Towards Understanding the Dark Patterns That Steal Our Attention

Contemporary digital services often adopt mechanisms, e.g., recommendations and infinite scrolling, that exploit users’ psychological vulnerabilities to maximize time spent and daily visits. While these attention-capture dark patterns might contribute to technology overuse and problematic behaviors, they are relatively underexplored in the literature. In this paper, we first provide a definition of what are attention-capture dark patterns based on a review of recent works on digital wellbeing and dark patterns. Then, we describe a set 5 of attention-capture dark patterns extracted from a 1-week-long auto-ethnography during which we self-monitored our mobile and web interactions with Facebook and YouTube. Finally, we report on an initial study (N = 7) that explores whether and how a widespread mechanism, i.e., social investment, influence usage and users’ perception of the Facebook website. We discuss the implications that our work may have on the design of technologies that better align with users’ digital wellbeing.