"Nothing Comes Before Profit": Asshole Design In the Wild

Abstract

Researchers in HCI and STS are increasingly interested in describing ethics and values relevant for design practice, including the formulation of methods to guide value application. However, little work has addressed ethical considerations as they emerge in everyday conversations about ethics in venues such as social media. In this late breaking work, we describe online conversations about a concept known as "asshole design" on Reddit, and the relationship of this concept to another practitioner-focused concept known as "dark patterns." We analyzed 1002 posts from the subreddit '/r/assholedesign' to identify the types of artifact being shared and the interaction purposes that were perceived to be manipulative or unethical as a type of "asshole design." We identified a subset of these posts relating to dark patterns, quantifying their occurrences using an existing dark patterns typology.