Of the eight dark patterns you identify as such in your thesis, Facebook implements at least two, possibly three - I could swear I've seen reports of what you describe as "hellbroadcast", but I don't have a cite to hand. Your "impersonation" I've seen very recently reported here on HN at least, and what even is Facebook if not the ultimate example thus far of what you (correctly) term a "social pyramid scheme"?

Fair point. I didn't mean to imply Facebook as a paragon of goodness, but rather that social media as a whole does not inherently imply dark patterns. I think there are certainly things I'd like to see removed from products and I think those products would actually benefit from that in the long-run. The problem is measurement: it's much easier to employ a dark pattern, show some short-term metric that indicates "engagement" and get promoted or leave before it all drops off again. Playing the long game is much harder, career-wise.

I do find myself moved to inquire further into how you compose, on the one hand, having produced detailed documentation and an inventory of examples on how to develop user experiences which are designed specifically to the purpose of maintaining user engagement in ways largely orthogonal to the inherently engaging quality (or lack thereof) of the underlying content - and, on the other hand, your argument here that platforms like Facebook, which are so broadly known to implement such patterns that to advance the claim merits no controversy whatsoever, do not achieve any benefit, or their users suffer any detriment, from such implementations.

This is a good question.

I'll address it backwards: as to "merits no controversy", again I just meant that social media doesn't inherently imply dark patterns. I often feel like media presents the argument as such: "X does A, Y does B, all social media is bad by default." It's a sexy headline, but I don't think it really holds a lot of water with the majority of the 1B+ daily users of FB.

I do think a whollleee lot of research is needed into how people's social relationships are changing and whether their real happiness is going up or down, but I think of social media as part of the solution, not the cause. I would have grown a lot more distant from my social connections due to work/family as I grew older whether or not MySpace existed. I am not sure if at the time of writing the thesis that I actively avoided discussing users as "happy" or "unhappy" but I am glad I did. Motivation and happiness are not necessarily the same thing (Frodo is super motivated to get to Mount Doom, but he's not happy about it) but I think UX designers really do intend their users to be happier.

As to how I square the circle on writing a book with all these patterns, but then turn around and say companies don't have reference material like this... First off, I didn't contribute to it no-one read the book :) It probably sold 50 copies or so. When I wrote the thesis, gamification was beginning to cool off from it's peak bullshit, but there was still plenty of bullshit to go around. I chose the topic to sort of make the statement "if you are going to do this stuff, at least try and do it so it's actually trying to meet a users needs rather than just chucking dark patterns at them." I hoped that if the book became popular, we'd see less of the bad stuff and more thoughtful application of the good stuff so that apps would be more useful/meaningful to users.

When I was doing my research, I went barking up a great number of trees trying to find evidence of some sort of secret documentation of motivational patterns (it was helpful studying in Silicon Valley). I never found it. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but I never found it and I really don't think it does exist. I think designers go with their gut and what worked elsewhere, and they don't have secret teams of behavioral economists figuring out a UX pattern to bump engagement by 3%.

Does this help? I enjoy the conversation and am happy to clarify anything.