There are people out there who do whatever pop ups tell them to do. I was in a meeting once and we need to check something on a site the other person just clicked yes on the cookie banner without reading. I told him “You should click no on those” and he replied “I know, every keeps telling me that but I just click yes anyway”. I just blankly stared at him for a couple of seconds and returned the focus to the meeting.
This experience reminds me the “normies” use the internet very very differently than techy people and it explains a lot of the weird quirks on the web.
We are at the mercy of the lowest common denominator which happens to be a majority
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.
You see it every day, successful websites and socials become successful thanks to these pattern, not in spite of them.