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Design practitioners are increasingly engaged in describing ethical complexity in their everyday work, exemplified by concepts such as "dark patterns" and "dark UX." In parallel, researchers have shown how interactions and discourses in online communities allow access to the various dimensions of design complexity in practice. In this paper, we conducted a content analysis of the subreddit "/r/assholedesign," identifying how users on Reddit engage in conversation about ethical concerns. We identify what types of artifacts are shared, and the salient ethical concerns that community members link with "asshole" behaviors. Based on our analysis, we propose properties that describe "asshole designers," both distinct and in relation to dark patterns, and point towards an anthropomorphization of ethics that foregrounds the inscription of designer's values into designed outcomes. We conclude with opportunities for further engagement with ethical complexity in online and offline contexts, stimulating ethics-focused conversations among social media users and design practitioners.
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This content will become publicly available on October 18, 2026
Social Media Users Engaging with Matters of Ethical Concern "By Other Means"
As deceptive design practices proliferate on technology platforms and increasingly threaten user agency and well-being, concerned online communities are using social media platforms to discuss and challenge these unethical practices. In this paper, we conducted a case study analysis of two subreddits, r/privacy and r/assholedesign, to investigate the kinds of ethical concerns expressed within both subreddits, the strategies employed to express those concerns, the goals participants hoped to achieve through participation, and the community infrastructure these communities created to support their collective action against technology manipulation. Our findings show that posts on these subreddits employ different strategies to discuss ethical and value-related issues, revealing instances where community members engage in ethics ''by other means''-raising attention to problematic practices, identifying workarounds, and encouraging activism. The findings also showed that members of both communities transformed individual frustrations with technology manipulation into collective ethical action, involving value contestation and interaction criticism of problematic technology artifacts mediated by the socio-technical community infrastructure they designed to support these objectives. We conclude by highlighting opportunities for CSCW scholars to further encourage user engagement with technology ethics concepts by considering the role of community infrastructure and the different rhetoric of ethics that express different combinations of values and desired outcomes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1909714
- PAR ID:
- 10645710
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 32
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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