Gabriel Weinberg's flowchart

Startup strategy - codified.

Another dark pattern: Sambreel

Nice strategy: plant browser-resident malware ("Drop Down Deals", etc.) that modifies each page the user sees, then zap the host's ads and show your own. [Atlantic]

Dark, dark

SOPA as a ransomware virus.

I should note - again - that I have no intention of writing a ransomware virus or instituting any scam to make money.  It's just that a pattern language for business structures should be able to describe these as edge cases - not only in terms of how they work (both technically and from a business process perspective) but also how they use peoples' expectations to propagate.

Speaking of dark patterns

Here's a great one: Roulette Bot Plus.  It's simple: in return for Paypal donations from your winnings, these guys will give you a free roulette-playing bot for online casinos.  It allegedly takes advantage of the fact that their random number generators aren't actually random, which is pretty darned plausible!

But it turns out it's actually a scam by some of the online casinos.  It'll look like it works for a while, then when you put your actual money into play, it'll go all-in and unfortunately lose.  Ah, well - better luck next time!

On the one hand, I'd love to play with bots of this nature now that I don't live in the States (of course, my bank is still in the States...). But at the same time, this scam fascinates me.  I know there are lists of scam patterns (like dark patterns) but it remains a goal of mine to encode them in a machine-readable and -executable manner. (Yes, I'm working towards humanity's demise.  Ha.)

Business patterns

What I really want to end up doing with startups is treat them like programming. That means libraries, components, a language for expressing them, a substrate to run them on, and design patterns. Swombat talks about dark patterns. Think about it. Think harder about it.