I run a development agency, and on a few occasions, we've had clients ask us to build features similar to what you've outlined above. One of those clients had a pretty thorough specification document that outlined how this behavior should work.

When you open the listing, it should wait a few seconds and then show you a number between 8 and 20 of people who are actively looking at this listing. If it was night-time, it shouldn't really be that much, so let's put in a number between 2 and 8.

This was of course all fake since the platform didn't launch yet. There was also a lot of other "building fake anxiety" tactics, but this one and all other got buried way in the backlog and never actually implemented thankfully.

I'm not saying that Booking.com is doing this, but I definitely hate this pattern.

Isn't this basically false advertising?

Arguably; it's not advertising the product itself (e.g. hotels). There's no rules against misreporting user or activity statistics as far as I know.

It is an interesting topic.

I never worked in a brick and mortar store but I wonder if they purposely only place 1 or 2 items onto a shelf to create a false sense of scarcity. Meanwhile they have a whole pallet of them in the back. As a customer you would never know but if it came down to taking legal action, it would probably be pretty hard to prove without a doubt this was done on purpose.

Scarcity or feeling like you're going to miss out on something (especially a deal) is a really powerful trigger. I generally ignore most advertising but man when you see that there's only 2 left of something you want on an online site, I would be lying if I said it didn't affect me. Luckily this tactic is less potent now for a number of things because so many online stores sell the same items.

Next time you go to a restaurant notice where they seat you. Usually its in the front so the place looks crowded from the street.

See my comment further up the tree. At least some years ago when I had access to the code, it wasn't deliberately misreporting statistics.

You're lying to make it seem more desirable; is there a difference between "20% more effective" and "20 people are looking at this"?

Maybe no explicit rules, but seems to run against ethics nonetheless.

As the other reply said – it's not, since no information regarding the actual listing is false.

So technically, it's not. But I agree with you that it should be labeled as such.

Many years ago, I reviewed the code at Booking.com that implemented this (in the version thar existed at the time, there's many more variants of it today) and it had a clear enough definition and was roughly what you'd expect it to be if you tried to design/implement it faithfully but without crazy out-there amounts of work: "number of detected-as-not-a-bot page views for this hotel (page) within the last X minutes" where X was, if I recall correctly, "a few" as in single digit. It was done by consuming a near-real time steam of logs, such that the X minutes above wouldn't be massively biased by the processing delay. I'm certain this was reimplemented at least once since because that wouldn't scale any more to their volume today.

Also, this functionality has received significant amount of scrutiny from some regulators, so last I looked, there was a mouse over that gave the actual definition.

That being said, in no way am I trying to convince anyone that it's not a "dark pattern" or that you have to think it's a good idea on any way. Just looking to preempt some comment that claims Booking.com is actively lying about this. They weren't ~5-6 years ago when I read the implementation and I don't they could've started doing that systematically since then due to regulatory attention.

I believe that the messages are accurate but they’re also incredibly misleading.

I just did a search for nearby rooms for the end of September 2020. It shows me a bunch of listings with a bright red “Only 1 left!” As far as I can tell, these are Airbnb style listings where the property is really just a single apartment. The message is technically correct (there is only one left) but incredibly misleading (there’s only one to even be available at all, it’s not because of high demand).

Every listing I checked also shows me “Lowest price today!” Obviously that’s because the price has remained constant. In fact, I’m likely the first person today to check these particular dates at all. The claim is technically correct, but easily creates the impression that you’ve caught a price decrease and that it’s likely to go back up soon.

I didn’t see it in this search, but I’ve seen many times before where sites will say something like “5 rooms left for this date” and “12 people booked this today.” They mean 12 people booked this hotel in general today, but it’s easily interpreted as 12 people booked the dates you’re looking at where there’s only 5 left, so you’d better grab it now.

It’s misleading and they know it’s misleading. That is lying even if the statements are technically correct. After all, lying is about intent; making a false statement sincerely is not a lie, and making a true statement with the intent to deceive is.

I don't know, still, most people's "psychological setup" isn't wired to handle this kind of manipulation on a frequent basis, even if "designed/implemented it faithfully".

It would just make the web a little more serene place if the said websites did away with these kind of pernicious practices which only induce stress and agony.

I'm with you. Weirdly, even though I certainly have an above average understanding of these tactics, they almost certainly still have a minor effect on me anyway.

What I was trying to do was to preempt the allegations that Booking is lying to its users. None of the allegations I'd seen while I was there actually checked out on that front. I, like most others, severely disliked the urgency messaging, but as is with ethics discussions, it was never clear cut. I did not perceive that there was a widespread culture of trying to trick users into purchasing something they didn't want. For most of my tenure, I managed the infrastructure department, not product, so was a bit removed. Experimentation infrastructure fell into my scope, though. We invested significant effort into both education and countermeasures for things like p-hacking.

> It's missing the one that I hate the most: the way Booking.com and similar sites create a fake sense of urgency.

There's booking.com mentioned at 3min 30sec into the video on the main page.

It seems to be missing from the 'Types of Dark Pattern' list:

https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern

Or the everlasting "1 item remaining in stock" on amazon.

Yeah, that always makes me think: "Hmm, a high quality product would create some demand, why not keep the stock well filled?" Also it conjures up images of 1 last item lying at the bottom of a big box where it was squeezed and just lying around for the longest of it's entire batch.. No good!

So, why? In me it creates a sense of "no thanks, I'll wait".

I suspect that some edible products are actually leftovers approaching shelf life limits. At least the one time I have ordered some protein bars, they were barely before their displayed end of life (and those things last for over a year)

There are even companies that will implement this design for your own ecommerce site (https://fomo.com). Reportedly they make a lot of money, 88k a MO th at least (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-social-proo...).

At least that one can be ignored. I hate even more how flight companies increase the price for the flight you've pre-selected if you are actively comparing options for several flights with the same origin/destination for the same dates (only to recover the original price several hours later if you don't buy it right then).

“9 people looked at this property in the last [rolling window whose length maximizes booking revenue].”

My team actually implemented this feature in a large booking.com competitor and the numbers were in fact correct - we didn’t just pull them out of thin air.

Also "1 room left at this price!"

Maybe... at this exact price. Maybe the next available will be higher. Maybe not.