Hacker Trends › “dark patterns” trend

How “dark patterns” trended on Hacker News

“Dark patterns” was mentioned 16,711 times on Hacker News between 2007 and 2026, peaking in Jan 2022 with 379 that month.

Every month from 2007 to 2026, counting how often “dark patterns” appears in Hacker News stories and comments. Each point is a live date-histogram over ~45M items, computed with Upstash Redis Search.

Top Hacker News stories about “dark patterns”

1. 1.Amazon Dark Patterns 1,056 points · 272 comments · 2018 · discuss on HN
2. 2.Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop 769 points · 529 comments · 2021 · discuss on HN
3. 3.Google Maps now requires WiFi scanning to use navigation 745 points · 438 comments · 2022 · discuss on HN
4. 4.Norwegian Consumer Council report on how tech companies use dark patterns [pdf] 731 points · 160 comments · 2018 · discuss on HN
5. 5.Dark Patterns by the Boston Globe 726 points · 317 comments · 2016 · discuss on HN
6. 6.Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK 653 points · 260 comments · 2014 · discuss on HN
7. 7.Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video] 639 points · 311 comments · 2016 · discuss on HN
8. 8.I was let go for refusing to deploy a dark pattern 615 points · 517 comments · 2021 · discuss on HN
9. 9.TurboTax Uses Dark Patterns to Trick You into Paying to File Your Taxes 608 points · 274 comments · 2019 · discuss on HN
10. 10.Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails 450 points · 193 comments · 2022 · discuss on HN
11. 11.Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites (2019) 389 points · 118 comments · 2021 · discuss on HN
12. 12.Dark Pattern Games 350 points · 138 comments · 2025 · discuss on HN

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