Just because it's annoying doesn't mean it's a dark pattern in the typical sense of the word. Here's darkpatterns.org's definition:
> Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something.
And here is the one used by the verge [0]:
> A dark pattern is a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills
Here there's no trickery and no chance that a user would unintentionally agree to cookies when they didn't mean to. It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until you do what they want. It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you shouldn't use their site.
What exactly is your definition of ethical? Because a little box at the bottom of a webpage that just sits there does not really cross the unethical line for me.
For me, this is only a dark pattern if the cookie banner makes the site unusable (as many sites do) until you click "Yes". Ours clearly does not.
Regardless, the initial accusation was:
> If you're not giving people a choice, why even pretend?
Which is clearly not true. There is a very real choice – we are not pretending. Your choice matters.
Because we do actually want you to click "yes", so that we can understand how you're using the site. Annoying? Absolutely. Unethical? I don't think so.
However, since a lot of people are not a fan of our banner, we've decided to add an explicit "no" option. I still disagree that our original implementation is a "dark pattern", as we very explicitly[1] will not sell your data, and tracking for the sake of improving the product seems like a square deal to me. But I understand that people are finding it annoying, so it's been changed. Sorry about that.
I trust people on HN to have the ethical relationship you envision, where someone uses your service, steps into a place you pay for, and can be generally expected to advance their own interests in a land of push and pull.
But for kids, older adults, and recent immigrants I feel this is borderline confusing (the right way to say no is to ignore?) and manipulative, and I would prefer more margin from the border.
The difficult conversation is to what degree do we expect rational agency from different kinds of folks, how do we think about formal or business relations with them, etc, but I don’t think the answer is “you shouldn’t let older moms or kids into the web”.
