Thank you for agreeing that Asch conformity experiment falls under human experiment ethics considerations and informed consent requirements! I am surprised though that you consider the reddit experiment unlike the Asch experiment (I personally see reddit as the worse one actually!). Could you explain how in your mind, Asch does carry a risk of causing harm in a way that reddit does not? Asch is just looking at a bunch of lines on a page after all! How can a bunch of lines cause harm? I also find it odd your cavalier attitude towards the word “should”.

General statements about the purpose of the research, as well as a full description of the research tasks and activities, should be provided in the consent form. (emphasis, should, not must).

If “should” isn’t prescriptive, why even have any “should” statements in our guidelines if you are just going to ignore them all? And yet again your link disagrees with you:

• The risk must be no more than minimal. “Minimal risk means that the probability and magnitude of harm or discomfort anticipated in the research are not greater in and of themselves than those ordinarily encountered in daily life or during the performance of routine physical or psychological examinations or tests.”
• The rights and welfare of the subjects will not be adversely affected.
• The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver. This does not mean that it would be inconvenient to conduct the study without the waiver. It means that deception is necessary to accomplish the goals of the research.

Ameliorating Deception

Protocols must include procedures for ameliorating possible negative effects of deception. In addition to thorough debriefing that explains the need for deception, emphasis should be placed on correcting any false feedback given to participants about their performance, competency, or other personal characteristics.

Participants whose behavior was recorded without their knowledge, such as during a fake “break” in study, should be given the opportunity to request that the recording be destroyed.

If a study was designed to provoke negative behaviors, participants should be told that most people react the way they reacted and that their behavior was a normal response.

Debriefing

Debriefing for participants who were deceived includes a description of the deception and an explanation about why it was necessary. The discussion should presented in lay language and should be sufficiently detailed that participants will understand how and why they were deceived. If the study included multiple deceptions, each should be addressed. If participants were filmed without their knowledge, they must be given the option to ask that the researchers do not use the film

Reddit never had any intention to ameliorate the deception, to debrief the participants, or to give them an opportunity to delete their experiment records after the fact. Reddit never implemented alternative practical research methods like opt-in studies. Are you seriously arguing that because the page says “should” and not “must”, reddit was perfectly ethical simply not doing any of this at all? This isn’t some RFC, this is normal people language!

Or if you are saying this wasn’t deception, then why link to the entire Duke deception page at all? The only relevant sentence here to you is:

If, in order to counter the demand effect, researchers cannot disclose their research hypotheses, the failure to disclose is not considered deception.

And it only refers to the disclosing the research hypothesis itself, not the very fact that you are taking part in some experiment! And you agree that it is not impossible to perform usage experiments without informing participants in advance (I brought up Firefox as a better example alternative), it is just more laborious. Moreover, reddit did engage in actual deception beyond simply keeping the fact of the experiment secret:

being unable to view a website without logging into an account is not anything more than minimal risk. And even then, it is important to emphasize that the failure to disclose the research hypothesis to counter the demand effect is NOT deception.

What happened went beyond that. If you read the reddit OP:

I’m logged in on my phone (iOS) but I use a browser, not the app. As of an hour ago, the mobile view is showing that I’m logged out, with no option to log in and a permanent “this looks better in the app” banner on the page.

This isn’t some simple A/B testing of things like text size or link color. This isn’t like Facebook or Instagram blocking everyone equally from seeing communities without logging in. OP was logged in. Reddit lied to them saying they were not logged in when they were. Reddit lied to them saying there is no way to log in. Reddit lied to them saying the only way to see the content was to download the app. This is the deception part. This is the part that’s similar to Asch and the people in the room with you lying that they are participants like you. You think you are in a normal situation but you are not. You’ve been singled out and no one believes you.