Instagram Dark Patterns
Instagram is full of manipulation as anyone with a reasonable sense of design awareness can determine I’m sure. But there is a blatant layout change that occurs when you first download the app vs after you’ve had it for a little bit in order to be able to condition you into pressing the “heart” button to see your likes. Where they then bait and switch you to click on the shopping icon. This is a consistent process that occurs if you ever delete the app and re-download it. I did it multiple times to verify it wasn’t some weird bug. It most definitely is not.
They also consistently show you that you have likes on a post, let you observe them then re-notify you of those same likes with a red icon on the “heart” icon. I didn’t have instagram for over a year as a way to detox and make sense of how I was thinking about the world and the technology I was using in general and came back to it with a new structure and even keener eye for dark patterns and this is something new that they were not doing before.
