Even if it wasn’t so much “manipulative”.
In person I am fanatically polite and helpful to almost everyone. But if you piss me off I will make you feel very bad about yourself.
I’m the same way, except instead of making you feel bad about yourself, I will feel bad about myself for feeling so angry at you.
Then if I’m upset enough, I will become moderately less polite or, in even more extreme cases, drop any joviality from my voice and speak to you only in monotone.
When I was 20, I started hanging out with a girl who lived in my dorm. We made out and went down to bottom underwear, but never really went far, because she wanted to be sure I wasn’t just after sex. This was because a month break was coming up.
During the break I chatted with her on AIM every day, while I was fucking a girl I went to high school with regularly. I never told her. After the break we started fucking and then I dumped her after a couple months to find a new girl. I was a ravenous asshole.
My karma is here now, because my mental health issues are finally treated, my libido is near zero due to aging and medication.
Not the most that I did, but I needed to help out a friend in college.
A friend wanted to get out of a group for a class because he was doing a lot of the work. I helped him come up with a strategy.
He was able to pull together a group of friends in non-responsive or disintegrated groups into his. He could then sell to the professor that he was being proactive in getting this group made as it would be easier for the professor than handling the fallout of these people not having groups. He could then leave his group while focusing on pulling together this group; that other group totally did enough work that they could go off by themselves.
He was able to get the professor to approve the change a day before a major due date.
Apparently, one of his group mates was able to figure out that I had to be involved because of how slick this went off.
Maybe not the most manipulative, but it’s the first thing to come to mind…
When I was 21 years old, I was dating a delightful lush who was 19 and it was a bummer that we couldn’t go out drinking together. So, I found a marriage certificate online, put our names on it and printed it out, then copied it. We also went to a department store and spent $20 on a convincing cubic zirconia ring. We pretended to be married because my state’s antiquated laws consider wives to be property of husbands in this regard, so voilà! We could now go out drinking together! And boy did we, haha.
I work in web dev and one of my jobs is to get you to engage more.
Maybe it’s buy more products.
Maybe it’s read more content.
Maybe it’s click on the button.
Maybe it’s like and subscribe.
Sometimes I do it with good UI. Sometimes I do it with dark patterns. Sometimes I do it by not allowing you to opt out.
I also get data to increase that number based on human behavior.
The worst part – im one of millions of people and companies who are doing this. We are all wanting your attention.
