alt Hacker NewsIn this case, since you can still type whatever you like, supposedly "soft coercion" doesn't seem like coercion at all?
It seems like a way to make it sound more dramatic if you dislike it.
In this case, since you can still type whatever you like, supposedly "soft coercion" doesn't seem like coercion at all?
It seems like a way to make it sound more dramatic if you dislike it.
I just don't think you understand what soft coercion is.
You have door 1 and 2 presented to you by me. You're equally likely to want to pick both options. Door 1 is open. Door 2 is locked, but you can ask me to come over and undo all the locks to open it for you.
Run the test over a large number of people, and then shockingly, it turns out that doing this made more people choose door 1, even though they didn't have a preference beforehand. According to your logic, I did not coerce anyone by designing the choice in this obtuse way because after all you can still choose between the two options. But more people ended up choosing the option I wanted them to pick, weird.
If this coercion didn't work, companies wouldn't be hard at work designing revolutionary new types of dark patterns that make you more likely to accept the cookies, back out of deleting your account or decline enabling an option in the settings they don't want you to use anymore.