Four exhibits. Real dark patterns, recreated. Your time is the ticket. Walk each exit, watch your clicks and guilt trips add up, and see how long they meant to keep you.
These are hand-built recreations for education and critique — not the original interfaces, and not affiliated with the companies named. Trademarks and product names belong to their owners. A source is cited on every plaque. Nothing here connects to a real account; no data leaves your device.
Every extra screen is a chance you give up. The FTC alleges Amazon named this cancellation flow “Iliad,” after Homer’s long, arduous war.
Source: FTC press release — FTC v. Amazon.com, Inc. — W.D. Wash., filed June 2023
Sign in, forget the password, reset it, then wander a settings labyrinth. Most people quit before they reach the unsubscribe.
Source: deceptive.design — Obstruction — Composite recreation; obstruction patterns catalogued at deceptive.design
A button that insults you for leaving. Shame is friction you cannot click past without feeling it.
Source: deceptive.design — Confirmshaming — Confirmshaming, catalogued at deceptive.design
Fifteen toggles, an ambiguous Save, and the one link that actually works hidden in 8px grey.
Source: deceptive.design — Obstruction — Composite recreation; obstruction patterns catalogued at deceptive.design
Getting out is supposed to be as easy as getting in. In October 2024 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission finalised its “click-to-cancel” rule, requiring cancellation to be as simple as sign-up — the same principle behind its June 2023 complaint alleging Amazon built a deliberately maze-like Prime cancellation flow it named “Iliad.”
Email has its own version of this promise. Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo require bulk senders — anyone sending 5,000+ messages a day — to offer a working one-click unsubscribe and honour it within two days, implemented via the List-Unsubscribe standard, RFC 8058. The machine path out is now, technically, one request.
Yet the human path — the page a person actually clicks through — is still where the friction hides, and the patterns catalogued at deceptive.design keep showing up. That gap between the one-click machine path and the labyrinth humans are handed is exactly what the Exit Gap Index will measure. A 150-sender Exit Gap Index is on the way — grading that gap across famous senders. It opens soon.