit) are getting incrementally controlled and censored.

... Sigh ...

NoScript, my friend! Sadly no good solution for mobile.

What's wrong with NoScript on mobile? Just breaks too many sites?

Parent is likely talking about Chrome since it doesn't support extensions. Firefox on Android can use NoScript, uBlock or what have you without missing a beat.

Yeap! https://noscript.net/nsa/

I ran into a site (tweaktown) recently that redirects you to an ad-blocker shame page if you block ads (they try to circumvent, though) or disable javascript (meta refresh wrapped in a noscript tag).

Yeah I see a fair amount of adblock-shaming on a routine basis now. How many of these beggars turn around and speak ill of homeless people begging on the street?

I'm more concerned with the fact that I can't go to any web page these days without getting one of these pop-ups.

People use these pop-ups (Landing Pages, Optinmonster, etc) because they are extremely effective at capturing emails. Your average programmer or techie on HN is horrified when prompted to sign up via a pop-up, but many regular users will just comply. The site has now converted a random passer-by, into someone who might continue to receive new content (and marketing material) in the future. Nothing comes even close to the ROI that you get from people subscribing to your mailing list. Note that I'm not talking about whether this is right or wrong, just that it's done for a very good reason. Would I put a pop-up form on a programming blog? Obviously no. Know your audience. But on a regular site? Not doing so is literally leaving money on the table. And that's why they are ubiquitous. When you don't see one it's often either an ethical choice (the site owner decided to maximize user experience, not profit) or lack of knowledge of how effective these pop-ups are.

Exactly.

>> Obviously no. Know your audience. But on a regular site? Not doing so is literally leaving money on the table. And that's why they are ubiquitous.

This.

Most (all?) of the mentioned ones are run by companies, not individuals who are not seeking any profit or anything. In terms of ethics, I wouldn't even call it unethical or a dark pattern. Some sneaky checkbox to receive spam is bad. Sneaky checkbox for addon when purchasing is horribly bad. But pop up with email field? Nope. Calling it ethical decision is a stretch. Worst case scenario - you close the tab and move on with your life. If anyone loses then it's the business, not you.

At the end, it's a business decision whether it's worth annoying some users in order to extract more value later from a fraction of them and it's the users choice to accept or not. It's a personal choice, to each their own.

You think the UX is so crap because of it and surely something better can be done? Take it as a business opportunity!

In terms of ethics, I wouldn't even call it unethical or a dark pattern.

I disagree. Offering your user the option to get on your mailing list is fine. But when you a) shame them if they chose not to, and b) make it significantly harder to find the way to express their "No" choice, it becomes an unethical dark pattern. Arguably, blocking their access to the material you offered them until they make this choice is also dubious.

>> shame them if they chose not to

It's not unethical to potentially harm your own business. I'd say it's just bad for the business, that's all.

Offline companies occasionally run silly/trying to be too clever campaigns. But no one really calls them unethical, as long as they stay clear from potentially discriminating topics. People mock them, but they don't call them unethical.

>> make it significantly harder to find the way to express their "No" choice.

I see where you are coming from on this one. But, again, it's not preventing the user to quit using the standard way of quitting.

No thanks, I'll stick to the latest Adam Sandler films.

Okay, Esquire, that one's kinda good.

Here's another Tumblr collecting passive-aggressive opt-out messages: http://cruelestoptouts.tumblr.com/

Idea: browser extension that transforms the confirmation text to something more .. colorful.

Reminds me of the canvassers on the street whose line is always "do you have a second for the environment?", "do you believe in equal rights?", "would you like to prevent puppies from dying?", etc.

What gets me is when the canvasser goes into mock-surprise mode when you tell them no.

Dude, you and I both know that your job here is to try to sell something to me, so don't be shocked if I'm not interested.

You also see it in the naming of groups/movements (e.g. Black Lives Matter). "Do you agree with Black Lives Matter?". The almost reflective response is "yes" because saying no makes you sound like a KKK member.

This is one of the reasons I still enjoy paper magazines and yes even catalogs. I remember being on a plane trying to read some article and just giving up and reading the SkyMall magazine the whole flight. The damn SkyMall magazine foisted on all delta fliers (and takes up valuable space) is less invasive than todays ad pop crap.

While magazines certainly have some annoying things (like the paper subscription post cards) and I suppose the eco unfriendliness these negatives are starting to look continuously better than the alternative. Ironical I think I was even shamed by a publisher recently for ordering "the paper copy". I know many banks do this as well... damn you for wanting paper... we must pop-up shame you and paper makes that difficult.

I suppose PDF is a good middle ground.