this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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This is what I meant by them being socially acceptable - dark UI patterns are now sometimes viewed as a norm. Make your cancel button a bold red and accept a bold green if you'd like to clearly differentiate with colors... but those grey buttons are specifically designed to be boring and less noticeable.
Grey cancel buttons didn't exist before material design and its push to have a "right" user flow.
Emphasised "continue" or "default" buttons have been around for a long time. In a software installer, nonstandard options are often less emphasised than the standard ones. For instance when choosing an installation location it makes sense for the default option, which is fine for most users, to be emphasized. If the continue and change location buttons were equally prominent the user might believe that a choice must be made here or that you are expected to choose a location. The experience of installing is more streamlined, less confusing for the less technically proficient, and requires less cognitive load when emphasis is used well.
As I said in an earlier comment, something being a dark pattern is entirely a matter of context. If used to encourage the user to shell out for gems in a mobile game, it's a dark pattern. If used to make user experience better, it's just good UX.
The key on what you're talking about is how we define emphasis - traditional button emphasis might involve underlines or bold font... but, I'd argue that's quite a bit different than de-emphasizing things - purposefully making a button less visible is only something to pursue when that choice is dangerous or requires careful consideration (and we frequently do that with speed bumps like confirm() prompts on actions that delete data).
I disagree that this is only occasionally a dark ui pattern since it is purposefully leveraging our perception to make some choices harder to see and, if you have a choice to put in front of a user, make the options obvious and clear. I also strongly dislike this particular pattern because it is used so frequently to abuse our psychology and I don't like to see it normalized.
At the core there is a difference between trying to make one option more visible and trying to hide another one.