It is just a fact of life that a sizeable portion of users "accept" dark patterns, and PMs consider that as a sign of success.
However I strongly doubt users are doing it by choice. IMO it's actually because of lack of choices, lack of knowledge or learned helplessness.
That might be controversial, but to me the point is that A/B tests and KPIs are the wrong incentives, not that users are stupid.
The comment I'm replying to is LITERALLY blaming "normal users" for these problems.
The mass, thus the normal user, is indeed the enabler.
But this isn't the fault of users, "normal" or otherwise; enablers don't make people abuse alcohol or whatever. Alcoholics who blame their enablers are deceiving themselves, and if designers try to blame users for their design errors, they are making the same mistake.
A lot of the crapness, AFAICS, is down to mobile. Mobile browsers and desktop/laptop browsers are different, and are used differently. And mobile browsers aren't all alike. Since most website hits are now from mobiles, designers are optimising for mobile, and then their employers stop the project before the desktop/laptop work is done. This really annoys me, because I'm too blind and fat-fingered to use a mobile as much more than a phone.
I think the crapness of the modern web[1] is going to eventually result in a rebellion. Like, the crapness seems to be snowballing. I mean, popups? What? I thought we got rid of them 15 years ago, because they were crap. How come people think they're now OK?
[1] The OP spoke of "todays's internet experience", but all he spoke of was the web. The rest of the internet seems to be working as well, or better, than it was working yesterday.
I've accepted many a dark pattern because of sunk costs and a lack of energy, time or options. I dont always have the energy to fight and punish.
Ultimately market forces are about collective power, not a collective representation of "what people want". A lot of people would like us to blur the two but they are distinct.
The people making the garbage is still the ones to blame for the garbage itself. The reason people make such garbage is because a subset of people accept it. But nobody is saying the people accepting it are doing it out of an evilness (maybe they're saying it's out of "dumbness", but I would disagree with that too).
The comment however is wrong in that it is perhaps not possible for the users to keep themselves from being victimized, without some recourse to the law.
How many people installed a browser addon that just agrees to the GDPR popup just so they don't have to click on deny?
