Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?
So many people offering explanations, and yet not a single one of them answers the OP&#x27;s question. If you&#x27;re upset that Intuit is engaging in lobbying (as you should be!), that might be an appropriate answer for a different question (eg: why doesn&#x27;t the IRS just send us their own reports for us to approve?). Again, I am not defending Intuit&#x27;s involvement in politics, but that&#x27;s not the answer to the dark patterns question - let me try to answer that specific question:<p>For years, I kept experimenting with different approaches to filing my taxes. I started out with TurboTax, and being so painfully aware of their bad reputation, I kept trying out every alternative I could think of - including their biggest competitor TaxAct and three different tax firms. After all that work, I am back to using TurboTax. Obviously, it was not an easy decision given how hard I tried to avoid that path, and no, I didn&#x27;t return to TurboTax because I got tricked by one of their dark patterns.<p>The simple answer for why the tax firms didn&#x27;t work out is that the work they required in their onboarding equaled or exceeded the amount of work it would have taken me to do the whole thing in TurboTax myself. Mind you, this is just the onboarding piece - not including the emails and calls leading up to the onboarding and following the onboarding.<p>The least sophisticated firm just said: send us everything in a zip file. That sounded appealing until they started following up with a million questions. The medium-sophisticated firm (which was the most painful of all of them) asked me to use their web app which was essentially TurboTax except that the questions were incredibly confusing so that I had to look up a ton of stuff just to make sure I was submitting the right thing. The third firm used a better web app, but it was still the same thing - the onboarding was essentially the same as just using TurboTax.<p>The obvious added value with tax firms is that they might catch something that you would have done wrong without their assistance, but these days TurboTax does offer the same service as well (and no, I never received some valuable piece of advice that justified the additional time and effort of working with a tax firm).<p>TaxAct is not bad, and would be my close second preference. In fact, they actually cover more niche cases (eg: filing certain types of corporate taxes). Even so, their UI&#x2F;UX is only almost as good as TurboTax but not quite. As unpopular as TurboTax might be in this community, I think we can take a moment and appreciate their PM+UI&#x2F;UX team, who used some pretty delightful copy and super slick design to turn an awful task into a rather pleasant experience.<p>And that&#x27;s the ultimate answer to the OP&#x27;s question as I see it... most people who are aware of the dark patterns in TurboTax know that it is not the cheapest way to file, but it&#x27;s certainly not the most expensive either - and if you&#x27;re looking for the easiest-to-use and fastest method to get the tax report checked off your list, then it&#x27;s hard to find a better solution (granted, partially because they are helping create the world we live in).