“Are You Still Watching?”: Exploring Unintended User Behaviors and Dark Patterns on Video Streaming Platforms

Abstract

Dark patterns in UI promote addictive behaviors. We explore how the effects of dark patterns in video streaming applications can be exacerbated by a range of temporal and contextual factors. Previous work has shown that excessive watching is potentially detrimental to physical and mental health. We conduct a diary study with 22 viewers over 228 sessions to gain insight into users’ states of mind and to identify users’ emotions while interacting with 4 popular streaming platforms. We analyze users during both the selection phase and the completion phase, finding meaningful correlations between user mood and contextual behaviors that highlight how particular individual characteristics and viewing situations can lead to negative behaviors. We discuss the implications of our findings, highlighting important UI design considerations to enhance digital wellbeing. Furthermore, we collect artifacts of problematic UIs, and present a novel taxonomy of dark patterns found in popular video streaming platforms from a user-centric perspective.