A mechanism or tactic · 2015 · Platforms
The free trial
A relationship with a competitor offered free while a subscription relationship is locked in behind the same login.
Platforms discovered that a user will defend the platform they have a relationship with against the platform offering them a better deal. The parasocial bond is now a competitive moat, and it is documented as such in the filings.
Manipulation. One-sided attachment engineered for somebody else's benefit. Paid intimacy, parasocial persuasion, sasaeng, grief extraction, the streak. The lane that pays the bills and the lane that causes the most harm, frequently at the same time.
Where it sits
2010 2010+ · 2015 2026
Provenance · 2 source record(s)
- retrievableThe free trial as a documented pattern rather than an anecdote: Hidden Subscription is defined as charging a recurring fee under the pretense of a one-time fee or a free trial, and users often learn of it only days or months laterMathur, A., Acar, G., Friedman, M. J., Lucherini, E., Mayer, J., Chetty, M., & Narayanan, A. (2019). Dark Patterns at Scale. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), Article 81. ↗
- unverifiedAnd it is paired with a barrier on the way out: the same paper finds Hidden Subscription frequently co-occurs with Hard to Cancel, making the recurring charge harder to end than it was to beginMathur et al. (2019). ↗
Connected · 2 out, 1 in
The dark pattern in the loyalty carddepicts · 2010 · A term or conceptThe recurring deliverycites · 2010 · A mechanism or tacticThe dark pattern in the loyalty carddepicts · 2010 · A term or concept
It sits in