Someone — the site doesn't disclose who — has been quietly collecting screenshots of dark patterns for the better part of four years. The collection is now extensive enough to constitute a genuine taxonomy of how digital products manipulate their users. The framing is museum-like: each specimen is labeled, categorized, and contextualized without editorializing. The tone is almost forensic.
The specimens are organized into twelve categories. Confirmshaming — the "No thanks, I don't want to save money" cancel button — gets its own section, which is long enough to be genuinely depressing. There's a subsection specifically for roach motel patterns: easy to sign up, nearly impossible to cancel. The examples are recent enough to recognize and old enough to have historical interest.
What makes it interesting beyond the obvious
The curatorial voice is what separates this from the dozens of similar collections you've probably seen. The annotations don't just identify what a pattern is doing — they note when a pattern is particularly elegant in its manipulation, which is an uncomfortable thing to appreciate but an honest one. Some of these are genuinely clever. That's part of what makes them bad.
There's also a section called "Almost" — patterns that stopped just short of being dark, or that were clearly designed by someone with intentions that weren't entirely hostile. This is the most interesting part of the collection. The line between enthusiastic UX and manipulation turns out to be difficult to locate precisely, and the "Almost" section sits on it deliberately.
Practical use
This is a genuinely useful reference for anyone who designs interfaces and wants to know what they should avoid and why. The taxonomy is clear enough to use as a checklist. More interestingly, spending time with the collection recalibrates how you experience ordinary software — you start noticing patterns you'd previously absorbed without processing. Whether that's useful or just annoying depends on your disposition.
The site itself, in a move that is either deeply ironic or entirely sincere, has no cookie banner, no newsletter signup, no social sharing buttons, and no tracking that's detectable by conventional means.