Hello and welcome to one of my new rants. I am legit fed up with dark patterns and guilt tripping into buying things. Like everything recently just wants you to buy something within the app, even if its the most useless thing ever. For example, I have a game on my work phone, it’s a shitty CAT phone but it has some games surprisingly. One of the games I kind of gotten addicted to (I mean, how couldn’t You when You are bored) and decided it might be a nice idea to download it on my smartphone. That game immediately opened with a video ad. I found out you can get some extra stuff that acts as coins while playing in that game too. But for some reason, every time you finish it opens up an ad or urges you to buy more of the items you need to collect with real money. Why? At that point just remove the gameplay entirely and make it a spending “game”. I don’t remember exactly what menu that was, but Windows also wanted me to enable something, and it had a big “LETS GO” or whatever button, but to close the window you had to press on tiny text below it. The reason I’m writing this though is that I started using Duolingo recently and that app is thirsty. It wants you to buy its subscription constantly, traps you into using gems for literally nothing, making mistakes apparently costs money (as you can fail limited number of times, but you can pay for more “lives”). It also has this addiction mechanic with daily streaks, and stuff like boosts if you log in at certain times of day. You’re constantly guilt tripped to continue doing practice, but if you miss it just makes you pay so you dont break your streak lol. Im kind of tired of ads after every practice too. I kinda thought it might be a nice supplement to genki and anki, to do something while I’m bored and usually wouldn’t do anything but I dont know if I’m going to stick with it. Usually with these kind of things, as soon as it starts bothering me to buy something I usually stop using the service/app/website. Too bad I’m too reliant on Windows and I can’t switch to linux (unless I dualboot or run Windows in a VM, in which case I’d have to still use it for several hours a day). I guess this time you win microsoft.

Oh yeah, how can I forget, MMO’s are the worst when it comes to this. I legit don’t know how I can play them anymore when this constant begging for my money (which I’m short on myself) is getting on my nerves.

I’m sorry if you stumbled across this blog and had to read this incoherent mess without any actual point behind it. I just wanted to write down my thoughts so I can finally move on and do something productive. Not that I will be able to do that with the 14 hour shifts coming my way :/. Anyways, until next time!