Imagine having a business model so fragile that your only line of defense is to obscure the cancellation process through these tactics. Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?
I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy.
And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant customer who can sign up later again, what you get is someone who hates your company.
What an incredibly stupid way to erode the brand of a publication, whose major asset to survive is precisely its brand.
Back in 2006 an AOL subscriber recorded their conversation with an AOL customer service agent while trying to cancel the service. It was really bad, way worse than this NYTimes process. The NYT wrote an article about the debacle [1] and had this to say about Netflix's great customer service and ease of cancellation, compared to AOL's awful service:
"Seeing how Netflix would be so protective of my time were I to leave makes me all the more unlikely to do so."
Interesting. I cancelled Netflix account 7 months ago and haven't used it since. A few days ago I received "Action needed: Reset your password" due to allegedly "suspicious sign-in". After changing the password and looking into the Recent activity, I couldn't see any suspicious recent login there. So I contacted the support and they said cancelled accounts are deleted after 10 months since cancellation. So now, with 3 months remaining, they apparently send a fake "suspicious sign-in" email in an attempt to convince me to re-activate the account. The email they sent was legit (no phishing) but there was near-zero probability of someone signing in because I used netflix-specific email address and randomly generated password for this account. EDIT: I also think they are breaking GDPR by keeping the account for 10 months after cancellation.
It sounds like there are two departments in Netflix working against each other. One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience (not paying for a service they don't use) and the other trying to retain revenue by any means necessary (sending fake security warnings to artificially trigger activity on an account).
I cancelled my Netflix subscriptions for a few months, then tried to renew and cannot because of a bug in their Credit Card process. I have phoned and tweeted and online chatted etc... Their only solutions is for me to buy gift cards, which I won't.
In the meantime, they keep sending me emails every week to beg me to try Netflix again.
So Netflix spends money to promote to me, and to answer my support requests, while they won't do a thing about their broken payment process.
>One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience
...and the other is the Netflix Specials department.
EDIT: Addendum so not to be too shitposty.
I think Netflix came to Denmark around 2013 or so, and the content at the time was pretty good. Now you have to wade through a swamp of third rate trash and maybe you're lucky to find something that isn't absolute garbage. My account will remain canceled.
Using services like Donotpay which generates credit card numbers that you can then freeze instantly might be the best solution for this. You can easily get an account when good content is recommended by friends etc then just switch off the card until you need to use the service. Cancelling is a lot of work.
I wish you saw more absurd situations like this in cyberpunk stories.
This mixture of trying to help the consumer to boost your image and sabotaging your own consumer-friendly process to drive up revenue is what late-stage capitalism is all about.
It's wild that Douglas Adams' and Infocom's Bureaucracy, an interactive fiction published in 1987, had precisely this sort of thing as more or less its whole subject matter. It's not quite exact to what we see today, of course; for one thing, it traffics in paper forms and mail-in cards, rather than web forms and obstructionist live chats. But its juxtaposition of saccharine platitudes and hostile apathy feels no less evergreen for the intervening decades.
You're right that the cyberpunk genre lacks a sufficient dose of this kind of absurdity. I think that derives in large part from its original popularizers - I'm thinking here of Gibson and Stephenson, in particular - being in such deadly earnest about everything. Gibson especially, being a literary author trafficking in genre, I think could fairly be blamed for this; Stephenson at least attempted a sense of humor in his most significant work, and sometimes even succeeded, but in his case I think it's more a flaw of worldbuilding in that the mechanisms of transition from the America of his present, to the micro-balkanized future he depicted, were insufficiently fleshed out and thus failed to capture the mounting absurdity of daily life that any such transition I think necessarily entails.
Perhaps that's a touch presentist of me, in the case of Snow Crash at least; after all, it was written in far less absurd days than these. Nonetheless, I think most who've followed have felt to some degree bound to emulate - not all, though; for example, the brilliant cyberpunk film The Fifth Element does spend deliberate effort to successfully, if briefly, depict the absurdity of life in such a dispensation.
Would that more works in the genre did the same, and in general that they would more broadly update their extrapolation of possible futures to look ahead from today, instead of from thirty or forty years ago. But that kind of work is very hard, so maybe it's not too much a surprise to see it done so rarely.
In general, my remark was less about absurdity and more about how the same set of incentives can produce both consumer-friendly and consumer-hostile behaviors, sometimes from the same company.
Cyberpunk stories tend to focus on the "consumer-hostile" part, whereas I think the superposition of the two and the permanent conflict between them is way more interesting.
(For instance, you almost never see review systems or consumer watchdogs in cyberpunk stories)
That's fair; I was tempted to say that The Fifth Element also a little bit prefigured "hopepunk", in that it is, in spite of everything, a love story with a happy ending. Brazil could maybe almost be considered the "black mirror" version of the same story, if you squint really hard at least.
In any case, I haven't watched either film in far too long. I should really remedy that soon!
Bureaucracy was very enjoyable. I wish he had released that same basic content in other forms. I often think of scenes from that game in everyday life; too few other people have ever played it.
Likewise. But it was so hard to get any work out of Adams, apparently [1], that it's no great surprise Bureaucracy only happened in the medium of IF.
Perhaps it's time for a reimagining - I could see it working really well as a collection of "websites" with "live chats" and "emails" and so forth, borrowing tools from the "alternate-reality game" style of organic viral marketing and turning them to an altogether nobler purpose. I think that'd be the right choice of medium to tell this sort of story today.
Damm, same thing happened to me. I initially thought I was going crazy that my password was hacked but something did not feel right about that suspicious sign in email.
UPDATE: I've tried to log in again today with the password I reset yesterday and it no longer worked! xD So I've tried "reset password" again now and no reset password email is coming (I have checked Junk folder and even Exim SMTP logs - I can see the email from 17th there from Amazon SES but none from today).
Apparently someone from Netflix read my comments here and deactivated the account completely. :P Thanks!
Sorry if I spoiled your clever marketing strategy but I think sending a fake "suspicious login" email and keeping cancelled accounts for 10 months is just not right.
I think the reasoning behind keeping those cancelled accounts for such a long time is to keep the account's watchlist and/or recently played items - I'm not sure about the latter, though.
Either way, I agree with you that this is not right.
I was thinking about it. The only place where the app was still installed was an Android tablet but no one has opened the app for many months (only me and my partner has access to the tablet and none of us opened the app). It could theoretically connect from the background by itself (I think android makes it possible for apps to run in the background) but when I tried to open the app the day after I got that email, it just displayed Update required screen (we don't auto-uldate apps on that tablet). And the suspicious login mentioned in the email was not recorded in the Recent Activity in the profile. Unfortunately I don't record all network activity on home network so can't 100% rule out this possibility but it seems unlikely to me that the app would try to connect from the background after couple of months by itself.
The email I received was "We’ve detected a suspicious sign-in to your Netflix account. Just to be safe we've reset your password and you’ll need to set a new one." with a button to "Set a new password".
It didn't mention any IP or geolocation as many other services say in such cases.
> I also think they are breaking GDPR by keeping the account for 10 months after cancellation.
Do you live in the US? GDPR does not apply to US companies serving US citizens. If you live in the EU, you might need to request account deletion, I think GDPR doesn't require that data is deleted, it gives Europeans the right to have their data deleted upon request. (I've read the entire code before but I don't remember the details on this point.)
I assume you're referring to the NYT there, not Netflix? (It doesn't matter that much, because the situation is similar either way.)
NYT is a US company serving a US locale by it's very name. GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans, or does EU business with EU offices*. The GDPR law is clear about this point, it is a protection for EU citizens regarding web sites and businesses that are focused on, directed and targeted toward EU citizens. It does not apply to interactions outside of the EU (aside from EU travelers visiting EU web sites), and it does not apply to web sites that originate outside the EU and are global that just happen to have visitors from the EU.
* The NYT might be advertising in the EU, I don't know. If it does, I'd be willing to bet that EU citizens are given an online mechanism to cancel, even though US citizens aren't...
GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans
It definitely does have UK specific ads, I’ve seen them, and GDPR is grandfathered into UK law.
I cancelled mine by cancelling the PayPal, there was no other way to cancel without phoning them. There is no online cancellation even for those in GDPR jurisdictions.
SkyDemon (a flight planning and navigation app) is a delight for subscribers:
* Subscriptions are for one year at a time, and have transparently indicated pricing. No "$2.71 per day, charged annually", no hidden tips, taxes or convenience fees.
* If you don't use the app for a few months, they auto-extend your subscription by an extra month as a courtesy.
* When your annual subscription is about to expire, they send a reminder a few weeks and another a few days before the expiration. If you don't renew, you get a final "Sorry to see you go, here's how to reactivate for $annual_price, if you don't renew we'll delete your stored data in a few months" email.
This is how subscriptions should work. They send an appropriate amount of notification at a good schedule to make sure you don't accidentally forget to renew, and don't pester you to death if you don't.
But please offer the option to autorenew. I don't want to have to spend time renewing all my subscriptions every year. I have my subscriptions for a good reason and see their charges every time -- if I want to cancel I'll do that.
This is similar to how Apple handles subs. You get notifications when subs are expiring or renewing, and if you cancel mid cycle you keep it for the remainder of the cycle usually, including free trials. Bonus, you can see all of your subs in one place, and cancel with a single tap.
Also if you accidentally let your Prime roll over for another month and you try to cancel a few days later without having bought anything that month, they'll offer to refund the most recent payment. Happened to me a few weeks ago, I was surprised.
But canceling prime does not make you a non-customer for amazon. People tend to forget that. You can still order, you still have your account and the refund is an incentive to "come back" -- although you never left.
Not to criticize this behavior, just to set it into the proper context. Its just smart to see the potential customer in your cancellations anyway.
I don't know about refunding here, but I love that whenever you cancel Prime, you receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of the period you had paid for.
They choose to offer refunds but also to bury the unsubscribe button behind 5+ screens with misleading text and reminders of what you'll "lose".
Rather than good customer service, Amazon try to be generous on the visible aspects that people might talk about, but quietly cheat you with antipatterns.
The fact that it’s NOT normal to act reasonably should be telling us something.
Imagine if you had to go through this exhausting process in your personal life. After half an hour since asking your spouse to help with the dishes, your spouse finally says “now that we realize using paper plates will solve your problem of dirty dishes, is there anything else I can help you with?”
We wouldn’t tolerate that in our personal life so why do we in business? After all, corporations are people...
Reminds me of the quote “Being well adjusted to a sick society is not a measure of health”
Their entire business model boils down to "exploit people's unrealistic expectations of themselves to make money". They obviously feel awkward about it, and they soften the blow a lot, which is to their credit, but at the end of the day this is where their money comes from.
But it's definitely not for everyone! If your reaction to Beeminder is "I would not do anything differently and just waste money" then you are probably right and should not use Beeminder. We've been around for about a decade which we think is evidence that there are people for whom it does work.
For anyone in the category you describe (tried Beeminder, found their expectations of themself to be unrealistic, quit Beeminder) we definitely want to talk to you.
Also calibrating self-expectations is one of things many users tell us is worth paying for.
Exactly. The normal SOP is to require a credit card at the beginning of the free trial period in hopes you will forget about it and allow them to keep charging every month.
Mine sometimes does. We also tend to refund recent payments liberally if, for example, someone who hasn't been using the app in a while asks to cancel just after they've renewed for another period.
Sure, it's a principle thing, treat our customers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. But it makes sense from a purely business point of view as well.
In return for giving up some small amount of subscription revenue by putting through a cancellation that was going to happen anyway a bit sooner, we generate positive sentiment. We often get a nice thank-you message back, with extra information about why someone was cancelling or hadn't been using the app recently.
We know for a fact that we have sometimes gained new customers from referrals by those people we helped out a little. Sometimes a former customer's situation changes again later and they come back to us, too.
And the reality is that particularly with online payment methods, there's also a small risk that someone will do a hostile chargeback without bothering to even try cancelling, particularly if they forgot about a subscription and changed their email address or something like that. Even if you've done nothing wrong and provide evidence accordingly, you have a good chance of losing a dispute anyway, and one way or another it ends up costing you more than it would have done to preemptively cancel a subscription that you knew wasn't being used for a long time.
This is from the perspective of a small business in a niche market, where there is definitely a sense of community and reputation does matter. We've met some of our customers in person, and there are many more mutual connections or friend-of-friend kinds of relationships that might be relevant one day. Maybe things work differently when you're running a huge business with a strong brand in a huge market; I've never done that, so I wouldn't know. But I honestly can't imagine why we'd want to run things any other way. There are few things more valuable to a business like ours than a good reputation in the community we cater for.
What a great attitude! I wish more businesses were like that. I had to leave a startup once, that I as a senior dev managed to drag to profitability, because I saw how they treated their customers.
It was such a sad experience- while helping out with the customer side I was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality.
I mean yeah they did get a fair amount of money from those schemes, but they did loose all of their senior devs in the process.
I was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality.
I personally don't think routine cancellation policy should even be up to the business. Deliberately preventing customers from cancelling a subscription that they are entitled to cancel, or making it unreasonably difficult or intimidating to do so, should be grounds for legal or regulatory intervention to protect consumer rights.
A basic rule along the lines that subscription services must provide a means of cancelling that would normally be no more demanding than the means of starting the same subscription seems fair to me.
Thank you, I appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately if I told you that, I might inadvertently be outing other parties as well through my comment history, and I don't think that would be fair. I hope that our policies aren't that unusual anyway. We're just a small business run by real people and trying to treat our customers as real people too.
My experience with this was having a dormant Chase account with like $100 in it, which they chipped away at, withdrawing the $4/mo fee or whatever, until the balance was at $0, whereupon it was immediately closed.
I'm not sure if this really counts for much in their favour.
I closed an account with Santander and they sent the remaining monies in it to another bank account.
Then they accepted a charge on the account from a subscription I had forgotten to move, even though the account was closed, and because my account was then in deficit decided to reactivate my account without letting me know. Then they charged me an overdraft fee and daily penalties, and then eventually sent me a bill with like £120 of charges.
I challenged it and had to speak on the phone to people for ages. Eventually they took the charges off as a "one-off gesture of good faith" which annoyed me, because it still implies that it was my mistake and not theirs.
If signed up to the scheme (most are, including Santander), your old bank is responsible for passing on any deposits directly to your new bank account and the new bank is responsible for processing any transactions made using your old details. This carries on for, I believe 12 months.
I found the Switch Guarantee service to be excellent and believe it's a significant driver of innovation and competition in UK banking (which is far ahead of many other European countries in my experience).
My payees from my old bank were even transferred over to my new one.
(Current account = checking account to any non-UK readers.)
Ah, that's good to know for the future - I closed it manually.
I wasn't told about this and didn't know about it - mind you it was a few years ago so not sure if this is a newer service.
Wells Fargo "accidentally" failed to close my account when I went in person to close it--though they did give me a check for the balance and told me it was closed--and then when I realized six months later it wasn't actually closed, they tried to make me pay them 6 months worth of monthly fees before they would close it.
When I closed my Wells Fargo account, they took out all my money, charged me some account closing fee, which over-drafted and fell back to a credit card which now had a balance on it due to the overdraft and they told me they couldn't close my account. I think I ended up paying something like 130 dollars of fees just to close my account, but at that point they'd already screwed me over so many times that I just paid it all and walked out.
Terrible, terrible company.
Every person everywhere really needs to move all their money to credit unions, our banking system is so thoroughly fucked.
In the US, they would reopen your account without telling you and start charging you fees and/or interest on the amount they overpaid. I know this because it happened to me last year when American Express mistakenly refunded a credit to me twice when closing an account (one check and one bank transfer). I never even cashed the check but apparently that didn’t make a difference to them.
Ha, I had a bank account that I opened for one specific purpose then forgot to close. It was empty. They kept withdrawing account keeping fees, sending it into overdraft. Then they added overdraft fees. When I went to close it, they tried to badger me into paying all the fees first.
I've no experience with the bank named and assume it is in the US, but for what it is worth, in the UK people hardly ever pay for bank accounts. It does appear to be viable, although I'm not sure how it works.
It's subsidised by eye watering fees on unarranged overdrafts. When the FCA and CMA looked into it several years ago, the banks claimed they couldn't reduce overdraft fees or they wouldn't be able to afford to offer free bank accounts any more. Some challenger banks wanted it to be forbidden to describe such accounts as 'free'.
Revenue from account fees must be peanuts, they make their money lending/investing/etc. deposits, in normal times interest rates are positive, so they might even pay for custom, getting more deposits, giving them more capital to make their money from.
Charging for bank accounts in North America is just like commission on retail brokers - everyone else is doing it, so why not? Eventually probably 'fintech startup challenger banks' with the novel idea of not charging will gain too much market share, and the big boys will scrap the fees too in order to compete (and barely feel it).
The big US banks each make over $1.5B in overdraft fees yearly. Fees on consumer accounts make up about 3-4% of the big banks annual income. Not as much as they make on consumer interest payments, but those are still some pretty big peanuts. I think they'd feel it if they scrapped fees.
I’ve had an empty Ally bank account open for at least a decade. Still get statements for it each month. Every time I’ve tried to close it, it’s accumulated $0.01 interest, which I have to transfer out before closing. That transfer takes a few days, so by the time I can close it, I’ve totally forgotten about it, or don’t have the will to go log in.
Leave it. If you're in CA (or some other states, but I know for CA) it'll get shut down after 5 years or so and the funds will go through escheatment to the state. Then you can go get them from the state. But you have to remember not to login and ignore all notices from them.
That’s part of of most states’ escheatment processes. Inactive bank accounts are typically closed after three years, and funds are given to the state to hold until you claim them.
Ive slightly misstated it - they closed the cheque function on the account (although the account is still called a ‘cheque account’ now, 10+ years later). The account was active but no longer had a cheque book associated with it. However I had a physical cheque book.
Notorious has at least two similar meanings; the more common one is "known unfavourably", the second meaning is a neutral "known", not positive or negative.
Most people only see the word used in the negative light so shy from it in the neutral use case to avoid being ambiguous or assumed negativity.
Using it with an adjective to clarify the meaning here is fine.
As a non-native speaker, my understanding of "notorious" so far has been what you described as the neutral form. However, to me, it does have a slight connotation of obsession or "doing it so much as to be annoying".
I am obviously not an authoritative source on how words are understood, but just wanted to add this data point.
I was kind of surprised at how simple it was to cancel my Netflix account. I was even going to fill out the standard "why are you leaving?" box because I had some strong opinions on changes they had made but they didn't even have one.
No they aren't. I had my account stolen twice which took calls to customer service to get back and finally cancelled which took hours and you can't do online when you can't even log into your account. I have like $90 of fraudulent Netflix bills.
AOL in the 90s was second only to phone companies for being able to scam retention people.
In our college house, we’d always run these rackets and get free plane tickets, CDs, tickets, etc. The phone companies were even better. At peak, we’d farm $300-600 a semester for switching long distance.
My favorite of the telco scams was from the bad old days of long distance companies called "I Don't Care"[0]. Apparently, a lot of people didn't care which carrier it was, so these asshats took it to the bank
A popular scam was “slamming”. A “bad” phone company would use pressure tactics or lie and get people to sign up for ridiculous long distance plans... $5/minute or something like that.
The “loophole” on the consumer side was that of you lived with 5 roommates, you’d transfer the phone service every couple of months and then switch the long distance plans with a legit company like AT&T, Sprint, etc.
There was a period of time in the 90s where you would get a check or credit for switching... as much as $200-300! Long distance costs were in free fall and telcos were swimming in cash, so they decided to buy market share.
AOL was great when you were on a free trial and called saying you wanted to cancel but forgot. They just kept giving me another month. I was given maybe 6 months free when it should have been 3.
They've been wildly successful over the last several years and are dominating the competition in online subscriptions so I think the advice they've been acting on recently is working just fine.
I said the phrase "I want to cancel cable but keep internet" 23 times to a Time Warner retention specialist then their supervisor, and I may have talked to her supervisor, too. They get paid to ignore you and read back canned responses like "but what about your favorite channels?", "what about watching sports?", etc. It was the first time my girlfriend had ever seen me angry.
The worst experience I had with this involved 4 customer service representatives simply hanging up (after a 30+ minute wait) after exhausting their script. I simply recorded the final call, stopping paying the bill, and sent the documentation I had to the credit reference agency when the contract went into default
At some point they sent a debt collection agency, that was much less stressful than it sounds. They called me up, "you owe $telco money", "No I don't", "oh?", "Yes, I have complete documentation of cancelling it, but their CS reps kept hanging up. Sorry, you've been had.", "Oh, this again. Sorry to have bothered you.", never heard from the debt collection agency again.
I had a funny episode with TD when I was closing the bank account when I was leaving Canada for good.
Very hard to close the account, even in person. My point was to make sure that there is no recurring payments left on the account.
Similar bullshit. You ask to close the account, and they keep asking you back with a square face.
In the end, a year after I left Canada, I get a call from collectors saying that they have $600+ debt+penalties+interest on my allegedly closed credit card from a service the bank added itself, and that they set my credit score to zero.
Then I found that TD subscribed me on some bullshit "credit alert" right in the month when I asked for account closure.
An immediate WTF was how in the world my credit card was still active. In than latter came out that TD does not let people really close their CC accounts, only "stop them," which only amounts to just hiding you CC from web UI, and that you need specifically say that you want to "really close" the account, which I did. So, next time, if will ever set my foot in the country, I will need to ask them to "really, really, really close my account"
I had, surprisingly, the opposite experience when I exasperatedly wanted to cancel my BofA account. I had had it with their awful customer service and simply wanted to never do business with them again. I went into a branch expecting a difficult process. The teller had me all sorted and done in 5 minutes. I was impressed.
Does this sort of thing still end up hurting your credit score though? I don't know how this actually works, but I feel like I've heard scary things about it.
When you remove an invalid debt, make sure that the bank doesn't sneak it back in. The banks "push" to the credit scoring companies on regular intervals, so although the credit scoring company-ies may remove it, unless the bank/source removes it from THEIR systems, it will be re-pushed 1-3-6 months later.
(source: Dave Ramsey's mentioned that in many of his radio shows/podcast episodes)
6 months seems like a long latency. I've been nervously eyeing mine due to a credit payment mishap in nov/dec (of under 2 dollars) that lead to what I expected was a 30 day late payment, but as of today it hasn't shown up on the credit reports (I check two bureaus). After reading your comment my paranoia is starting to resurface.
I don't see how the distinction matters to the individual consumer. It's interesting as an insight into how the credit scoring system is organized i guess
It's very difficult as a consumer to get things off your credit report. You may be able to do.it, but expect it to take months of effort. For many small debts, it's just not worth it (and I believe this is by design).
The one downside to cable now streaming, is that the answer I used in the past "I don't have a TV" no longer shuts them up. It used to be amazing; it seemingly broke their brains. The two, three times I had to use it, the rep fell silent for a solid 3-4 seconds, then "You...don't have a TV?" "That's right" "...okay, so that's just internet then" "Yes".
Heh, comcast says the same thing. I was snookered into accepting a improved internet plan with "free HBO". Which after a few months added TV broadcast fee, and substantial other costs. I tried to move back and they literally said the are not an ISP and will not sell me an internet only plan.
I had to cancel the plan and have my "roommate" (actually my wife), start as a new customer to get an internet only plan.
That's so scummy (but also kind of funny, just the sheer audacity of Comcast). Honestly, I feel like that's so bald-faced and abusive on Comcast's part that the regulators might be interested in your story
I already had them for Internet access, but had DirecTV at the time for my TV.
They must have a quarterly quota to upsell to their subscriber base, so I'd get a call like clockwork every three months, pushing a cable TV package. Each time I'd tell them that the only reason I'm with DirecTV is because of Sunday Ticket (NFL package; exclusive to DTV). That always worked, until one day.
This sales rep responds with, "We have Redzone". I reply that it's not the same, and I really need the package I have with DTV. Then he says, "You know there are websites that stream all the games for free, right? Why not do that?"
Yeah, basically telling me to pirate the games.
... "That's a good point! Hell, I don't need any TV service at all then, right?"
That seems really good advice. Next time I try to cancel my NYT subscription, I'll try that. I managed to do it entirely by email, but took 3 emails back and forth. Then in all the excitement of the 2020 US presidential election I subscribed again ... so the cycle will repeat.
P.S. there probably going to get a lot of people "going to prison" in the future so the scripts will include questions to out the fakers, who want to cancel without trouble.
LOL, cable companies are the worst. I got Mediacom to cancel my non-working service and refund my money, but only after sending a completely deranged demand letter to them[1], copying their general counsel. And you know they googled me and found that I could back my threats before they did it.
times like this I imagine a cancellation service. Imagine paying $X to some Indian company that calls them and whenever they offer alternatives they just respond that they are not authorized to do that. Bonus if they have a think Indian accent that makes it somewhat hard to understand.
The only disadvantage is that you would probably have to give that company your billing information for that to work.
We can also imagine that Indian company you contract to also has a contract with your ISP. So one person is arguing with their coworker over canceling a plan, but they don’t know it. Like when cops go undercover on stings and end up attempting to arrest another cop on a different sting. Yes, that happens sometimes.
I've had success pursuing bad i.e. potentially illegal cancellation practices by filing a complaint through the attorney general's office where the company is located.
In my case:
1) First I had a rough time cancelling my account _in person_ at a T-mobile store. The remote T-mobile employees in charge of cancellation kept hanging up on the T-mobile employees calling them from the store because cancellations are bad. This was so normal to the local T-mobile employees it was laughable to them.
2) T-mobile never cancelled my account - they suspended it...and didn't tell me! They reopened it 6 months later, charged me for a few months w/o notifying me, then sent the unpaid dues to a local debt collector. I only found out after being contacted by a debt collection agency.
I was able to get both T-mobile and the collection agency they work with to "look into it", but I could not get a direct answer from T-mobile about how to fix the situation after multiple calls to them, and the collection agency relied on T-mobile to strike the debt clean.
Bob Ferguson is the attorney general for Washington where T-mobile's HQ is. Bob is THE man in case you were wondering. After filing a complaint to his office, which was then forwarded to T-mobile, I heard back from someone at T-mobile specializing in these situations in a week's time and was informed the situation was fixed and the debt was removed from my credit report.
Wow, had similar. I cancelled online, they said my account was in good standing, nothing owed, and killed my t-mobile.com account.
A few months later I got a collections notice for $500 from t-mobile, went to a t-mobile store, said that my account looked weird, and they had recorded me as not owning my phone, despite a clear account history that I paid full price for the phone and didn't owe anything.
Still get collection notices, but it's now over 7 years, and my credit card recovered by some 70 points or so when it aged out.
I don’t know if it’s American-only, but it’s definitely common place in America. These stories are particularly bad but none of them are surprising to me.
I actually found the NYT cancellation process to be relatively painless to be honest. That’s how accustomed I am to painful cancellation experiences.
T-mobile can be dirty. The law specifically prohibits holding numbers hostage--but they found a way to try anyway. My employer had gone under, I wanted to keep my number. No problem with my employer, they released it. The problem was I was trying to port the number to a pre-paid T-mobile number (at the time you could buy 1000 minutes for $100/year, the unused minutes rolled over. For light use it was the best deal out there.) The port kept failing, though, puzzling the employees. I finally got the truth out of someone in a call center--there was a big bill owed (duh! But I wasn't the responsible party.) I pointed out that what they were doing was illegal, the person I was talking to didn't care.
A letter to the regulators, though, a few days later I got a call from a much more friendly person who made it work like it should have. It's amazing how much better companies behave when the regulators come calling.
This isn't the first time I've seen NYT cancellation process in my social feeds. It has to be a negative feedback loop cycle. People that read HN are absolutely the type that would consider paying for NYT (or at least the two cohorts have great overlap).
This cancellation process never considered the impact of internet cancel culture and rage reactions. It's far easier to damage a brand than it is to build it up.
It didn't used to be this bad. The NYT revamped its editorial staff and got some controversial identity politics types (Google "sarah jeong tweets" and be your own judge), and also discovered that much like Fox News, running aggressive and inflammatory headlines and opinion pieces gets clicks.
It's depressing because the NYT was more of a mainstream liberal newspaper whose main crimes were a lack of critical attitude towards foreign policy (such as the weapons of mass destruction fiasco). Its domestic reporting was decent. Now the domestic reporting is pitting Americans against one another.
The OP's claim is a little strong but in my case, it's a narrative and opinion pieces that melt in with the news. We used to have international and domestic news, and an Opinions section that had the narrative. Now, we have opinions mixed in all three, inflammatory headlines, and missing data (one-sidedness), with more extreme assertions in Opinions.
For a younger person, perhaps they wouldn't notice? I have been reading NYT and Guardian since the early 2000s, and canceled the NYT this summer when they failed to report really major events in NYC that didn't match narrative (looting and rioting that was directly observable for two days). I realized at that point we had a real problem.
The Guardian has always been more openly activist, and I have a lot of respect for their Snowden work. But Trump being in the front page for four years was a bit much.
I'm pretty happy with Reuters and to a lesser degree Bloomberg (whom I pay per month 7 times what I was paying for the NYT subscription).
Last couple days have only one story from NYT with ore than 100 upvotes. I didn't bother with checking further than second page of results, but though there are lots of submissions, rarely they get more than a couple of upvotes.
Honestly they got me for a couple of years with this. The $10/month digital subscription was hitting my credit card, but every time I tried to cancel I ran into issues. It took took quite a while before I got annoyed enough to put the effort in to actually cancel it.
It is such a scummy tactic. I tell everyone not to subscribe to NYT just based on that experience.
Another related dark pattern: When cancelling a Prime trial, Amazon makes it appear as if you're going to lose the Prime benefits immediately, not at the end of the trial, to keep you from cancelling early.
(It seems like you DO keep them until the end of the trial, but you only get told that after cancelling)
Together with their decreased support quality (agents barely understanding what I write + the typical "tell the customer what they want to hear so they go away and give you a good CSAT, by the time they realize you lied it won't matter for you anymore"), I have a _very_ low opinion of Amazon. They still have a service (delivery time), price (free shipping) and consistency advantage in many cases, but it's quickly shrinking, and I am much more likely to buy from alternative places if they can make a competitive offer.
Same story with a full Prime subscription, not just the free trial, they use several dark patterns to confuse you about what will happen when you actually hit the cancel button.
When I found myself slowly buying fewer things on Amazon a few years ago and decided to cancel Prime after many years as a subscriber, I was so grossed out by the cancellation process that I’ve actively avoided ordering from them ever since.
I just got fooled by another Amazon dark pattern and ended up with a Prime free trial I don’t want. Went to cancel it immediately, and wow so many hoops to jump through. Hopefully I did it right. If they end up forgetting I canceled they are getting a chargeback so fast it will make their heads spin.
Curious, I cancelled mine yesterday because they messed up my billing and wouldn't/couldn't unsuspend it¹, so the CS person suggested to cancel and resubscribe. I did have to confirm about three times that this is what I wanted to do, but in no case was it hidden or not obvious.
¹ it was a bit of a mess, they first tried to bill an empty credit card, but only notified me after several attempts when prime was actually suspended. I added a regular credit card, but they don't conform to the new EU rules about authentication so it just got declined. Again, they didn't tell me they were even trying. So I added a SEPA account which is possible through the UI, but apparently they required a credit card. In the end I just cancelled, and re-signed up under the amazon of the country I live in (which is fairly new, hence not doing it the first time.) At least I get another free trial month for the hassle.*
I cancelled it a couple of years ago so perhaps things have changed, but afaik I'm not alone in feeling it was intentionally designed to confuse...lots of scrolling, multiple buttons with slightly different wordings, confusing warnings about when exactly the benefits end.
Just the fact that I–a software engineer and longtime Amazon customer–felt compelled to open a new tab and Google questions about the cancellation process, seemed ridiculous to me. Plenty of less tech savvy folks are sure to have been confused, tricked or given up in the process.
I've experienced the opposite with Amazon. If you complain about a product you've gotten they simply refund the full purchase price, no need to return the item or anything. I've even gotten months of prime refunded by telling them I forgot to cancel.
I assume that eating the cost of a bad purchase is cheaper for them than upsetting a long-term customer.
I've never had that experience with Amazon UK, they've always demanded that the broken / damaged item be returned.
On one occasion when I had to return an item I ended up £30 out of pocket because it had to go by courier instead of post, due to length. I had to argue with their customer support to obtain recompense despite it having been them who told me to send it courier. The item was only worth £80.
Nowadays I just use Amazon as a price baseline but shop elsewhere.
On returned items, both Amazon US and Amazon DE have been quite helpful. I think Amazon US is even more over-the-top, but I think the local retail standards for this are much higher in the US so it makes sense.
On memberships, I don't mind the Prime cancelling issues very much because they seem to always credit back a month if you later tell them you forgot to cancel. Unfortunately, there are annoying dark patterns when signing up, hiding the "No thanks" button when trying to get through an order, etc.
I just returned an item and they arranged for a courier to collect. They acknowledged the return after one day and credited my account the following day.
The only thing I noticed is they hide the collection options under a button. By default they encourage you to drop off at a depot or post office.
In my recent experience this has changed drastically. Amazon was
on average the cheapest, fastest online marketplace I'd used,
and any issues were resolved within an hour.
Now I'm still waiting for a product I ordered 3 months ago. The
only option I have is contacting the seller - who doesn't
respond. I wrote a review about the experience, which then got
promptly removed.
More recently I've ordered a few things from multiple places,
the one outstanding delivery is from Amazon, and now almost a
week late. It'll probably be the last one; their obvious lack of
interest regarding fake reviews, review resetting and
obfuscation, misleading pricing, counterfeit products and the
constantly shrinking number of quality products have taken a
toll. More often than not products are shipped from China,
making it a worse choice than many local competitors who may ask
higher prices for delivery but at least ship in two days instead
of two weeks, have a phone support hotline and a reason to care.
Very slowly but steadily the reasons I started using Amazon's
platform eroded away until it became more or less a more
approachable middleman for aliexpress dropshippers.
The other issue with audible cancellation is that you throw away your credits...but then if you try to spend 5-10 credits quickly it becomes challenging...so you don't cancel. lol
They say this, but your credits aren’t actually thrown away immediately (at least they weren’t in 2018 or thereabouts). I learned this by ending up in exactly the position you describe - trying to get rid of credits before canceling - except I gave up with one or two left. To my surprise, they were still there once I was done canceling.
Stating the obvious here: it is a Service. When you stop the provision of a cellular service, you immediately lose access to the the service. If you have not consumed the remaining of your points/credit/etc. I find it hard that the service provider would be nice enough to let you consume them points/credit/etc.
Exceptions will exist, but the general rule is such.
No, it is subscription. Much like a magazine subscription, where you are purchasing the magazine each month, you are purchasing credits each month that you can use to buy audiobooks that you then own (yes yes, do you really “””own”””” things in the digital world of licenses, blah blah). So losing access to the app, and therefore the audiobooks you purchased, is not how it is supposed to work.
But THIS is how it works. This reality doesn't fit your paradigm. But the reality prevails.
In other words, when you stop paying them.. it stops. You can no longer consume the goods, past-present-future. You call it subscription. I call it a service. Because in my mind a subscription to a Newspaper is "News-as-a-Service. I stop paying Amazon, I lose the AWS. I stop paying the Economist, I lose access to all (present-past-future) issues.
Downvote all you want. Call it what you want. Still.. someone give me an example where the subscription ENDED, and they still have access to the Benefits. If not.. you're welcome. NaaS. Unless you get the paper-copy. Then you ACTUALLY bought the "News" and ONLY because YOU control the physical medium (the paper its printed on).
> someone give me an example where the subscription ENDED, and they still have access to the Benefits
Literally Audible. The person that couldn't access the app is not the norm and likely had some sort of problem. You can access the app after you cancel and can continue to download and listen to books you've already bought. That is why it is a subscription, not a service.
That's not how Audible works. You buy the credits with your subscription unlike an unlimited-consumption model such as Netflix. As a result, they have a policy of allowing credits to be used for a limited time after canceling: https://help.audible.com/s/article/do-i-keep-my-credits-if-i...
This probably has to do with Apple charging 30% for any in-app payments so Audible didn’t bother implementing any payments / subscriptions functionality on their app.
Same, then you get bombarded with ads on Amazon for a free trial despite the fact you're logged into your Amazon account and Amazon knows damn well you're not eligible for the free trial anymore. I quit Audible after prices stopped being related to length. At the $17 a pop for the three-hour books I was buying it was going to cost me $900 to get the whole series. Nope!
To be fair, POWER 10 is an absolute beast. They did make the mistake of using a custom DRAM connection method (in itself actually good), for which there exists only one chip to translate it to normal DDR4. This chip uses someone else's IP for the DRAM controller part. This other company is against the system running with open firmware.
I had this thought the other day - what was the last big story the NYT broke that wasn't Trump related in some way? Like, actual investigative work whether in local governments or in other countries. I can't think of a single significant story that the NYT itself broke and led the charge on
This is what throwaway credit card numbers are for. I'd like to see that concept become more mainstream. If you make it hard for me to cancel a service, fine. It's a single click in a well-designed financial app: delete card.
I think the primary feature is limiting the damage of a compromise.
It sounds great to also use this as a way for the customer to cancel service with an unwilling company, but I think in practice they may come after you with a collection agency.
SiriusXM did this exact thing to me. Temp credit card declined and they kept my service active and continued to try to collect from me. I wasted hours of my life going through this cluster.
> Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?
I'd bet that a small percentage of cancellation requests are waylaid by these sorts of underhanded tactics. Even if the success rate is low, it's still not zero.
>Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?
Yes, because it actually does work. If you need proof, just call up one of these companies and say "I am cancelling because your service is too expensive." Odds are decent that you will get some type of promo offer to keep you. If there is any competition in your area for internet/cable and you have never done this, you are wasting money.
OP could have also had any number of other problems that could have been solved by these retention specialists. Basically they are doing the equivalent of an IT person asking if you have turned it off and back on again. That might be frustrating for the type of people who read HN and know better, but the reason they ask it is because there are legitimately issues that can be solved by this extremely basic level of support.
I get that ending the subscription is annoying and I wish they hadn't done it but claiming they have a "fragile" business model is just wrong.
They are WILDLY successful. Their operating profit jumped 28% last year and literally are blowing away the competition in overall subscriber numbers and growth. It's really not even close
As with many things in life, if it didn't work, they wouldn't do it.
So to answer your question, yes, it probably does reduce churn, if only slightly. Is there an occasional person who goes to try and cancel, runs into this byzantine process and then says, ah fuck it, I'll just stay subscribed so they don't have to deal with this bullshit? Yes, but probably only infrequently.
Instead, it infuriates all the rest who DO go thru the byzantine process and add more frustrating to whatever reason they were already intent on canceling from in the first place, as was demonstrated in this OP's chat transcript.
I wonder if this isn't a profitable practice though.
However much annoying these processes are (I had to suffer an identical Financial Times cancellation process last week) They know how much it costs to take cancelling users through an account specialist and presumably they get enough people to continue subscription to make it worth while.
A continuing paying customer now is worth far more than someone who may subscribe again in the future. And even if you're sick of their cancellation process, if you want to read NY Times news again you'll signup.
Edit/addition: regarding your ".. I wonder if this isn't a profitable practice though."
Well they keep doing it, so.. at some point they ran the numbers and they saw it is better for them. Perhaps in 10y this may change, we will notice by the change of corporate practices. Profit will determine this.
I pay for a lot of subscription services like music- and film streaming, and SAAS-services but would never ever give my contact- and payment details to a newspaper or magazine. Newspapers and magazines brought their death on them self imo. People will pay for your service if they can trust them with their information, and not be harassed.
I bet there are one or two executives who decided it would be this way. They should be named and removed. This is a prime example of an issue with simple hierarchies: the single point of failure.
This is why we need a CPA with teeth. The should be that if you can sign up with a click on mobile, you can cancel the same way. The amount of regulatory capture in our plutocracy is maddening.
I had a similar thing with Comcast which kept referring me to their retention department and asking me to call.
I replied to them no less than 5 times, each time pointing out that (a) I don't have time for phone calls (b) their terms and conditions permits cancelling by e-mail.
Another way is to notify them once by e-mail to end your subscription per [insert T&C clause and citation] and just stop paying. If they don't get payment they'll stop anyway, and if they come chasing after you, you have the notification you sent.
I just cancelled and it was relatively painless, to their credit.
When they asked the reason, I said that political coverage was unfair. Left is OK, unfair is not.
I don't consider myself "on the left" but I really don't mind a publication being left of center or right of center. If it's good, I will pay for it (I subscribed tp The Atlantic at least twice, and the New Yorker once, and probably others in a mix of print and digital).
But the NYT has drifted too far down the path of politically-correct fashions, and away from robust debate and discussion of challenging topics and how they intersect with real events.
It feels more like they want to persuade me to hold a set of opinions (which shifts rapidly), rather than informing me and letting me form my own. "Persuade" is even the wrong word; more like "pressure" or "coerce". If it's all ads, so be it; but when I pay, I expect that I am the customer and not the product. So I don't pay as of the end of my billing cycle.
Also, the NYT cheers on, and even participates in bullying. Scott Alexander being a recent example, but there are a lot more when it comes to politically-charged topics.
I should reiterate that this is not a right-left thing. I would have remained subscribed if the NYT had simply drifted left, and concerned itself mainly with arguments betweed various left-of-center factions. Lots of worthwhile things to discuss and debate there, and lots of events to tie it to.
> they want to persuade me to hold a set of opinions
Glad more people are realizing this. It's harder to spot/acknowledge for people on the left since the biased coverage feeds into their worldview...in my opinion it's artificially solidified their confidence on how "correct" they feel they are about political topics.
The next step in this realization is nothing to do with one-sided reporting, it's the massive scale of what selectively gets ignored or hidden.
As a regular European reader of the NYT, even the stronger left leaning columns from people such as Krugman/Kristof contain mostly opinions that are often considered "common sense" on our side of the pond.
Maybe your opinion has more to do with how weird and dispatched from reality American politics has become and less with how the NYT wants to brainwash you, or whatever you think they're doing?
Interested to know what you’re referring to. If it’s social or economic policy, I’d get your view. But if it’s culture wars / identity politics you’re referring to, I’d be surprised and expect the opposite in Europe.
My sense is many (most?) of the commenters here are off-put by the latter category.
Edit: the reference to Krugman as significantly “left” just registered, and I don’t think that’s what people are referring to —- or even that most of NYT’s new guard would consider Krugman to be a leftist
No, you misunderstand. The comment asserts that the NYTimes, specifically, is biased, and this bias is harder for people on the left to see, because it aligns with their sensibilities. Meanwhile, it's easy for people on the right to see it.
The comment doesn't say anything about people on the right being immune to it (and I would suspect there's a similar effect there in reverse, for eg Fox News).
I wasn't subscribed to any publications on the right (though in addition to the left-leaning publications I already mentioned, I was previously a WSJ subscriber once and an Economist subscriber a few times) so there wasn't anything to unsibscribe from.
I don't see misbehavior on the right as a justification for lazy, manipulative groupthink by the NYT, or outright bullying. Especially when they are clearly capable of good reporting.
> The implied reverse therefore would be that it's easier for people on the right to see bias in the media.
Yeah, that's also what I read. And as evidence to the contrary I pointed out that some people had their world view changed so much that they tried to overthrow the government.
Which tells me that they didn't see the agenda they were being pushed.
Which contradicts the comment's point.
Note that in no way do I disagree that the left has a problem too.
Nah, those people just needed an excuse, they were already past the tipping point. They exist on both sides and one side got called out for attacking the capitol while the other is "mostly peaceful protests" because they are only destroying police and private property.
As in, both sides are equally bad for similar but different reasons but we only hear about a singular event that some whack jobs on the far right pulled off. Compare to my local media as an example which buried the story about the violence around a "citizen" road block until a seven year old was murdered as her family tried to go past. Even then it was buried with stories of police violence or right wing threats.
No, those of us who lean to the right know the nut jobs and there that line begins but there where that line is for my left leaning friends is beyond me to understand.
> but we only hear about a singular event that some whack jobs on the far right pulled off.
Really?
I would invite you to foxnews.com. As an example for the last week the front page has been plasted with Cuomo.
And CHAZ? A complete disaster that was absolutely not a secret.
You say that the line is clear on the right, but I think it's just that it's clear to you. The fake news that the election was stolen is actually mainstream, on the right. Trump had some ordinary people injest bleach, you don't think many more believed the other lies?
Do you think most people on the left supported the 2020 summer riots? Or defund the police? Even polling of black people had a huge majority against that nonsense. Some do. But then some on the right think Biden's about to be arrested when trump returns with the military in two weeks.
My point is that "especially on the left" has no connection in reality. "Also on the left" does.
Maybe I'm just a blind leftie, but I think one side got called out for attacking the capital because that's what they did. And the other side had thousands of protests, 90+% of which were completely peaceful. Granted, it's a small sample size of on the insurrection side, but 100% violent, versus < 10% violent.
> I must say though that Fox News has gotten downright rational (on all things) since then. Politically biased, sure, but they're actually news lately.
I've noticed that national news outlets in the US tend to be better when their preferred party is in power and worse when the opposition is in power. I suspect it's because in the latter case the news outlets slant all of their coverage towards negativity and discrediting the opposition.
I thought CNN was much more tolerable during the Obama administration, but watching them over the last few years has consistently left my frustrated. Meanwhile, the reverse has been true for Fox News. That said, I don't consume much from either outlet.
Maybe trump is an outlier, but (at least up until the election) I found Fox News to be completely bananas the last four years. So far they've been better under biden than trump.
I don’t think any of the parent commenters were trying to say this phenomena didn’t happen on the right as well. Obviously we’ve seen a huge swell of right wing media trying to coerce the viewer into a certain set of opinions.
If anything that’s all the more reason to be very mindful of the same effect occurring in other media publications.
The quote "It's harder to spot/acknowledge for people on the left" sounds to me like patronizing "I'm simply right, whereas you are fooled by your media".
It shows a strong assumption that while that commenter is able to see the difference between bias and misinformation, the left cannot. And I don't buy it.
Neither people who watch Fox News nor people who watch NBC News buy it hook line and sinker.
So considering there was an attempted coup, and that many people still believe the election was rigged and that trump will come back in power (arresting biden) in the beginning of March doesn't exactly speak well for the "especially on the left".
Although my side (the left) often says things like “reality has a left leaning bias”
And it’s totally true when you’re countering the real charlatans of the right like Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz (to focus on American politics) But not a valid blanket statement whatsoever.
The pandemic made me realize how much newspapers have impact on people opinions. If they keep telling a vaccine in unsafe, a big part of their readers will believe the vaccine is unsafe. If they keep telling a vaccine is safe a big part of their readers will believe the vaccine is safe. And that no matter what the reality is.
I'm not american but reading NYT during the elections, I was astonished by how much NYT was blaming Trump for everything, and never say anything positive about him. Now I treat newspapers as propaganda.
I actually stopped reading any news at all except bloomberg a month ago and can't be happier.
It’s sad to see so many newly-created accounts that only argue about politics, from a particular point of view to counter what they see as HN’s incorrect groupthink. “There’s this forum, guys, where people don’t think the right way. Let’s brigade. Go there, create an account, and comment.”
I wonder who it is referring people to HN for this purpose.
I agree, it seems like there has been a constant raiding party around here for the last few weeks. I'm glad someone else has noticed. Thanks for speaking up!
Trump refusing to ever wear a mask had a huge impact on how seriously people took covid and what they did to protect society. Trump really is at fault.
You totally missed my point. I didnt say anything about Trump being right or wrong. I just said that for NYT anything that is related to Trump is bad. And I'm pretty sure this is not the case
When you have to argue that you're "pretty sure" not everything
about a person is bad then negative press coverage is not
surprising.
I am currently struggling to come up with something about Trump
that's not mostly negative. Maybe his honesty in the Woodward
calls? That's stretching it a bit, and only highlights how
dishonest he's been in public. His response to Covid and natural
disasters? So bad it better be incompetence rather than malice.
His refusal to clearly distance himself from hate groups? His
refusal to pay his own lawyers? Trump University and all the
other scams?
No, I'm lost, I might be missing something. Please explain what
Trump did well that isn't considered morally questionable.
The Snopes article was published 2 weeks before the impacts of coronavirus even started to be felt in this country, back when he was privately telling the truth about it to Woodward.
Trump's base overwhelmingly believes it's a hoax. So is "left" wing media lying to me that he says it's a hoax, or is right wing media lying to all his supporters that it's a hoax?
He seemed to have believed it wasn't a hoax when closing the border with China. He was being impeached at the time. He was criticized for being too drastic in this decision, even xenophobic.
I'd like to know when he actually called the virus a hoax.
Your argument essentially boils down to "he only called it a hoax once--and c'mon doesn't he really deserve a huge benefit of the doubt as to which part he was calling a hoax?--and all the other times he downplayed it or called it no big deal he avoided using the word 'hoax'". If, as you contend, he hasn't been pushing that idea all along--in one set of words or another--why does his base believe it's a hoax?
If someone is alleged to have claimed that ghosts don't exist, but we see them hanging protective charms over the doors and sprinkling salt on the floor, the objective observer will seriously doubt the allegation.
I'm an outsider to US politics (in that I'm Australian), but I'm really interested to know what widely held "left" views you think are "incorrect"?
The topics I understand as being pushed by the left in the US just seem so centerist to me, based on the political landscape that I'm living in.
Single payer health care, minimum wage increases, increases in social support nets... So many topics I'd love to hear the argument against from any stand point that isn't pure capitalist greed.
Also not an American, but the US left has a lot of controversial views that are nothing to do with the things you've listed. Surely you've heard of some?
What do you mean by incorrect? Because you're asking us to prove/argue that Left policies are incorrect. By correct/incorrect do you mean:
Moral/Immoral?
Right/Wrong?
Fair/Unfair?
If we can agree on judging policies, platforms, ideologies and beliefs on a shared set of criteria, then we can move forward, otherwise we're just shouting at each-other.
You can tell me all day long that it's fair for me to get my stuff taken away without my consent by an entity because I got born within it's "borders"; but that won't make it fair for me within my moral framework, irrespective of how much I deplore the suffering of the poor and unfortunate and want to help them.
The US has four states with population comparable to Australia.
It would be perfectly centrist for a couple states to enact the policies you mention, assuming they can work out the details and balance the books. When these policies turn into wild success stories, other states might follow.
It probably makes sense to start with some small-medium sized, well-governed blue states first, like when MA implemented Romneycare.
But the left position is to enact these polcies nationally across the US, which has >10x the number of people in your country. And there are a ton of details that nobody really even wants to talk about, and no plan to adapt when things don't work out. So, we are just supposed to trust Congress with a huge amount of extra money and a lot more power because the title of the bill sounds nice?
There are also a lot of policies that seem uniquely designed to punish the "right". I am pro-choice, but I recognize that a lot of people in the US are really, really not. But a lot of people on the left don't just want it legal, they want to use taxpayer money to pay for it. Think about how that makes tens of millions of evangelical Christians feel? There are enough pro-choice organziations that they can pool money from pro-choice people to subsidize abortions. The taxpayer money isn't needed. Why force it?
That last argument sure sounds like an argument from feels rather than facts and logic, I thought the right hated that kind of rhetoric.
The obvious answer is of course that health care is a public service and should not be reliant on charitable organizations, which would be absolutely ridiculous. (Yes reproductive care is health care, arguments made from personal feelings or believes are not a worthy retort against medical scientific consensus)
Couldn't this argument be made for the Border Patrol, or the war in Iraq? There are lots of things my tax dollars pay for that I find morally repugnant.
It's a matter of degree and alternatives. Borders and wars are clearly the domain of the federal government as described by the Constitution. If you don't like it, your only real option is to elect better people. Yeah, it sucks when our leaders invade Iraq for no reason, and then we elect one of few diseenting voices to be our next president and then he... invades Libya. So I realize my words are cold comfort, but there's no much else I can say.
But abortion funding is not the domain of the federal government and there is not much reason for it to be. There are plenty of private citizens who are pro choice and could fund abortion subsidies. It would probably be easier to do that than fight a political battle over it, which also costs money.
A government should govern the people that are actually here, not who you wish were here. Maybe in some places nobody minds abortion, but the US is not one of those places. So, we've got to respect those tens of millions of people at least enough to not spend their money on abortion.
This sounds like a technicality argument - wars are in the Constitution, so whatcanyoudo?
If we should respect the views of tens of millions of people in one area, we should do it in another. If we think that life is sacred and we shouldn’t spend federal money to end it, let’s be consistent.
there are significant gaps in funding for these services, especially in underprivileged areas.
Would you support increasing WIC and other benefits for these children? Because if not, this policy decision would increase the number of people who grow up hungry.
The minimum wage increase that Biden is pushing for is radical. He wants a 15$/hour minimum wage, which if I believe Wikipedia would be the highest minimum wage in the world right now.
Not saying that's a bad thing, but I think it would qualify as left-wing in most countries.
Agreed about social safety nets and most other policies. Sometimes it feels Americans don't realize how uniquely chaotic and inefficient their system is, compared to every other western country. The healthcare system in particular.
> would be the highest minimum wage in the world right now.
Australia's minimum wage for people over 21 is over $15 USD for full time work, and over $19 USD for part time (you receive a 25% casual loading rate increase for part time work). [1] That comes out to about 70% of their GDP per capita (working 38 hours per week, 50 weeks a year). The US going to $15 an hour would only be 43% of GDP per capita. If the US paid its minimum wage workers according to our actual economic output per person, our minimum wage would be $24 an hour, to match Australia. I wouldn’t really call $15 an hour radical.
Eh, it isn't that radical. These people making minimum wage are likely working part-time, so they don't get medical insurance. They often have to find two or more part-time jobs. Do they are working more hours than a full time job, but still don't have medical.
An increase in the minimum wage will help a little, but having affordable health care works help more.
I’m not rage-quitting yet but the decision to capitalize the word used to describe the skin color of one group of people, but not the words used to describe the skin colors of other people, is just so completely asinine and panderous that I have considered doing so.
Doesn't appear to exactly be in line with the APA guideline you posted, which suggests capitalizing "White". Though they recommend against using "Caucasian" and recommend using "White" instead.
To quote the link you posted:
>"Racial and ethnic groups are designated by proper nouns and are capitalized. Therefore, use “Black” and “White” instead of “black” and “white” (do not use colors to refer to other human groups; doing so is considered pejorative)."
>"The Times also looked at whether to capitalize white and brown in reference to race, but both will remain lowercase. Brown has generally been used to describe a wide range of cultures, Mr. Baquet and Mr. Corbett said in their memo to staff. As a result, its meaning can be unclear to readers; white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups."
Edit. Side note. Maybe I should write to the NYT and tell them I'm a White African and they're not representing my cultural and historical identity!
The New York Times' dismissive responses to leading American historians like Gordon Wood and James McPherson when they pointed out distortions and inaccuracies in the 1619 Project was an eye-opener to me.
The NY Times promoted an extremely suspect hypothesis about the American Revolution (that it was fought in order to preserve slavery - there's essentially no evidence for this hypothesis), and got push-back from some of the top historians of the US. The NY Times' response was essentially, "You're wrong, and we're not changing anything." Then the NY Times' own fact checker published an article in Politico pointing out that she had warned the NY Times not to claim the revolution was fought in order to preserve slavery, but that the NY Times had ignored her. That finally prompted the NY Times to issue a slight modification of their claim ("some" of the colonists fought to preserve slavery - which colonists is completely unclear, but at least the updated statement is so vague that it can't be disproven).
All around, it was clear that the NY Times had an agenda to push, and they didn't care if historians disagreed. That didn't stop the 1619 Project from winning a Pulitzer, though!
Journalists are pretty honest about what they do if you listen to them talk candidly about their profession. It's not really about reporting reality or facts it's more they see themselves are a class above the regular people who have a moral obligation to make sure we think and believe the right things we're supposed to for what they consider the greater good.
Not saying if that's the right thing to do or not but personally it's not something I'd ever pay for.
Perhaps. ...but among the journalists I know socially (this is a worthless anecdote), they agree that they have a responsibility to report a "socially responsible narrative".
> But the NYT has drifted too far down the path of politically-correct fashions, and away from robust debate and discussion of challenging topics and how they intersect with real events.
> I should reiterate that this is not a right-left thing.
This very likely is a right-left thing:
* The NYT systematically avoided the term "torture" in everything except op-eds when describing the Bush admin's post-911 torture program[1]
It's difficult to think of a more dastardly use of political correctness than a newspaper employing a euphemism for torture that effectively softens the blow in their stories about a government torture program.
Obviously if you knew about this but still subscribed to NYT anyway while now unsubscribing for problems wrt left-thing political correctness, that's a "right-left thing." (And however bad we both agree their left-thing political correctness problem is, it can't possibly be worse than systematically dressing up torture.)
But even if you didn't know about it, it's still the same problem. At best your comment makes it seem like NYT gave in to its long-standing penchant for left-leaning fashions, and that ended up actually damaging its ability to do robust reporting. That interpretation makes a special case of the entire Keller period when the most important stories were scuttled in deference to the Bush administration. That period includes refusing repeatedly to run some of the most impactful stories-- like Jim Risen's on the Bush-Cheney domestic spying program-- because the government told them not to[2]. That period is in major "never forget" territory wrt to journalistic integrity.
You misunderstood my point. Bias exists and I have accepted that, and I won't unsubscribe from good reporting because of bias.
Giving into left-leaning fashions is bad not because of the "left-leaning" part; its bad because of the "fashions" part. It's lazy groupthink at best, and bullying people into conformity at worst.
Have you noticed how narrow and specific all of the rules for reporting have become? Do you honestly believe that leftism is defined by these narrow rules, many of which are changing rapidly?
No. Most left-leaning people don't believe this stuff (how could a normal person even change their beliefs from one day to the next?). They go along with it because either they are too scared of getting bullied themselves; or because it's mostly hurting the right, and they believe they can regain control of the discourse after the right is diminished.
But it's easy to destroy good discourse and hard to rebuild it. After the right gets marginalized, we won't go to open-minded chats over coffee among left-leaning folks. It will be these same horrible tactics over the most minor differences of opinion on the left. Proponents of socialized medicine will be doxxing proponents of Medicare for all. There will be no end to the ridiculousness.
Stepping outside this particular argument for a second, do you think it's possible to know the beliefs and motivations of "most people"? I don't. (Personally, I don't think very many people understand their own beliefs, much less that of others.)
I don't expect that I understand someone else's beliefs at a particular point in time. But I find it implausible that anyone changes their actual beliefs fast enough to keep up with these political fashions. So that's why I don't think most left-leaning people believe in these fashions.
This confirms my impression: the conversation does not have to go sideways about advertisements. It is kind of a deflecting trick to provide customer support instead of cancelling the subscription. Once you step in their trap, then it is slightly more cumbersome to go through the cancellation process.
I guess people try to be polite and come up with a reason for cancelling their subscription, and this reason could be solved by customer support. It is not being polite to try to please Tony from customer support, he is just doing his job and does not care about polite reasons for cancelling, his job is that you do not cancel. It is important to know what you *really* want before contacting them (or any other company), in case they use this kind of trick to confuse you.
Highly recommend getting news through either AP news or Reuters. Both are non-profit journalism groups and I find that the headlines that pop up from those apps are straight up boring (and I mean this in the absolute best way possible).
First article had 12 paragraphs, and a grand total of 12 sentences. 7 of those are quotes/paraphrases of what people said/claimed. Oh and the page had 20 ad images.
60% of the article is "s/he said X". The remaining 40% are low-fat versions of something one can find on Wikipedia.
Another one:
10 paragraphs, 11 sentences. 5 are quotes/paraphrases. 15 (fifteen) ad images!
That is not journalism, that's Twitter with extra steps, masquerading as news. At this point, if I didn't know any better, I'd call Reuters a glorified ad farm!
Ditto. I subscribed to the NYT when I appreciated their coverage, and unsubscribed...when I felt like it, around 2020.
I had heard horror stories about needing to call customer service, but they must have heard those complaints, because now their unsubscribe process is a simple form.
I'm sure they mean well, and hopefully their journalism department also has an ear to the ground. It'd be nice if they returned to centrist investigative journalism soon.
Forcing the right-left sprectrum on the NYT obscures the reality that they're mostly a neolibieral organization, if anything. They've been Manufacturing Consent since the mid 20th century.
We can just as easily say that from an African perspective there are no right wing publications or politicians. After all in most of Africa homosexuality is still criminalized. In many places, witchcraft and apostasy still is.
And Africa has about triple the population of Europe. So what makes Europe the default point of comparison? (More reporters having done a semester abroad at Barcelona than Lagos is not a valid answer.) Heck why restrict ourselves to the present? How about by the standards of all of human history? Even Fox News would be left wing in 1750.
The simple answer is that it’s very dumb to arbitrarily compare against a different society, with a different history and different culture. American institutions should benchmark on American mores, not grasp at politics from entirely different continents.
It simply means something different in the US vs Europe.
In the US, "left" tends to be centered around social and cultural issues, such as racism, sexism, immigrant rights, abortion rights, affirmative action, or increasingly things like white privilege - what is sometimes derisively called identity politics.
In Europe, "left" tends to be centered around the economic sense of the term, that is, socialism, communism, redistribution of wealth, social safety nets, etc.
By US standards, many European politicians are on the far right because of their social and cultural views. By European standards, most US politicians are on the right or even far right because of their economic views, whereas they're to a European perspective absolutely extreme on the social politics scale.
In general, while they're handy for bandying about in a very general sense, I don't think political axes between countries can be compared in a very meaningful way. There are all kinds of bizarre mismatches even in the same domains - for example, the VAT would be considered a very regressive tax favored only by the more extreme libertarian-conservative types in the US, but it's hardly seen that way in Europe.
It simply means something different in the US vs Europe.
It means something different to you. The US is a big country, and your understanding of the left is pretty shallow and certainly doesn't speak for the whole country.
That you say the left is centered on ID politics is evidence that you're out of touch with leftist politics. I would venture to say because there's not a loud leftist voice in the mainstream media.
> It means something different to you. The US is a big country, and your understanding of the left is pretty shallow and certainly doesn't speak for the whole country.
Although I am leery of placing myself on a political axis for the same reason, I think most people would consider me a leftist. Certainly they would think so based on my voting record, with a couple of exceptions.
Firstly, it may be - and I think is probably - the case that the average self-described liberal or independent in the US does not prioritize most culture war issues, or identity politics issues. They might instead be more concerned about conventionally leftist economic policies, like raising the minimum wage or improving safety nets.
But that's not, by-and-large, what political campaigns, politicians, or the news media focuses on. Cultural issues and (increasingly) identity politics surrounding specific issues take up an immense amount of bandwidth in the US to a degree they do not in Europe - or if an analogous issue does, the battle lines are drawn and the conversation is framed in a totally different way. Even issues that are the 'same' are often downstream of US politics.
I don't think this is an argument that there's no loud leftist voice in the mainstream media. That is maybe true, in the conventional sense. But it's not because the media is conservative or reactionary in some sense - there's a similar problem on the right; if anything, this was strongly illustrated by Trump's success - Trump brought to the forefront issues like immigration restriction that had wide support among the voting base but very weak to no support in the conservative political and media establishment. It's because the "leftists" who are actually in power, and control large 'leftist' institutions, care more about identity politics and culture war issues than they do about conventional leftist economic policies. US politics on both sides is charged along different lines than in other countries.
There's no doubt similar phenomena in Europe - it's not as though politics as represented by politicians and in the news accurately reflects the desires of the people there, either. Nor is Europe a unified block either, so we're being a little sloppy. But this is still a substantial difference.
At any rate, there's still other issues I mentioned like VAT - VAT would never fly in the US even if the "left" took complete power because liberals would consider it horrifically regressive!
One of them is a authoritarian regime where the press is controlled by the state and the others are a collection of countries with some of the highest democracy ratings in the world, by most scales, including for freedom of the press.
> That's my point. The farther left you go the more things the state has control over.
That’s because you’re using the term incorrectly: right-wing authoritarian states were just as perilous for those who disagreed – imagine being a left-wing business owner under Hitler or Pinochet! You’d much prefer living in “left-wing” Sweden unless you were very right-wing.
The mistake is trying to use a single term to compare multidimensional properties. The degree to which power is centralized in the state is independent from economic and social policies, and you can find examples of many combinations depending on which characteristics you’re interested in (for example, the Soviet Union was good for the perspective of opening career paths for women and terrible for gay rights while Nazi Germany was bad at both, and no single term comparison is going to cover that).
> That's my point. The farther left you go the more things the state has control over.
Is this true, though? With full socialism isn't control supposed to be pooled by citizens? If anything, it's more akin to libertarianism, just that instead of citizens self-organizing in groups to manage bits and pieces they self-organize in groups managing everything.
However people in the USA talk about the left as a bloc and people in Europe don't talk about communist media or politicians (although there are a small number).
You would have a better analogy if you used "socialism" rather than "communism".
They at least subscribe to the leftist version of identity politics, which has admittedly become very mainstream, but is still the number one rallying point of the left today.
As others have mentioned in this thread, "right" and "left" are all relative. From my point of view, a neoliberal like Biden is right-of-center by any reasonable definition of "right" and "left", but obviously that varies person-to-person. My point is that most of the people on the far left tend to dislike identity politics since it's such an effective distraction from real economic issues.
No, the problem is that left-vs-right doesn't really have a standard, global definition, so in an average internet discussion, you can have several people using their own definitions and not understanding that the person they're talking to is trying to say something completely different. To some, maybe mostly in Europe, its socialism vs capitalism. Whereas in others, maybe mostly in the USA, its SJWism vs Conservatism, or even Democrat vs Republican. The modern NYT (>2015) is definitely not pushing socialism, but they are pretty much anti-Republican, anti-white, pro-LGBT, pro-Antifa/BLM, etc to such an extent that's pretty far removed from the common American, or even the common New Yorker, and more like its coming from some Twitter echo chamber.
I said twice that it's not about left-right. Please don't try to make my comment about that.
The problem is they are treating politics like fashion, where it's super specific and constantly changing. And they are bullying (or cheering it on, at least) anyone who doesn't conform.
Whether these specific fashions they promote are "left" or "right" or "center" was immaterial to my decision to cancel.
Oh God I'm glad it's not just me that was feeling this. It's been pointedly obvious that there are narratives they want to push and there are clear newsworthy items that they do not cover for fear of making some groups look bad that would not look "woke". I've been forced to balance my news with right-leaning publications (NYPost... ew) just because they'll at least mention some events.
> But I can no longer do the work that you brought me here to do—the work that Adolph Ochs described in that famous 1896 statement: “to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”
>It feels more like they want to persuade me to hold a set of opinions (which shifts rapidly), rather than informing me and letting me form my own. "Persuade" is even the wrong word; more like "pressure" or "coerce".
It's a little amusing to see liberals trying to describe this for the first time. Harper's is unequivocally further left than NYT. It's also less grating.
To me, that's because the "left-ish" bias of NYT takes the form of telling the reader to be afraid of certain people or groups of people, whether it's Tom Cotton who wants to "send in the troops" or some little-known blogger. Which stands in direct contradiction to the ideals of what most people think of as leftism.
Bias is tolerable and probably inevitable; a politics of fearmongering is not.
+1 to FT. I have been reading FT for a while now and have completely stopped reading NYT or other publications. They seem to have solid reporting and are pretty unbiased IMO.
If I recall correctly both predict the collapse of France, like clockwork, every few years (especially because French policies are slightly more socialist and both publications are super business).
And of course, both look down on non-Anglosphere countries, in general :-)
I don't know where you get that from. Any examples?
> You have to be aware of their biases, though.
A point of view is not a bias. The Economist was founded as a pro-market liberal (classically liberal) publication. A Marxist would consider that a bias I guess?
The Spectator is usually classified as centre-right. Amongst my peers ("creative" millennials in London) that makes it a bit of a non-starter, unfortunately.
I think it's a mostly respectable magazine with a high degree of journalistic integrity (e.g. the recent High Court case). They have some fantastic contributors. Like any publication there are some that are a bit "out there" for my tastes, Delingpole comes to mind, but they pale in comparison to some of the opinion pieces the Guardian publishes. But because of its mild association with the word "right", I know many of my peers would be unpalatable.
Certainly left-leaning. I've heard Stephen Bush (their political correspondent) is quite reliable on Labour issues, but I don't read it much these days. It went right down in my estimation in terms of journalistic integrity after the Roger Scruton debacle.
The idea that someone would suggest the Spectator—more reactionary troll factory than magazine at this point—as a response to someone who feels the NYT is pushing too much of an agenda is absolutely hilarious.
To be clear, I generally accept bias. It's just the way things are.
My complaint about the NYT and many other news sources is absurd combination of a hyper-specific and rapidly-changing set of beliefs, along with brutal enforcement of those beliefs.
My challenge to you: write down your beliefs on a controverial topic (on paper). Wait 6 months and pick up the NYT. My prediction: they will be in the process of canceling someone for those same beliefs, and you will shred the piece of paper out of fear.
OK, maybe that's an exaggeration. But I wouldn't be shocked if it was too close for comfort.
Have you read it recently? There certainly are trollish (but not insane) rightwingers like Rod Liddle and Toby Young, and Taki must be published solely to wind up left-wingers. But the main editorial slant is basically Cameron-conservative/New Labour types like Nick Cohen, Katy Balls, Isabel Hardman, Matthew Paris etc.
It's definitely right-of-center and doesn't mind cocking a snook at left-wing holy cows, but it's not a "reactionary troll factory".
Magazines publishing centre-right views are fine. But if what you are seeking is a news publication that doesn't push a particular agenda, then The Spectator is pretty much as far away from it as you can get outside of Pravda.
You're right, of course, that it publishes some mild centre-right commentators with uncontroversial conservative views. That doesn't really compensate, in my view, for the provision of space to writers like Liddle and Young. These particular people are reactionary trolls; their writing contains little other than disinformation deliberately intended to stoke culture-war nonsense, and they're too smart to believe what they write. This stuff does little more than make society worse for everyone.
But I'd say regardless of your views on individual commentators or the overall quality of the publication – if someone wants to avoid the NYT because it is campaigning too much, then directing them to The Spectator is laughable.
Would you like to provide an example? Or, better, several examples to establish a pattern that couldn't also be found in, for example, The Guardian or NYT?
You’re not a fan of Debbie Hayton then? Although I can’t imagine what her motivations would be for spreading misinformation about trans issues. Perhaps she and other Spectator writers have views trans activists disagree with, but that’s not the same as misinformation.
I had a similar issue with the Wall Street Journal a few years back, and despite having spent the majority of my career working on Wall Street, I’ll never buy a subscription again.
I signed up for a really good deal for 6 months of digital + paper delivery, but my paper always arrived a day or two late, so before my 6 months were up I tried to cancel, but couldn’t figure out a way to do so on their website. I messaged support asking them to not renew my subscription, and told them that the paper always arrived late. They responded back that they were going to give me a free subscription until they could figure out the paper delivery. I should have held firm and cancelled, but it seemed lke they were trying to provide good customer service.
Nothing changed with delivery, and I followed up a few times to see what was going on. I was told they were looking into it.
One day, out of the blue, I received a large bill from them. I called to see what was going on and I was told that my trial was up and since I hadn’t cancelled that it had renewed. A proceeded to tell the about my problems with delivery and that customer service was supposedly working on fixing the problem and not charging me until they could. The person on the phone told me that that’s not possible since they don’t provide same-day delivery to my address. I recounted exactly what had happened, and they basically told me I was a liar, and would not refund the charge because the user agreement says they don’t have to, even though I called within a few hours of the new charge and subscription renewal.
The part that really stung was that I was a PhD student and could get an entire year for less than what they charged me for a month. I’ve never had a company treat me so poorly before.
Incidents like this make me wonder why there isn't an appetite for better consumer rights in the US.
If this had happened in the UK, you'd have the option to pro-actively block the payment, recover it, and legal standing to defend getting your money back.
Letting companies redefine the rights of their customers seems bizarre to me.
>Letting companies redefine the rights of their customers seems bizarre to me.
I'm sure it's obvious by now but perhaps it's worth restating:
Those companies have large budgets for contributing to elected officials' campaigns. The individual consumers negatively affected by these practices can't band together as efficiently as the large business on the other side of the abusive behavior.
As long as enough elected officials entertain these businesses in visits, allow them to help write legislation, and accept contributions from them, it won't change.
Also, executive agencies have to put out proposals for new rule making and allow a period of public comment. The business in the sector have entire staffs and/or contract with firms whose job it is to watch these publications and craft intelligent responses backed up by fudged data to "prove" how "damaging" these policies would be to the industry.
The individuals who respond are mostly retired people/activist citizens who can only say "this is a bad idea and I don't like it at all."
But do you think in the rest of the world it's the same thing? In Germany we have good consumer protection laws, even though there of course are lobbyists (or, the old-fashioned name for it, PR people and employees of a company).
Currently in the UK, I had a really bad experience with 3, where I tried to cancel, I was informed that I had my account cancelled and then they kept billing me (for months).
I consulted with some lawyers and they told me since I had only done business on the phone (the only way the company does this business by the way) that was essentially my word against the companies. There was no way to email them and even when I did they refused to confirm or deny any account status unless I called them.
That's not to say consumer rights aren't important, I think America could do better, but I certainly do not feel protected in the UK. It's worth noting that the bulk of my exposure to UK based utility companies or government departments has suffered from similar problems, no easy way to paper trail requests made making these kinds of consumer rights ombudsmans worthless.
In the UK as well, that's why you set up a direct debit payment for any subscriptions. That way you can cancel it at any point and the company can't continue taking your payments any more. If they genuienly think you should still be paying them, then they can sue you for the money, which of course they won't over a £9.99/month subscription. Paying with a debit card is a bit of a mistake because the company can just keep charging it - althought that is also solvable by just ringing your bank and asking for a new card with a fresh number.
Historically I've had good luck emailing/live chatting them stating 'This message confirm xyz, please confirm within X days. Lack of response will be taken as confirmation.'
Keep a record of that and when it comes down to having to make a complaint you can present it to the ombudsman.
This does exist for credit cards in the US. There are guidelines by which credit card issuers must abide by customer requests, and they're seemingly always happy to side with the consumer when it's even somewhat reasonable.
> Letting companies redefine the rights of their customers seems bizarre to me.
Maybe it's just what I was used to, but I think it's far more annoying in many European countries (not sure about the UK but at least the one I live in) where it's harder to return products without specific proof and following strict guidelines, virtually impossible to get a credit or debit card that covers all fees for normal international use, difficult to get a fraud or improper charge on a card statement immediately rescinded, etc.
Speaking from Australia, we have outstanding customer protection and rights, and no massive hoops or hurdles to go to get it that would be more significant than anything in the US. It’s really much more just. Fraud or improper charges are also easily immediately rescinded if using a credit card. What kind of cover for fees for international use are you talking about?
> Fraud or improper charges are also easily immediately rescinded if using a credit card.
I'm not sure how exactly it compares, but every credit card at least in my lifetime in the US has been bound by these same protections.
> What kind of cover for fees for international use are you talking about?
Sorry, this is more of a tangent that I should have denoted, as it's not specifically related to fraud or consumer rights. At least compared to the major European and Asian countries in which I've traveled or lived in, credit card and bank/debit card offerings in the US are extremely generous in benefits, rewards, fees, etc. I actually still sometimes use my US card in a European country because my US bank offers lower fees than my domestic bank (in the home country) for ATMs, currency exchange, card replacements, etc.
> Speaking from Australia, we have outstanding customer protection and rights, and no massive hoops or hurdles to go to get it that would be more significant than anything in the US.
I'm honestly not sure how this compares to the US or elsewhere as I've never been to Australia. I'm regularly surprised by how inflexible businesses seem in much of continental Europe, however.
> At least compared to the major European and Asian countries in which I've traveled or lived in, credit card and bank/debit card offerings in the US are extremely generous in benefits, rewards, fees, etc.
That's true in my experience. It's hard to find a card that doesn't charge ridiculous fees for foreign transactions (even in local currency), for example.
There's the other side of the medal though. Which is that somebody is going to pay for this generosity by the card companies.
Either merchants pay ludicrous fees, which are severely capped in Europe. Or card companies outright rip off the less fortunate members of society by usurious interest rates and fees. Fees, which may be outright criminal[1] if charged in some of the European countries.
[1] That's not hyperbole. For example: Interest rates in Switzerland are capped at 15% annually. If you charge more than that for a loan it's usury, which is part of the criminal code.
In my experience consumer rights in the UK isn't all that either. They basically just ignored all the EU consumer protection laws and never enforced them, so companies could do what they want, like add hidden surcharges for example.
Probably still better than US, but that's not saying much.
There's a huge appetite, it just doesn't matter because corporations have more power than individuals because of how capitalism interacts with democracy.
I use Privacy.com for this reason and to not worry about my cards getting leaked. I create a card per-subscription and set the monthly limit to exactly the cost of the subscription. When I want to cancel, if it's not easy I just destroy the virtual card.
I was going to subscribe to my local paper but didn't when the subscription form said that a phone number was required and that by subscribing you agree to receive calls and texts about "offers that might interest you". This seems like a horrible tactic in general and even more so when your main product is available for free. If it stops being available for free I'm still not likely to agree to that. No respect == no money from me.
Cancelling a card and not paying a bill doesn't mean you no longer owe the underlying debt. A real company like the NYT will still pursue collecting the debt
It’ll be months worth of them, and there are plenty of cheap agencies that will make minimal effort, report to the credit bureaus, and wait for you to come to them begging to get it off because you can’t get a mortgage.
I'm confused how they make money, the free plan has up to 12 new cards a month which seems like a lot. Even on the lower pro plan the cashback can exceed the $10 per month you pay.
I'm not sure but what I've read is that they keep part of the fee that usually goes toward rewards or points in other cards. I don't mind this at all because I think they are providing an amazing and much needed service that I've been wanting for years. Their apps and web extensions are also great. Last time I had to cancel a card because some website got hacked it took me weeks to resolve and change it everywhere I needed. I would happily pay let them have all of the rewards to not go through that again. Sorry if I sound like a shill, I swear I have no relationship with them. I just really like the service.
It does look great, I'm not a US citizen so can't use it and the banking landscape is very different over there which could be how they make money like you said.
Just as any other card issuer, they should be getting something like 1%-2% (depending on location and merchant type and card type) from all purchases as interchange fee from the merchant. Assuming their processing infrastructure is efficient enough, that should cover all the expenses and allow for some profit even for customers with small turnover.
also had a similar experience with wsj. never again.
and with a new subscription to the economist. tried to cancel a few months ago, mostly because i didn’t like how they would charge my card without warning or an invoice. it was all just super stealth. worst part was you couldn’t cancel online, you were supposed to call. but you couldn’t call either because their phone staff wasn’t working due to covid. so convenient for them. had to file a formal dispute with my card. also, never again.
ironically both free market publications. may the free market flush these awful, consumer hostile companies down the toilet.
I agree, it's particularly egregious that they spent the extra development time and money to only have this feature in locales where they are legally forced to.
First time i bought it via Amazon Prime, when it was available and with Amazon i could cancel stuff directly via Amazon at any time, bypassing WSJ minefields.
Then WSJ got smart and start selling it directly in hope to force subscribers to go through their sales jerks in case they want to cancel.
I subscribed to the NYT a couple years back. I had to talk to a rep to get canceled, and at one point he offered something like half a year for free if I'd keep the subscription. I insisted on canceling, because I was getting irritated, and he laughed out loud that I refused the free offer. Right then they lost me forever as a customer.
But it was a valuable lesson on looking at the exit strategy for a service before you sign up for it. And I try real hard to only do business with companies that make it as easy to stop spending money with them as it is to start.
Tried to expand on it but I missed the edit window. If you're a subscriber (even at a discount) you count in their circulation numbers. Those numbers affect their advertising costs, the value of the news outlet (not just the NYTimes), and probably the internal performance reviews of lots of people who really don't want to lose you.
Traditionally newspapers didn't make enough money from subscription revenue to cover their costs - advertising is where the money was, payment for subscriptions was nice but a big part of its importance was as an indicator "this person cares enough to pay for this news source" for selling advertising. That hasn't really changed that much.
Not sure why your comment got downvoted, really. I agree, from their perspective it makes sense to give away a half year of service if it keeps the subscriber account active. It increases the odds above zero that the customer will stay even after they have to pay again, it looks good for the advertising stats, etc.
I don't think they're really factoring in the "angry customer" aspect, however, or they'd stop. They turned me from an ambivalent customer who decided the ROI wasn't there, into an opinionated former customer who is willing to tell friends and family the horror show that will happen if they subscribe and then decide later it isn't for them. It's the opposite of good word-of-mouth advertising, and NYT is going to suffer for it. Even if they change their policy today.
There should be a law that you can cancel via the same method that you signed up.
For example you can sign up for recurring paid channels on the Amazon app on Roku, but have to log in on the computer to cancel.
What happens is my 80-year old parents try a week of HBO, Starz, Showtime, Britbox etc. Then can't figure out where they actually signed up. Was it under roku, under amazon, under a new app? What credentials did they use? Then they forget about it and are billed in perpetuity.
In the Netherlands at least this is actually the law. May even be EU law – not sure.
Of course, the law is only as good as it's enforced. A few years ago I wanted to cancel a mobile phone subscription and the cancellation procedure said I had to send a letter. Like, an actual letter. lol? I just sent an email quoting the law, and since I didn't get a reply I stopped payments. Never heard from it. I sent a notification to the consumer protection agency, but not sure if they actually did something with it.
I've never been able to cancel any subscription with ease, so nowadays I always use Privacy to get temporary credit cards. When I want the subscription cancelled, I try the provider's website, if it doesn't work, I just cancel the card all together.
It only works if you didn't give them your name and address. At least in Europe some debt collection agencies will track you down and charge an enormous fee, and will leave you with a bad credit score.
Happened to me. Cancelled Sky Broadband, CS reps wouldn't acknowledge it. Got sick of the back-and-forth. Sky don't just make you wait on hold for 30 mins, they play ads at you while you wait. Fuck that. Stopped the direct debit.
Debt collectors got in touch years later asking for £50.
I said, "fine, send me a copy of whatever bill I supposedly didn't pay."
They didn't have it. "We don't have any documentation, just pay us."
Escalated to a complaint and they dropped it.
I'd do the same again, but could totally understand why some people wouldn't. YMMV.
When I left the UK 11+ years ago, I cancelled Sky, or so I thought. 6 months go by in another country, all my mail was redirected to my parents address in case I missed something. My parents got angry letters from Sky demanding payment, but I had already settled this before I left the country. Well, turns out they cancelled my TV subscription but was still charging me for Sky+ (ability to record). I'm not sure why it wasn't cancelled at the same time, surely when I told them I was moving to a different country as to the reason I was cancelling, I wouldn't need the Sky+ feature.
Yes we all have a credit score - it's mainly used to measure your ability to borrow and repay debt and will influence whether a company loans to you and the interest rate on said loan.
It's not (yet) as aggressive as the social scoring system in China if that is what you were alluding to...
Do you not have a similar system where you are from? How would the above be decided for you?
Well, is it a score based on your current economic situation, or your past use of credit?
Here in Norway you're evaluated/scored based on some metrics like income, job security, job prospects, education, assets, debt, defaulted debt in the past, fixed expenses, etc. I think when Americans talk about "credit score" they talk about something completely different, namely their insane system where your score is (positively) affected by taking on and managing credit card debt. In that fucked up world, two debt-free people with the same income will be "scored" differently if one of them happens to use a CC to buy all his groceries and pays off the card each month, and the other buys the same groceries on debit. Surely you don't have that insanity in the UK, do you?
There's not a universal credit score in the UK. There are a bunch of providers who will try and sell a score to you, but the actual score can vary greatly from provider to provider and guarantees nothing in terms of getting accepted for credit.
Banks giving out loans will look at the data behind the score along with a bunch of other factors. It's very possible that if Experian say person A is average and person B is good, a bank may decide to give Person A a better rate on a loan based on different data, or different weighting of the data.
In the UK maybe, not most countries. There are some corporate databases that consumers eill mever hear about, but certainly nothing even close to US credit scores.
There is some danger to this since just because your card is declined doesn’t mean that you stop owing them money. Gyms like to take advantage of this.
I was a member of a well-known gym for more than ten years straight. Once, my card expired, and when I went to work out they said the membership had lapsed.
No problem, right? I'll pay up on the account, re-activate, and work out. Nope, they wanted to charge me a reactivation fee. I said "no" and left. Never paid them another dime.
A gym's ideal customer is one who pays but never uses the facilities. One can imagine that if you often used the facilities, particularly at peak times, they almost want to discourage you,
The solution to that is, you never give them your real name, address, number, email, etc. It's never verified and Privacy doesn't seem to check your name matches.
Unless you have a contract, no, you don't owe them anything. Saying that you'd like recurring charges doesn't obligate you to continue paying after you've stopped using a service.
You don't owe someone money just because they say you do. If you've given notice to someone that you want to cancel in a reasonable way, then you don't owe them money any more. Keep documentation of your efforts to cancel, and if they try to put something on your credit report, go to court.
What does "to your door" mean here, because it's exactly how the process works in the US.
Typically if don't pay a bill you'll get a few months to rectify with fees tacked on, then internal collections will happen or it'll be sold to a collection service.
In both cases you'll get letters and eventually if the amount is high enough or the debt other otherwise motivated, a summons for pre trial mediation and then a civil suit.
This might vary in pre vs postpaid accounts. Postpaid typically includes credit check which requires submission of info that could later be used for collections.
Privacy.com is awesome, but I recently tried using this for Bloomberg, and their e-commerce platform seemed to know that I was using a prepaid card and declined the authorization.
I have to replace my simple.com account, so instead of doing that for a dozen or more subscriptions, I just changed the funding provider in Privacy, and keep the vendor-specific virtual cards.
What kind of fraud does it sound like? I gave my credit card to the merchant and said they could charge it for auto-renew, but that doesn't seem to put me under any obligation to make sure the card is still valid next year - credit cards expire or get canceled all the time. The merchant is free to cancel the subscription if the auto-renew fails.
Contract law in general does not prescribe that the contract is automatically terminated with no obligations if some payment doesn't arrive. The method of payment is pretty much orthogonal to any obligation to pay and the continuation of the contract.
The contract may stipulate that the merchant is free to cancel the subscription if you don't pay for whatever reason (the card expires, the card does not have money, you chose to pay in cash and didn't have a card, whatever). However, the contract can (and usually does) stipulate that the merchant is not required to cancel the subscription in case of non-payment, and in that case the contract is valid, they owe you service and you owe them the contractually agreed payment.
On the other hand, contract law generally would assume that the subscription is cancelled if you sent them an unambiguous request in writing even if their standard process flow (e.g. requiring a phone call with a sales rep convincing you not to quite) wasn't followed - if you've sent a letter than that and stopped paying, that should be appropriate in most circumstances.
For anyone wondering - no this definitively isn't fraud - no it will have no impact your credit (there isn't even a mechanism for this to happen), nor will it get debt collectors after you (you don't owe a subscription continual payment, failure to pay only means they can terminate your service).
I have encountered similar tactics from a popular VPS provider. Set up your account to auto-renew, send the invoice to collections if they can't charge you, instead of just canceling the service. Infuriating, to the point where you'd think they'd be more concerned about driving away future customers.
Why would it be fraud? I paid for the service when I used it, if the business makes it impossible to cancel a subscription or makes you go through endless hoops to waste your time, that's on them. After I stop paying for it, they'll just stop providing me the service.
If you signed a contract for X amount of months, then I get it, you have to pay, but I always do month to month at the gym, they still make it impossible to cancel.
This is not fraud at all. You could just as easily file a dispute. You're under no obligation to continue allowing a company to charge you a recurring subscription that you do not wish to continue with.
Cards stop working due to fraud or lost cards all the time. Businesses must accept this as a fact of life. Forcibly dunning is a malicious business practice.
Credit cards expire all the time, if I had an interest in ensuring payments flowed I would have given you an updated credit card... which I'm sure would be easier than cancelling.
I also just canceled my NYT subscription (or, more accurate: I am in the process of doing that) and it is just terrible.
I am in Germany, and basically they do not accept your cancellation via writing to the customer support, but require you to call a callcenter, which is extremly hard to reach (either they do not pick up, or the connection quality is so bad that they don't understand what you're saying). In short, I did not succeed in that.
Rejecting the written cancellation and requiring to call is both borderline illegal, and an insult to the customer. Everyone involved knows that this is a just a maneuver to nudge you to give up on it, and that this requires me to waste vast amounts of my time trying to call a shady callcenter – that is just an insult to me, and it also destroys the NYT brand.
German law stipulates that ToS requiring a call (or letter) to cancel when you subscribed online are void (§ 309 Nr. 13 BGB limits what restrictions can be placed on the mode of communications). Cancelling via their contact form, email, or even SMS is totally fine as far as the law is concerned. I don't see how the NYT could refuse your cancellation via their contact form. Maybe nobody's bothered to sue them? (IANAL)
Deepl translation of the law:
Even to the extent that a deviation from the statutory provisions is permissible, the following shall be invalid in general terms and conditions: [...]
13. (Form of notices and declarations)
A provision by which notices or statements to be given to the user or to a third party are bound
a) to a form more stringent than the written form in a contract for which notarization is required by law; or
b) to a form more stringent than textual form in contracts other than those referred to in point (a); or
c) to special access requirements
I think you're right, that is also my take. However, the issue here is they just don't comply with that. I wrote them via contact form, and they replied from a non-reply email address to call them instead (and after that they even had the audacity to send me another mail asking how I liked the customer support).
Of course you could try to sue them, very propably even threatening does the job. But the idea is to have a hassle free cancellation process, and a court case is not really my idea of such a thing.
As far as I'm concerned, I don't need the company to "accept" my cancellation. I simply need to inform them, in writing, that I have cancelled, and to stop paying.
Life's too short to jump through these hoops with abusive corporations.
I just unsubscribed using web form. There are some dark patterns involved but not too dark. E.g. first option is the chat with representative, second is the call by phone and third option is the web form.
After I have navigated 3 pages using "default button" for canceling the unsubscription process - it is done.
It's not the best experience, but not the nightmare the OP described.
FYI, using the NYTimes mobile app should follow the same flow described in the parent comment. I'm in NY state. Just choose the "web form" option to cancel, click through two or three confirmations to cancel. And you're done. Took all of 20 seconds.
Yes. Stick to the business at hand: this is who I am, this is how you can look me up in your system, this is what I want to do. Feedback doesn't help, they're not going to take your advice, don't waste your time.
For example: "Please tell us the reason for your call today?" Should be met with the answer, "Please cancel my subscription." "May I ask why you want to cancel?" "Please cancel my subscription." "Have you ever used reader mode?" "Please cancel my subscription."
While this solution has a certain emotional satisfaction, I do not wish to further the notion that service providers are owed any explanation whatsoever for my demand. If the terms of the contract I entered with the service provider permits me to cancel for no reason, it is to those terms I will abide.
Even with the system is a simple drop-down I always choose “other” and enter n/a in the comment box.
Even though the individuals are humans, they are reading a script given to them by a soulless automaton (also made of humans, but the result of an inhuman optimisation process).
Those writing the script are taking advantage of your aversion to skip social graces when they decide what questions the low-ranking representative will ask you.
The only winning move is not to play. It's not the individual's fault, but neither is it fair on you to play along. Be polite, but direct, and don't play the game.
I tend to go with a few "No, thank you"s at first and then, if the heat picks up, the ol' firm & fatherly "Look, I appreciate it, but I'm going to cancel today no matter what," informing them that there's nothing they could do or say to try to make me change my mind and stay, ♫ we never did too much talkin' anyway, so don't think twice, it's all right.
Well, yeah. They're following a flowchart that labels common objections and the responses to overcome them. You're in a pipeline. Your job is to get to the end of that pipeline without being shunted off in long and meandering side paths.
Their job is to stop you from achieving your goal. They're a person, but they're not your friend in this interaction. You don't need to be rude, but you also don't owe them anything beyond basic courtesy.
This should be met with a combination of "Sir, are you having an aneurysm right now?" and "I'm sorry, our staff only speaks English. Non-English speakers should send a letter to postal address xxx".
Exactly. I was cringing so hard because he kept engaging with the rep on lines of questioning that were so obviously going to go down the path they did. I've cancelled my NYT account in the past and it was rather painless because I was consistent in my response and communicated clearly that I just wanted to unsubscribe. I've since renewed my subscription, but cancelling service with an ISP or even Amazon Prime at this point is way more annoying.
It also took exactly 15 minutes between encountering the live agent for the first time and the final sign-off. That's nothing given that they had to communicate via live text chat. And as others have pointed out in this thread, it's actually possible to cancel just by filling out a form, not that this excuses the dark patterns and endless offers.
This reads as someone determined to get something juicy they could screenshot, or else someone who was already so annoyed from having to find the cancellation method on the site that they let it cloud their responses to what was a relatively painless process.
When I tell someone I want to cancel a service, the only thing I ever want to hear is, "Yes sir." followed by, "All done, sir." And maybe a, "Have a nice day, sir."
Period.
I give you money. You give me a service. I stop giving you money. You stop giving me the service.
Nonsense. If your situation was generalizable, then no one would accept rebates or gifts offered during the cancelation process - yet many do, which is why sales rep continue to offer them.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. Back before prices got better, my parents used to call up the cable company every year to "cancel our service". Why? "It's too expensive." Eventually they would "give in" after shaving $20 off our monthly bill. This of course was their intent the whole time: they saved thousands of dollars over about 10 years as a result.
Very few people actually determined to cancel are going to be convinced by something like this, I suspect. There's a whole cottage industry of mostly older, upper-middle class folks who call customer service lines once a year to get their rebate. I find the whole game rather reprehensible (on the part of the companies that allow it). It constitutes a kind of wealth transfer to the people who have the free time, energy, and ability to play the game. I'd much rather these companies just reduce the price across the board towards the "average" payment, and stick to their guns with the people who call in.
This would eliminate so many hours of pointless work and frustration.
Usually, it's not worth the time to haggle over people to figure out the most they are willing to pay for low margin retail goods, so you don't see it at Walmart or the grocery store. But for high margin goods, such as cars, real estate, B2B sales etc, each buyer has a different amount they are willing to pay, and so you want to try and capture as much of everyone's capacity to pay as possible.
Actually, come to think of it, low margin retail and grocery does it too with coupons and whatnot that some people are willing to spend time on and others are not.
> low margin retail and grocery does it too with coupons and whatnot
Yes! I was going to mention that this is really a pretty universal feature of "pricing", but decided that was too controversial an angle on what was a rather simple point.
And correct answer after first cycle is. "All done! Service will end tomorrow!". And if customer tries to cancel, just tell them the new higher price with not leeway any more for them.
Yes, but the incentives are not strong enough to allow it.
Give some companies some heavy fines for this bad behavior and you’ll see the rest start to stand in line quickly.
Except that it's not required at all, as confirmed by multiple people already in this thread.
OP chose the chat route, was complaining to the virtual chat bot for a whole page in the screenshot, then presented technical issues as a reason for cancelation - which the human support rep correctly tried to help the customer with, and customer engaged in that discussion, and once OP said they want the subscription canceled regardless (just a few messages later) it got canceled.
If you were to run a business, and a customer tells you the only reason they no longer wish to remain your customer is because of technical issues that you know how to solve, would you just try to help them, or would you ignore it?
Let's say someone disabled javascript in their browser, and your website doesn't work because of it, would you just cancel their subscription or would you offer to help and if they still insist on canceling it then cancel it like the rep in the screenshot did?
The interaction didn't seem that bad to me. The business is hurting and valuable. I can kind of see how you'd get there and want "customer retention specialists", who are people that have a job they don't like where they are probably measured on some metric related to how many cancels they let through. Sucks all around, but again I was expecting so much worse.
For an interesting definition of "most"? I see, what, 3 lines that weren't direct answers to direct questions? One of those was pretty legitimate feedback, which seems sensible when the rep tells you feedback is why they're asking. Another is just asking for a copy of the chatlog.
Agree 100%. It sounded a bit like a tech request on how to get rid of ads, which established some scope for agent to assist.
I'm subscribed to NYT and WP to help support journalism; I'm using Samsung's Internet browser which is just great - no ads, easy on the battery, and a dark mode to boot.
I just unsubscribed from the NYT. I originally signed up via the Google Play Store, so the process was literally two clicks in the app: choose the sub I wanted to cancel, then confirm. Done.
Of course, this isn't particularly useful if you signed up via any other channel, but it definitely makes it easier next time around.
The marketing/sales talk like, “Am I to understand you’d like to cancel even though our product could be saving you $xx in time and money?” repulses me to no end. I understand they’re trying to keep a customer. I just hate the leading questions. I hate that I feel like they’re trying to outwit me, or trick me into realizing I’m so silly for wanting to cancel something.
Even though I might cancel products, the cancellation isn’t always forever. I’ll gladly go back to companies that treated me well. However, companies that pressure me to stay I typically write off as scummy and won’t go back if the need arises.
Reminds me of the old MCI telemarketers. You'd tell them you're not interested in their long distance service, and the rejoinder would be "You don't want to save money?"
I've been witness to a number of cold callers having their heritage and species loudly questioned for using this tactic.
"Cancelling your product is going to save me even more money."
I mean, it's annoying to have to talk to sales reps when you don't have to, but I feel like people here are being a little overly dramatic?
There are certainly some cases where it becomes almost impossible to cancel things (people hanging up on you, etc.) which are much worse than what is described here and looks like it would take about 30 seconds of my attention in a background chat window.
Six months after I bought a home, I started receiving the weekend NYT. I called them to inquire about it and they said unless I could verify the name on the account, they couldn’t talk to me. I guessed the name of the previous owner, and that was correct. I explained I was the new owner, that I read the NYT online (usually the night before the print edition comes out, since I’m in California), and that I would just end up recycling all the papers.
The rep understood but said she couldn’t cancel the account without verifying my identity. I reiterated that I was not the account holder but I literally own the home where it was being delivered. The rep wouldn’t cancel the account. Eventually he suggested putting it on a vacation hold (maximum 6 months) and then repeating the process every time it started coming again.
General advice when subscribing to NYT is to do it through PayPal. Once you cut them loose from their funding from PayPal, they let you go without hesitation.
I have not had good experiences with cancelling subscriptions through PayPal. My one attempt at reversing a transaction there went nowhere, and eventually I had to contact my bank to do so.
I used to work at a Cable company with commissioned CSRs and that has to be the alltime peak for dirty cancellation tactics.
I wasn't a CSR but my office was next to theirs and what I heard was tragic. The commissioned nature of the CSRs and the penalties they received for cancelations created all sorts of perverse incentives.
I used to listen to reps who would drag out a particular person's cancelation for hours, days or even months. People would beg to cancel their service (usually because they were seniors who couldn't afford it) only to be given endless runaround.
A couple of nasty reps in particular would browbeat the customer for a while but then cancel them and note down the customer's information. Then at the end of the grace window that was built in for people to un-cancel service, they would go in and reactivate the person's subscription.
I'm pretty loathe to sign up for anything with recurring billing these days.
The Wall Street Journal has electronic cancel. I did so temporarily. At first I was super impressed. Then I remembered that it was really hard the first time I tried years ago.
This is amusing but if you aren't trying to make memes, just email unsubscribe@nytimes.com, include all the necessary info about your account (account number, billing address), and in my experience they'll do it right away. Of course my experience has N=1, but there it is. Don't waste your time, use email.
I bought a subscription last year during their $4 a month special but cancelled it a few months later. I had to go through the chat system on the website to cancel my subscription, but my experience was rather different. I told the customer service agent that “I thought I’d be reading more of the newspaper but I found that the free allotment of articles will likely suit my usage,” and the service agent cancelled the subscription.
This reminds me of the French newspaper lemonde.fr, which I had subscribed to, and then wanted to unsubscribe after a couple months. There was simply no way to do so online, not to reach any customer support. The only option was to send a letter via post. This was during our first lockdown in UK, so no way I would go to the post office for that. I'll simply never be a customer again.
Can people in the UK not send outgoing letters by putting them in their mailbox and raising the little outgoing mail flag? Is that a uniquely American thing?
As a Canadian who has been in the US close to 10 years, this is the first I've heard of this! I had always assumed the flag was meant to be set by the letter carrier in some bygone era as a courtesy to let residents know they had mail. Thank you, kind internet stranger.
To answer the question, this service doesn't exist in any other country I've lived in -- Canada or Japan, in my case.
> I had always assumed the flag was meant to be set by the letter carrier in some bygone era as a courtesy to let residents know they had mail.
Even as an American I used to think this, but because I grew up in a large city where all mail collection was from a mail box at the corner of the block. It wasn't until I moved to a sprawling suburb did I have my own mailbox at the end of the driveway and I got to use that little flag thing for the first time.
In the UK, there's normally a postbox serving a whole street that people can put letters in to send (distinct from the letterbox in each house's front door). GP's nearest postbox might have been inside their local post office, or they might just have needed to buy stamps.
In Australia, you post something by putting it in a post box, they're located in shopping areas and have specified collection times, usually daily on weekdays.
Of course, you can also go into the post office and deal with a human who will take the postage $ as needed.
These days, the number of times I've posted something can be counted in low single digits per year. Mostly dealing with government forms that need signatures because stupid reasons.
Most houses don't have an external mailbox, the mail goes through the front door and into a basket. A lot of houses on terraced streets have no front garden and open directly onto the road, especially in cities.
There is doorstep letter and parcel collection for less than a dollar.
Does not exist in Germany either. Most of our regular mail delivery is done by foot or bicycle, except in very sparse rural areas. And our mailboxes have locks anyway. So it's either the post office or a street mail drop-off box/pillar box. Nobody I know does regularly post letters anyway, it's more in the range of 1-2 letters a year if even that.
Ha! I had this experience years ago. I subscribed in college to practice my French, but ended up wanting to unsubscribe because I had more important uses for the money. Sure enough, I had to use my rudimentary language skills to write a letter to unsubscribe and mail it off to France.
Glad that worked! I hope that didn't put you off learning French.
Personally, I stopped trying to write such letters after a couple instances where the recipient company claimed they never received any letter from me.
Then I learned you should always send a letter with a signature to have a proof of reception, which is a bit more expensive. And then one kept charging me anyway, and still claimed the letter didn't reach the right department (after more time spent on the phone with them).
Bottom line is if a company wants to make it difficult for you to leave the relationship with them, there are tons of tricks in the books for that. Therefore I blacklist them after any sign of dishonesty.
Being too afraid to make a quick trip to the post office sounds like major overkill to me. Besides that couldn't you have ordered stamps and envelopes online?
Oh yeah. I made the mistake of getting NYT subscription. Absolutely hated the cancellation process. If NYT goes out of business, that’s on them for their shitty business practices. NYT is one company I wouldn’t ever do business with, nor ever recommend anyone else.
It’s also funny how other publications are jumping on the bandwagon seeing NYT’s model. It’s like they are digging their own grave for long term retention.
Or may be the shitty business tactics work and that’s the future. Just like how expedia pulls off every dark pattern to manipulate you into buying.
At least you could do it over chat. WSJ requires you to call with long hold times. The only reason, of course, is to make it as difficult as possible and ensure they read you all of the "are you sure?" scripts.
I would love to subscribe to the WSJ, but I cannot justify the cost at the moment.
Here is a free workaround for many periodicals. Get a library card. Access ProQuest through the library's website and find the RSS feed for the newspapers you like. Plug it into an RSS reader and get a daily feed of all news stories.
It is not as good as a digital subscription. No images or interactive features. But it is pretty good for $0.
Similarly, most popular magazines are available with a library card through apps like Libby.
I had a similar experience with the Economist a few years ago. Signed up for a trial (something like $5 for 13 weeks?) and decided to cancel at the end of the trial.
It took me 10 minutes on the phone to cancel, and then I received 3 phone calls later that day from the Economist offering me special offers to re-subscribe. I have to admit that I may have answered rather rudely when the third caller asked how I was doing...
At least for the economist this was not the case last month. I canceled my sub and got a new one for my kid who wants the paper copy (this way I got the intro deal for students) and it was painless. Plus I can still log in online.
So maybe enough people complained, or someone in the subscription department ran across a conscience and tried it on for size.
That's honestly not bad, I was expecting much worse. I've been subscribed to UK services that took weeks to cancel. Weeks of emailing, calling and frustration and to this day I doubt they really closed my account. Normally I wouldn't care, but when the account has a credit card attached to it that you can't remove and they refuse to do so, it's a concern.
From that point onwards I decided I won't subscribe to any service again that doesn't offer PayPal; at least that way I can control my credit cards and only have to worry about PayPal getting compromised as opposed to worrying about twenty different service providers. More so, I won't even purchase anything with a credit card directly if it isn't through a wrapper such as PayPal.
When they ask why you are cancelling say "No reason". There is literally nothing they can say to prolong the whole experience. Don't volunteer any information. Don't tell them what is wrong with their website. Don't tell them anything. You will make the whole process go longer.
I just say, "Cancel my subscription." Don't play their game, don't give them an inch, if they ask why, just repeat "Cancel my subscription". If they say something else, just say "cancel" and nothing else. They will cave.
> Hi, please cancel my subscription (account number ...). Thanks and regards.
Answer:
> Hello, ...
> Thank you for contacting The New York Times! I am sorry to hear that you would like to cancel your New York Times subscription today.
> I was able to locate your account under the email ... and I would like to thank you for your support as a Basic Digital subscriber. It is through the support of subscribers like you, that allows us to continue to pursue the truth, as the truth is more important now than ever.
> I was able to see that you are currently on our rate of $4 every 4 weeks for the Basic Digital Access and I would be very happy to help you with 4 weeks free for your subscription then stay at a 73% discounted rate for just $1.00/week for a full year, then returning to a discounted rate of $2.00/week, no commitments!
> By cancelling this subscription, you'll be missing out on unlimited access to all our published articles from 1851 until now; as well as access to exclusive features and Newsletters which are a big time saver as they are sent directly to your email with a summary of your preferred topics and sections such as the Morning Briefing, Arts and much more! Are you sure you would like to give up to these features?
> If you would like to apply for this new promotional rate, do not hesitate to reach us back! If we do not hear from you within the next 7 days, we will go ahead and cancel your subscription.
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Honestly only case where I'm willing to overlook it. It's so hard for them to stay in the black. I can't imagine, in this age. For a serious newspaper that does good investigative journalism, I'll accept some desperate measures to keep subscribers and not hold it against them.
Any other company and I'd call them garbage, but the NYT does a lot of good. (Same would go for other top investigative journals that have published a lot of pieces revealing major information to the public.)
They're not a charity or a nonprofit that relies on donations. They're a business selling a product, and the only thing that should rationally factor into giving them money or not is if you want to buy the product. Need doesn't factor into the equation.
Some business and industries do more social good than others. We're all still adjusting to the internet. I'm on the side of leaning towards giving NYT a pass for this. It was a single chat interaction, not so bad.
No business gets a pass for crappy behaviour bordering on malpractice. NYT is a left-leaning, propaganda paper today which has fired most of its older and rational staff writers and editors.
The NYT has been doing really, really well financially the last 4 years. Their stock price is up almost 300% since 2016--not the only metric, obviously, but it certainly gives some indications of how concerned investors are that it will stay in the black.
Other, smaller papers are not doing nearly as well.
eh, I don't know. NYT sucks up a LOT of talent from across the country. What I'm saying is: this sort of thing is maybe excusable from small/independent journalism outlets trying to stay afloat, but you don't need to make excuses for NYT. They pay their own executives handsomely to do that.
Substack. Citizen journalism is the future. The MSM solely exist to make every problem your problem through an omnipresent stream of manufactured outrage.
One reason I don't click links that go to Substack is that the founders seem happy to donate free content to alt-right outlets. I don't give traffic to organizations like that.
NYT was once known as the paper of record decades ago. In the past recent years they have starting slipping on their journalist standards and reliability. They were pivotal in pushing the WMDs in iraq for example as well as russian collusion.
Again, I highly doubt that NYT relies on these dark patterns, but I could be wrong.
If NYT actually relied on these tactics to keep themselves afloat, then I wouldn’t call it “thriving”, simply because these kinds of techniques are not sustainable at all in the long run.
And a common definition of thriving is growing in profitability, for which stock price can often be a good metric. Their stock price gas increased 289% over the last five years.
A while back someone posted a look into their finances and business strategy. They were fumbling the ball a decade ago, but are now doing extremely well
When I have to cancel a subscription service like cable or internet, I always say I'm "moving to another country". Pick an obscure or made-up country name like "Maltova" to prevent BS follow up questions.
I just don't see any reason to be this rude to the agent. Also, why even bother explaining why are you cancelling? Just say you want to because you want to. Done. The conversation would have been done in 2 lines.
Me too. I've subscribed and unsubscribed to their digital plans a bunch of times in the past ~10 years and it was never difficult. Perhaps this is new?
Oh! I didn't know that. Looks like you give up the introductory offer, but the price is actually a bit better ($17/mo vs $17 every 4 weeks) and I'm perfectly fine with that.
Eh, I'm not going to download a whole app for reading one article a month. There really needs to be something where I can just hit a bunch of checkboxes for the news sites I want to subscribe to, and then that app could charge me accordingly. Hell if Google integrated it with their Google News app, it could be super seamless.
If you live in southern California an have a Los Angeles Public Library card, you can view the NY Times by logging in every two days. You do have to register at nytimes.com but it's all free.
Regardless, you should check if your local library has an online subscription.
I don't think they're discriminating, probably just massive laws they have to deal with for every new country, and they're still pretty new so probably don't have their resources.
I argue they are discriminating, even if it is indeed regulatory issues at play there.
I'm not going to fraudulently open an account misstating my residence, that's breaking their ToS - you do promise thet you're a US resident when signing up.
Of course it's their choice who they want to take on as customers. They've been providing the service for ~6 years though, which is really not that new in context.
You can spare the sarcasm - I'm sure your local ice cream shop is great but it does little for people across the globe looking for ice cream.
Great that it works for you, but they won't take most people on the earth as a customer, including me. Even if I would be OK with illegally breaking their terms, my account would be subject to block and ban at any moment.
The challenge is the price. I call and cancel every year, and then renew in the same phone call since they finally offer me 8 bucks a month (and then bump it to 15 after a year). With Apple the cheapest option I see is 14.99, so even though it sucks up my time, the call helps me save 80+ bucks a year.
Yep, me too. For things like the NYT, I buy through Apple's store, and cancellation is all in one place and easy, as are the terms of when the cancellation will take effect.
Completely straightforward, no hassle, no surprises.
I went through this recently. I was also forced to repeat name/email etc so that they could “find my subscription”, despite having had to log in to the account to even reach the chat. After that I basically just kept repeating that I want to cancel immediately, and refused to engage with any of their other questions. It went relatively quickly. The chat operator said that I could have also canceled “through the website”, which as far as I can tell is a blatant lie, unless he meant the very chat I was already using on the website…
It is of course completely unacceptable and dishonest to make it easy to subscribe or upgrade your subscription, but require this procedure to do the opposite, and I’m a lot less likely to ever become a subscriber again. But on the other hand, if you’re spending more than a few minutes in this chat it’s probably because you are engaging with their attempts to keep you subscribed.
Add me to the list of NYT subscription failures. Sorry NYT, but I will never sign up again (and I think you are a good newspaper) unless you come clean about these lame practices.
I was thinking about a similar experience I have each time I need to do anything with any larger institution in the UK. For instance, if there is a problem let say you have with the bank because of their business policies, and if you get transfer to the agent, talking with the agent is even more annoying than talking with the bot.
Employees here are trained to go by the script, so there is no thinking, no logic, no reasoning, if it is not in the script they will just go on and on, in the same loop like a broken gramophone record.
Usually, humans should be more helpful, but in quite a number of cases, when things are exceptions to the book, that simply does not work. I personally find that type of behaviour super frustrating, wanting me to stop any kind of business with that organisation, for ... forever.
Any similar stories in other countries?
That's an obvious reason though.. It provides user training, addiction, lockin, and demands to further entrench Adobe CS in companies as "required software".
The lockin of all my documents and content is enough to run me towards Free and Open Source software. Albeit the software may not be as polished, but I will not be subject to my data being hijacked and ransomed by a for-profit entity.
I feel really bad for the service reps. If you hate doing this every time you cancel, imagine how they feel having to do this all day every day, always with the threat of being fired from their minimum wage job if they're accidentally too helpful.
I'm curious if there is a relationship between how strict one company's retention policy is (e.g., tactics like this), and the overall health of the business. Is it positive, negative, neutral? In either case, I do worry about the future of paid journalism.
I always hate it when a customer service person asks me why I'm canceling their subscription.
I called my mobile phone carrier to cancel and they asked me why. I said "I don't like your TV advertisements". That put a quick end to that line of enquiry.
This sort of thing is why I’m fine with Apple charging the people I do business with a 30% cut: Apple provides a lot of value making “payments” and “subscriptions” consistent between vendors.
The Times lost all objectivity over the last 20 or so years and can't turn back, they're desperate. The only respectable piece of the org left is the crossword, which is still orders of magnitude better than any other.
Prepare for the crossword to go down the tubes too. One of the crossword editors was a big proponent of firing their longtime science reporter for dubious reasons. I bet they are already censoring "problematic" words and clues.
There are several publications I would willingly support (eg The Atlantic, the New Yorker) but I don’t and this is the reason why: I absolutely refuse to subscribe to services that are going to be a hassle to cancel.
It’s the gym business model. I’m sure this shows incremental gains in revenue but I bet it’s at the cost of retarding growth.
I want to start and stop a subscription as I please. I want to do it without having to speak to a human being. I don’t want to be called by the provider to renew my subscription.
I will not reward or support scummy retention tactics.
Who would pay $50 to have a registered legal letter cancelling your subscription or service physically mailed to these organizations, and then with a registry of case numbers for credit reporting so that when collections buys the "debt" from the company, they can reference whether the person has executed this cancellation or not?
If it saved you a couple of hours on the phone, was legally compliant and protected your credit, and forced the company to stop, and was just "point and shoot," would you use it?
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what's legally required to cancel a typical subscription or membership?
For example, are companies like the NYT permitted to force you to go through a red-tape gauntlet of their design?
Or, e.g., does the law ensure that once you tell one of their agents that you're canceling, they're legally barred from attempting to charge you for the service?
It seems to me that the burden of red-tape / bureaucracy navigation is an under-discussed battlefield for consumer rights, at least in the U.S.
A little trick might work. You only need to say you become a trump supporter and they will cancelled it immediately. I use this way and the whole process cost less than 5 mins.
I'm surprised how many publications went the route of selling subscriptions to a virtual paper. I can't bring myself do to it. If it was just a 75 cents charge for the new articles and you could access them forever, that would be more appealing to me.
Put it this way wouldn't mind buying a national geographic on the iPad but I don't want a subscription for this very reason and it seems like a waste of money paying for something I might not get into.
Alternatively, if you live in California or the EU send them a data deletion request and job done. Not sure how to do that? Try this: https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/nytimes.com
Disclaimer: I created YourDigitalRights.org precisely for this sort of cases. We now send about 500 deletion request a day.
Here’s a kicker: once canceled, your card stays on file. But there’s no way to access that credit card management page anymore because you’ve canceled the subscription. How can you get back to the credit card management page? By signing up for the subscription again. Can you remove the credit card from file at this point? Nope!!
That’s right. They have your credit card forever if you put it in once.
Just chiming in to add that I also had a terrible experience cancelling my NYT subscription. I signed up online with a credit card & didn't realize that that automatically causes your subscription to autorenew (it was hundreds of dollars per year, no small amount of money). I called them they told me that because I signed up with cc I opted into auto renew which I am 100% sure I did not "opt-in" to consciously, I wouldn't autorenew something that expensive.
They initially refused to issue any refund and eventually gave a prorated one after a long time on the phone. It was a nightmare. (I had subscribed to magazines in the past and they do not autorenew as a rule, I was used to getting "you have 2 issues left! Last issue!" reminders and I thought newspaper was the same). Anyway their "using credit card = opt in to autorenew" was sleazy in my opinion. I certainly will never do business with them again.
You’re wasting their time by making them think they can engage you. They are wasting yours by thinking they can engage you.
Be the binary choice you want to see in the world — copy and paste ad infinitum until they acknowledge, then take a screenshot / save the call recording:
“Thanks, I want to cancel my subscription (Jo Doe jdoe94@gmail account 155234) please acknowledge”
I've been looking into cancelling my NYT subscription for reasons. Everytime I look at their page to cancel they say they have no online agents available and I can call them instead. Which causes me to delay further. But the fact that it's been so hard to cancel is making the probability that I will cancel and never resubscribe 100%.
Haha yes! Right around the time I decided I didn't want the sub anymore was luckily right around when I cancelled (for unrelated reasons) the credit card they had on file. Super easy!
My credit card expired and they sent my account to collections. I still subscribe because I like the work their journalists do, but when I read an article about how they're dying I don't really feel bad for them.
(I am also tempted to cancel my Wall Street Journal subscription when I accidentally read an opinion column. Not sure why real journalists let partisan hacks put their opinion columns right next to their real work. Strange business model!)
I canceled WSJ a little while ago and it was a total nightmare. Had to call a number, got put on hold for about 45 minutes, then had to answer a bunch of questions and deal with an aggressive sales pitch. Never subscribing again because of that. I'm sticking with Washington Post for now because it's a lot cheaper, has better politics coverage, and the cancelation process is more reasonable (I think, haven't had to do it yet).
When the WSJ rep asked me why I was canceling, one of the reasons I gave was how bad the op-ed section is. A little while ago the news room writers actually put together an open letter complaining about the lack of accuracy in the op-ed section, and also asking for the labeling on the op-eds to be more clear, because it was affecting the news rooms' credibility.
How is that not fraudulent? Obviously they're not giving you online access anymore or sending you papers once your card gets declined for a month-to-month subscription.
Can you show me some examples? I subscribe to both the NYT and the WSJ to act as a check and balance on each other. But the actual news is pretty much exactly identical. The reporting choices on big stories are about the same, with the NYT throwing in some more human interest stories while the WSJ gets into business nuts and bolts. (Following the whole Gamestop thing was much easier on the WSJ, for example.)
Both newspaper's opinion sections are complete garbage. I tend to agree with the NYT's opinion columnists more than the WSJ's, but I wouldn't say the pieces are well-reasoned, that they try to explain both sides of the issue, etc. It's basically long-form Twitter, which I would pay extra to opt out of.
It isn't even just for profit companies which have this dark pattern. My local PBS station, WETA, allows you to start monthly donations, increase the amount of your monthly donation and update your form of payment online, but to reduce your donation or stop your donation you must call them.
Not surprising, and honestly I didn’t think it was that bad comparatively speaking. Try canceling you home cable or your mobile service and see how that goes :)
That’s no excuse though, ideally we would be able to cancel any service we want through an online form, but in reality that is a pipe dream.
Most companies will take this as a opportunity to make a pass on you with a sales person. And honestly, it is their prerogative to do so I think. Once you’re gone you’re gone. I don’t blame them for attempting to retain your business.
While I don’t blame them, I wish it wasn’t the case.
Any person who lines up in the queue to cancel is just a ‘lead’ for the sales people assigned to this task. And they are sales people. Don’t be fooled and think you’re talking to a customer service agent.
In this case, it was a pretty weak attempt by ‘Antonio’.
Freddie deBoer dishes out a savage burn to the NYT that is, in itself, enough reason to cancel your subscription. No amount of shade is too deep to throw on the NYT at this point, from their cancellation process to their editorial policies:
> Try canceling you home cable or your mobile service and see how that goes.
I always tell them I'm moving out of their service area. Sometimes it's the truth, but if not, they're not going to expect to convince me to move somewhere else, and I'm not going to be able to convince them to start service somewhere they don't cover; although sometimes they do ask for the address. If you're not actually moving, it may help to have a known non-covered area in mind; although I like the upthread suggestion of incarceration.
Sure, but not everything in life can be purchased through your Google or Apple accounts :)
I meant it’s a pipe dream, because many companies will put a lot of effort into paying sales people to try and retain your business. So I wish it was the case, but easy cancelation of a service without getting a talk from the sales department is a rare find.
It's surprisingly easy back in my home. Furthermore, they even offer me a discount for 6 months if you want to change your mind, and let you keep their card if you want to subscribe again.
Do you mean for canceling cable? Yeah, I’ve gotten many fully free months of cable in the past when trying to cancel.
Offering discounted or free months is a good sales tactic for them because the cost for them to keep you on is basically zero. Then they hope you will forget/ or lose the motivation to call back in six months to cancel and keep paying.
If you do actually leave, the chances of you coming back are approaching zero as far as they are concerned. Any good sales person will throw you a card just on that slim chance it will generate a commission in the future.
I expected to read details of some legal battle over months. But this is a transcript of a chat for about 15 minutes. Srsly? That's what outrages you? Having to wait for a few minutes to cancel a newspaper subscription? How many times a day do you do this kind of thing?
It's outraging because it should be a single click, and there should be no need to go through this ordeal.
Incidentally, NYT can make it easy. I'm in Europe and canceled my NYT subscription last week – it was really easy, just a click on my NYT account page.
Funny, when the rant is about issues with Google support then the critisism tends to focus around it being really hard to actually be able to talk to a human being.
They do the same stuff with the paper end. Back in the day used to get it delivered... excruciating time canceling it... for a couple weeks it would keep showing up on the doorstep, and they couldn’t tell me why the cancel didn’t go through.
The process was so abysmal I vowed never to do business with them. It’s a shame.
I dealt with a lot of print companies for some of my business back in the day. The business people would always complain that the editorial boards hated what they did... but then they just replied, “who’s going to pay your salary to write your articles”.
I still think journalism needs a better business model. Ads conflict with honest content, and subscriptions don’t pay the bills when it’s easy to get free news from other less reputable sources.
I don't remember where I read it, but apparently one person was successful with stopping a free weekly paper from being delivered by reporting littering to the police (they tried telling the newspaper first, but they didn't stop).
This is why I use throw-away credit card numbers for everything. I'll give a quick try at cancelling a service (out of respect), but if it takes me more than a few clicks, I just stop the card and send their emails to spam. Done and done.
I always try to cancel subscriptions with a legally binding letter. In Austria we have a federal signature service, which can be also used to sign PDFs. Those signatures are legally binding and have to be accepted by all people and companies inside the EU.
So I send a signed letter via email to the company. I ignore all their forms, procedures, intimidations. If they don't want to accept it, just threaten them with a credit card dispute (which you will win).
I have no idea about the laws in the US though, if that's possible. And yes, it's annoying. But you just need to figure it out once, and use the same standard procedure for any services/subscription.
I vaguely remember that at one point the NYT provided a way to just simply cancel your account through a link on the NYT account portal -- no need to chat with a specialist. Though, it could have been another paper subscription that allowed for that, I don't remember fully, it was probably 4 years ago at this point.
Anyway, I cancelled my NYT subscription a few months ago and received no push back from the specialist. While this tactic might be something that's expected from management, I don't think everyone is willing to do it... or maybe the specialist I chatted with met their retainment quotas for the month (if that's a thing.).
I got a NYT subscription in 2019. Last year in September my credit card expired, and my bank sent me a new one. This one had the same card number but a different expiry date. NYT just wouldn't accept it. I don't know how credit cards are renewed in the US but this was the new card I got and it worked everywhere except NYT. They just kept saying that it was an expired card so they could not accept it.
I tried contacting customer support, no use. They just said they'd manually enter the card details from their side which showed the same result. After a month my subscription was automatically cancelled. Well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For what it’s worth, I’ve been in and out of a few subscriptions several times (incl WaPo and NYer), but I promised myself to never again subscribe to the NYT after I went through their cancellation process the first and only time.
I mean, it wasn't THAT bad. But that's still annoying and you should be able to cancel via their website.
They likely have metrics on how effective their attempts to prevent cancellation are. If it's worth it (save more $ by preventing cancellation than it costs to pay these chat workers), they'll continue to do it. Though, I also have been very irritated with some companies' cancellation hurdles. I could see some law where cancellation can't take longer than 5 min or something on average (that was just an arbitrary criterion). It's anti-competitive to obscure cancellation for sure.
I learned years ago to cancel everything in writing, via post. It sounds anachronistic, but actually takes less time and stress. Companies don't mess with letter writers. There's a lot of legal precedent behind us.
Use easily cancelable, on-line only credit cards. For everything. No fuss with unsubscribing, just block the card and you're done. I don't even bother checking the website for the unsubscription process.
Sadly I've seen worse for a subscription service. For example, Birchbox, a monthly makeup service will autorenew for you for a full year and won't allow cancellations at all. Also obviously you can sign up online easily but can't cancel there, you have to work through their customer service, like most of these sites that try to steal your money. I guess treating customers who already left you doesn't matter much to these companies and in some cases like Birchbox I'm surprised what they are doing isn't predatory and illegal.
I wonder if you were to just use a burner credit card (e.g. one of those virtual ones you can generate over your existing credit card) and use that to sign up. Then send them an email saying that you are cancelling the subscription and cancelling the credit card the subscription is with as well. I wonder if this would allow you to not waste your time dealing with their ridiculous process. The only potential issue I could see would be someone sending you to collections because they record you as cancelled when your payments start to fail.
Whenever I looked into buying an actual news paper subscription the fact that the was no price transparency made me conclude I couldn't do business with them.
I'm a supporter of the guardian, but actually buying NYT or some other high quality journalism I've given up on.
If I feel like I'm getting scammed when I'm buying the product, then I don't want to buy it!
Low introduction price without telling me what the real price is IMO criminal fraud. I might put up with it from an essential service provider because I have no choice, but not from a newspaper vendor.
I’m still receiving “spam” from the WSJ after a long long time, I unsubscribed when Murdoch took over, as it’s quality plummeted overnight!! It took the editor a few more months to quit and move on..
In theory signing up online in California gives a consumer the right to cancel online, but I don't know how closely that's enforced, or if a non-resident of the state can vpn the signup.
It seems to imply the subscription had to be a "click" affair.
"If the subscription was started online, consumers must be able to cancel it online. No more dealing with fruitless or contentious phone calls with these businesses! One click of a button, and the service is canceled."
I think their analysis is mistaken. I think NYT lawyers could successfully argue that virtual chat complies, at least enough that they'd get a slap on the wrist at worst. From the law linked in your article:
(b) A business that makes automatic renewal or continuous service offers shall provide a toll-free telephone number, electronic mail address, a postal address if the seller directly bills the consumer, or another cost-effective, timely, and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation that shall be described in the acknowledgment specified in paragraph (3) of subdivision (a).
Edit: I do see a later clause that says transactions that start online have to be endable online. But there's no stipulation that it be a simple "click". Even though I think this is scummy, I think they're within the letter of the law.
This is why I started subscribing to newspaper apps through the Apple App Store. The apps are somewhat inferior, but the ability to unsubscribe and resubscribe easily are worth it to me.
This seems like a good space for an online service to get involved. Certified mail is often a good way to get through to companies with practices like this. They handle it differently because the fact that you are sending it via certified mail usually means that you are doing so to provide legal documentation.
It should be easy enough to setup a business that sends cancellation letters for you with the proof you need if there are any issues. $10 to cancel your internet. $20 to cancel your NYT subscription!
Oh oh oh here's another good one. A few years ago, I heard that The WELL still existed---yes, that classic pre/early internet community---so I subscribed. It turned out to be 99% dead and basically crap, so I tried to cancel, but nobody ever answered email and the telephone just went to a voicemail box in the void. Someone just kept collecting money but never responding to attempts to get it to stop. Eventually I just disputed the charge with the credit card company.
This isnt too bad, hell annoying but I have had to deal with worse!
Even with larger companies like YouTube I 'suspended' my subscription thinking it was suspended indefinitely. It is not.
So they went to work charging again, on the day I tried to contact them about it and wow it was easily a good hour of my time just making sure i cancelled correctly this time.
Then they got back to me a couple weeks later saying they didn't know what payment i was reffering to.
I genuinely just gave up. Which is exactly why its designed that way.
The most compelling things about NYTimes that keep me coming back are the site design and experience and Wirecutter. It's a shame that other news sites haven't been able to use design more to their advantage. (Fox News has pictures of race car drivers on it, it doesn't really say "professional" to me)
On the payments side, wouldn't be nice if Visa and Mastercard enforced easy-cancel subscription policies and punished businesses who didn't comply?
I hate to say it but this is really tame compared to some companies.
Wall Street Journal is much worse, where you literally can’t cancel via chat, only phone.
This rep asked why the person the cancelling and suggested an alternative to alleviate their pain points, and when the customer declined they cancelled it anyway. The only thing they could have done better is reading the previous transcript so the customer wasn’t forced to repeat themselves.
This post was an inspiration, so I decided to cancel my subscription.
It was a swift cancellation, 3 minutes, maybe because of the effect of this thread.
I typed 2 x "I want to speak with areal person". regardless of the question of the bot, then NY Times account number. After that, to the real agent I typed "I can't afford the NY Times subscription".
The "it's me not you" approach is perfect in persuasion.
I subscribed last year via the app, so the subscription and payments were handled by Apple. When the NYT jacked up the price, it was quite straightforward to unsubscribe. I had heard horror stories like this before, so I'm glad I did it through Apple.
(It wasn't completely straightforward. I did have to search for how to do it -- I wouldn't have found the option otherwise!)
I had a similar experience with them as well. It definitely surprised me and made me grumpy, but it honestly took half the time as this one because I didn’t put up a fight.
I remember being similarly disgruntled by canceling Prime. Lots of misleading calls-to-action across multiple screens. But something about being forced to talk to a human being really rubbed me the wrong way with the Times.
This was exactly my experience with The Economist. I tried for a few weeks to get through to someone because the queues were long, and I didn't have the time to wait around, checking the chat box every minute.
It is absolutely unacceptable to have to chat to someone in order to cancel your subscription and I lost all my respect for the publication since.
I went through this process last month, and I was shocked to the bottom. Absolutely unprofessional. Thank you for spreading the word. I didn't even think of contacting NYT and complaining, because I knew from this experience that all I could ever reach would have been those awful robots. Thanks for sharing this. NYT, let's please fix that and move on.
Telcos in Germany also use some shady tactics (just one of many examples, my in-laws were paying 5€/month for an otherwise free AOL email subscription). The one thing that really works over there is threatening to bring in a lawyer, they usually can’t get their in-house counsel to look at some small subscription where they are probably at fault anyway.
In France I am sending an email to the company, and then cancel my direct debit agreement. Total 5 minutes.
Of course you may have timing requirements (engagement for X months, or cooldown period, ...) but beside that it is very simple.
Once you cancel the direct debit, the bank is not allowed to send money anymore and it is now a problem between you and the company if they do not get paid.
Making a subscription that by default lasts forever should be ilegal.
Users should always have a choice to subscribe by a certain amount of time or undefinitely.
Personally the fact that services start a business relationship with me trying to trick me into forgeting to unsubscribe is the main reason why I avoid subscriptions at all.
It's interesting to see all the recent HN complaints about Apple's app store in light of this, since this is exactly the kind of abuse that Apple's consumer-biased policies address.
Specifically, if you subscribe to the NYT via the app store, unsubscribing is a quick, no-bullshit process. You can even do it from your Apple Watch.
I have something like 4 subscriptions that I cannot figure out how to cancel on my AMEX. So I cancelled my AMEX. They now have a feature where your subscriptions will follow you any way. I literally have no way of getting rid of like $200 worth of fucking subscriptions unless I want to close my credit card account.
As far as I know, there is no opt out for account updater features. If you are unable to cancel the subscription with a company and you don't want to do any future business with them, I recommend issuing a chargeback through your credit card company.
Note that chargebacks should be a last resort, as if you use it too much, they may just close your account. It may be worth raising the issue with th se subscriptions saying that they should cancel or you will just start issuing chargebacks.
I signed up once for Sunday delivery only. After 3 months I never received a single paper, then I called to cance. I had a much easier time over the phone, but they were surprised I hadn't received any of my papers even though I called/emailed on 3 occasions that I wasn't receiving my paper...
I had a similar experience, and it is what keeps me from signing up again, despite the fact that I really want to read that paper. Frankly, the experience motivated me to drop by subscriptions to other USA papers. I still subscribe to some overseas papers, which seem to respect their customers more.
To be fair, I've had the same experience with the Wall Street Journal (you must speak to a human and they try to give a few months free) and French newpaper Le Monde (where I even had to pay 5.50 euros to cancel via certified mail).
On the contrary, canceling my yearly membership with Barnes and Noble was a breeze.
That's why I use Privacy.com and can cancel the card at anytime with any merchant. Some merchants guess the new expiration date if your credit card gets renewed - I'm not sure why they are allowed to modify your payment method. Well, it's for my "convenience", I guess.
It was easier for me to call my credit card issuer and block NYT from issuing any further charges to my card than to try and deal with canceling with them by phone. I'm kind of shocked someone managed to cancel over chat at all. That's technically revolutionary for them.
I was not able to cancel my subscription about 10 years ago, but I found that I could put the paper on vacation hold. I've been on vacation for all but one week a year ever since, one benefit is that I can still access the digital products all year round during my vacation.
And that's why I prefer the closed system Apple provides (even though I might pay the 30% premium publishers forward to their users): Being able to cancel any subscription the same effortless way and seeing clearly when it will renew and what I will pay.
I know its not good but this is not different from most companies. All of them force you to speak with a human to cancel. Its possible people hang up when they have to jump through hoops and some others will be uncomfortable cancelling with a human.
Reading the horror stories in this thread, I am asking myself if this is only the issue with US based companies. I have never had this kind of problem with EU based company. Fellow Europeans, what is your experience? Have I just been lucky?
Here in The Netherlands there's a law that you should be able to cancel the same way you signed up. Signed up through a web form? Should be able to cancel through one. If they don't offer it, the closest alternative is valid. Just send them an e-mail with the relevant information and you've legally canceled. Doesn't matter whether they like it, accept it or respond to it, the subscription is void. If they keep collecting money, just reverse the charges. They'll have to sue to actually get your money, which they'll never do, because their lawyers aren't stupid and know that they'll lose (it has actually happened).
It wouldn't surprise me if this actually originated as an EU regulation instead of national law.
I’ve had this frustration with a number of subscriptions over the years, but there’s a great workaround—subscribe from the App Store. I get access to the NYT website, and cancellation is one button press away in my subscription settings.
FYI if you set PayPal as your payment method, you can cancel your subscription in a couple clicks. Obviously it'd be preferable to NOT have a ridiculously difficult cancellation process, but that's one way to make it easier.
The Economist magazine was the same. I had to call and talk to someone in the phone.
On the other hand, I subscribed to Bloomberg for 3 months at a nice discount, and cancelling that was easy. +1 for Bloomberg, -1 for NYT and The Economist.
I cancelled my NYT digital subscription 2 weeks ago and it was a matter of clicking a few buttons on their website. I don’t know what all the fuzz with virtually assistants is all about.
It’s certainly easier than canceling Amazon Prime.
I just stopped paying them, my card expired, and I didn't give them an updated one. It's a shame, I was going to reinstate my subscription (because I love their paper!) But don't want to support this.
That's it? I mean, it IS annoying but that's utterly painless compared to any number of other financial interactions you may be faced with online. Take almost any medical related billing issue, for example.
Just because something else sucks more shouldn't normalize this. NYT (and all other subscription based businesses) should make it easy to unsubscribe online without requiring customer service.
Does anyone here know of canceling Wired is also this difficult? I was considering starting a subscription after seeing a compelling offer from them, but if it will be this hard to cancel this puts me in the fence.
Make proof (recording, screenshots, mails, etc.) that you requested them to cancel subscription. I typically record the call and tell them I am recording. Then threaten them with lawsuit if they don't cancel.
I didn't have to speak to anyone to cancel mine through the web interface. Did that just last week so this info is not out of date. I'm not sure how you got to speaking to an agent in the first place.
Do you live in California? Because apparently some services have a California-only web interface to unsubscribe. If your billing address isn't in California then you can't access that page.
I almost only subscribe to services via Google Play.
Takes 5 seconds to cancel , even got a Duolingo refund after 3 months ( duolingos language education is so poor it's borderline malicious) by emailing Duolingo directly.
Similar experience with Wired magazine online (owned Condé Nast). These subscription cancellation work flow and process steps are designed to be hard - otherwise their product team is not doing their job, IMO.
Yeah, I went through this process and wondered if this is even legal. Luckily my subscription was via PayPal so I just stopped paying them. I was so offended by it I'll definitely never subscribe again.
To their credit it was pretty fast for me to cancel. All i said was “ I have a subscription from work and don’t need personal subscription anymore “ . They cancelled right away , no more questions asked .
I went through a similar process with the WSJ, except it was made worse by the fact that I had to call them to get it done. I'm not from the US; no such thing as a toll-free number for me.
I used to work at a call center processing At&t cancelations. Usually just saying, "Please don't put me through the cancellation flow and just process my cancelation", works.
Yeah, I remember when I cancelled mine, it is about a year ago, but during the chat session, I had to be very stern in my wording, multiple times, before the person decided to do as I told.
Reminds me of cancelling my mobile phone service one time, though in that case it was a phone-call and the attitude of the Indian call centre guy was borderline hostile. It was amazing.
With all of its terribleness, PayPal is good for subscriptions, you can just cancel it any time and done.
So if subscription only service doesn't offer PayPal, I'll skip it.
Take a look at the online subscription of WSJ - there is no online way to cancel the online subscription, you need to call a number and try to survive their retention script.
Does the NYT not allow you to pay via iTunes in the US? One of the main reasons I tend to sign up for things like this via Apple is how easy it is to cancel from within iOS
It wasn’t quite that bad, but I had a similar tedious chat session in order to cancel my NYT crosswords subscription. I don’t think I’ll ever pay that company another dime.
I wonder if this would happen to me as an EU subscriber. There is a law (source unknown) that requires cancellation of services to be “as easy” as subscribing to it.
I've been wondering for a while why the root div from imgur deletes as it is loading on safari, it's happening even in incognito mode. Firefox works fine.
It will make you want the cancel process to be just as easy as the subscription. Instead you have to chat with a person who will try to retain you as a customer.
A workaround: Make it impossible for the NYT to collect any further payments. For example, if they have your credit card number, cancel the card account.
in fact, they've made it so easy that we've resubscribed plenty. if anything, the netflix model is one to emulate. that being said, we've never tried removing my credit card.
This has not been my experience with Netflix at all. I regularly unsubscribe and resubscribe later. Unsubscribing is always just a click of a button and I've never had to speak to anyone at Netflix for anything.
Incidentally they also appear to honor their data deletion policy. If I stay unsubscribed for more than six months, my account ceases to exist and I need to create a new one to resubscribe.
I would have thought Netflix would be the gold standard for how to do this properly. I'm sure they have lots of people like me who subscribe a few months a year just to check out whatever's new. If I ever ran into a problem like this I would never sign up again.
When most people see "cancel membership" they will think it is immediately. They will just wait to cancel until the last possible day and when they forget it's free money for Netflix. It's smart/shady. I'm sure it contributes to their decreasing churn.
Full disclosure, I used to work for Netflix. I really don't think they're trying to be shady. When you click to cancel, it tells you what your last day of service will be. This is also how just about all monthly subscription services work. One of the most important metrics at Netflix is how many hours members are watching. Any A/B test that can improve that metric is really cherished, because Netflix wants happy customers who both stick around and tell their friends. Trying to squeeze an extra month out of them doesn't really fit their style.
Okay makes sense then. I just don't see any of the elder people who I have setup Netflix risk pressing the cancel button because they can't get it set up. However, they do try to remove their credit card number and it doesn't let you. Which is actually another annoyance, why can't I delete my credit card from your site. It's still a dark pattern or just bad data security.
That's a good point about older customers. I could see them being confused. I'm not really sure to be honest though, as I didn't work on this stuff when I was there. I'm not sure about the credit card issue either.
If you have access to one, get an Amex and you'll find that's not the case. As someone who used to work in billing for a company with "not great" patterns, the bosses hated when people signed up with Amex because it made collections on lapsed payments borderline impossible because of how well they protected their members.
This is the reason we need journalism. Somebody posted something on an image posting website and all the comments on HN go one way. Why is it so easy to manipulate people these days? Is HN going the same way as twitter, FB, or other SOCIAL sites?
I just canceled NYT's subscription, and it took two messages. 1. I want to cancel. 2. I don't want your discount.
I’d probably just dispute the transactions and get a new credit card number - going through 10 layers of “choose your own terrible cancellation adventure” doesn’t work for me.
I’m a strong believer in not paying any bills that don’t make financial sense for me to pay; worst case with enough disputes and drama almost anything can get taken off a credit report.
If anyone can't read the image for one reason or another, here's my attempt at OCR with minor corrections.
Info: How can I help you today?
21:33, Feb 16
You: Cancel my subscription
Info: Welcome! We're excited to offer you messaging, allowing you to reply to us in your own time. An advocate should reply within 5 minutes To view The New York Times Privacy Policy and California privacy notices, please visit nytimes.com/FLLy_Agy
Info: You are now connected to The New York Times Virtual Assistant.
21:33,Feb 16
New York Times virtual agent: Hi, I'm the New York Times virtual assistant.
21:33,Feb 16
New York Times virtual agent: Please answer the following questions and I will connect you with the appropriate Customer Care advocate.
21:34, Feb 16
New York Times virtual agent: What is your full name?
21:34, Feb 16
You: (hidden)
21:34, Feb 16
You: Digital Subscription
21:34, Feb 16
New York Times virtual agent: >
21:34, Feb 16
New York Times virtual agent: What is your email address?
21:34 Feb 16
You: (hidden)
21:34, Feb 16
New York Times virtual agent: What is your billing zip code?
21:34, Feb 16
Your: (hidden)
21:34, Feb 16
New York Times virtual agent: >
21:34, Feb 16
You: Other
21:34, Feb 16
New York Times virtual agent: Please briefly describe the reason you are contacting us today.
21:35,Feb 16
You: Way too many ads. Beats the point of paid subscription.
21:35,Feb 16
New York Times virtual agent: Please wait one moment while I transfer you to an account specialist.
Info: You are now connected to Antonio.
21:35,Feb 16
You: Why do I need to speak with someone to cancel a subscription???
21:35,Feb 16
Antonio: Hi! My name is Tony. I'm an account specialist here at the New York Times. I will be happy to assist you. I'm sorry to hear you would like to cancel your subscription today. May I ask why you are canceling?
21:36,Feb 16
Antonio: The New York Times doesn't give customers the option to cancel on their own which is why you have to go through an account specialist such as myself in order to do so. This allows the customer to be canceling properly.
21:36,Feb 16
You: You asked that already!
21:36,Feb 16
You: Way too many ads.
21:36,Feb 16
Antonio: Are you successfully logged into your account underneath the correct email address?
21:37,Feb 16
You: yes
21:38,Feb 16
Antonio: What kind of advertisements are you seeing?
21:38,Feb 16
Antonio: Also are you using a apple product to see the news?
21:38,Feb 16
You: Can you please cancel my subscription?
21:39,Feb 16
You: Its impossible to read an article without the screen jumping to allow an add make space in the middle of the article
21:39,Feb 16
Antonio: Do you use a iphone or macbook?
21:40,Feb 16
You: And, the one that takes the top 1/3 of the homepage
21:40,Feb 16
You: yes, both ^
21:40,Feb 16
Antonio: Apple products have a special feature called readers mode where it gets rid of all of the advertisements and miscellaneous pictures across the website or application.
21:41,Feb 16
Antonio: All you have to do is click on the lowercase and uppercase a in the top of the website and it changes the entire website to readers mode.
21:41,Feb 16
You: Antonio, thank you for educating me on web technologies. Can you please just unsubscribe me??
21:42, Feb 16
Antonio: So just to clarify you would still like to cancel even though readers mode would solve the advertisements issue?
21:43,Feb 16
You: My conversation right now with you makes me even more determined to do so.
21:43,Feb 16
You: So please YES - CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION
21:43,Feb 16
Antonio: We thank you for your feedback, and I'm sorry you feel that way. I will make sure that your thoughts get sent through the proper channels. Your experience with us helps make us better.
21:44, Feb 16
You: Please also forward this feedback - this unsubscribe process makes me much much much less likely to resubscribe ever again.
21:44, Feb 16
Antonio: The New York Times doesn't give customers the option to cancel on their own which is why you have to go through an account specialist such as myself in order to do so. This allows the customer to be canceling properly.
21:46,Feb 16
Antonio: We appreciate your support as a Basic Access subscriber. This grants you unlimited article access on nytimes.com and on the go with the NYT mobile app. You are on the best deal of $4 a month for a whole year! Are you sure you want to cancel?
21:46,Feb 16
You: Yes.
21:47,Feb 16
Antonio: You will continue to enjoy all your subscription benefits for the rest of your billing cycle, which ends on Thursday, February 18th, 2021. Unfortunately we cannot issue any credits or refunds for the remainder of this billing cycle.
21:48,Feb 16
You: That's fine.
21:48,Feb 16
You: Can I get the transcript of this chat? I'm sure other users would value a lot from learning what this process looks like.
21:48,Feb 16
Antonio: You can email yourself a transcript of this chat, which will also serve as confirmation of our conversation today. The option to receive this transcript will be when our chat session ends. Make sure to select yes to receive your transcript and it will be emailed to you.
21:49,Feb 16
You: Cool thanks.
21:49,Feb 16
Antonio: (thumbs up)
21:49,Feb 16
Antonio: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
21:49,Feb 16
Antonio: If you do not need any further assistance, I will close this chat in approximately 1 minute.
21:50,Feb 16
You: Nope, good night
21:50,Feb 16
Antonio: Thank you for being the best part of The New York Times. Have a wonderful day!
I subscribed to NYT annual plan and cancelled it within 3 months. There was no refund for the remaining months. I tried to resubscribe after a month and had to pay 12 months fee again. Weird!
I wanted to read an article of the NYT that interested me, so I purchased a month subscription. I only used it for that one article. This same thing happened when I tried to cancel. They don't provide a way to do it without talking to a representative unless you set your zip code to California which requires a way to cancel the same way that was signed up (i.e. if you can sign up without talking to someone you can cancel without talking to someone).
If it were easy to cancel I'd definitely re-up my subscription when I want to read an article they have. Now when I hit the paywall I just move on or look for another source.
I haven't R'd TFA, but if I ever wanted to cancel my NYT subscription I'd just close the associated Privacy.com card. It really makes daily life a lot easier.
The New York Times...some of the best journalism around, also some of the worst. Something happened in 2015/6, maybe Trump, maybe something more fundamental (ie larger shift in the zeitgeist that also caused Trump) but they are so off the rails these days. It's mostly the incessant playing of identity politics that's turned me off.
That’s not really the point. It’s that once companies have your CC info they make it arbitrarily difficult to stop paying them. This kind of behavior should run afoul of consumer protection laws.
Irrespective of the quality of the publication or whether one wants to support a specific industry or publication by default, there's no good-faith reason why canceling a subscription has to be difficult.
I agree but the original post seems to want to ask someone to reconsider subscribing (or something to that effect). To me that raises the question if it is worth whatever hassle they demonstrate.
At the moment, its hard to say... I'm loathe to say, "Nothing", but that may actually be the most correct answer.
Institutions have completely squandered what little trust the public once had in them.
I think we're living through a very specific period of history in which we're going to see some sort of new paradigm emerge and become dominant. Citizen journalism has been on the rise - I don't know how long, I admit I don't pay much attention to it - and established journalists like Matt Taibbi are moving to Substack.
I don't know what the future might hold, but I don't think the next 100 years will look at all like the past 100 years, at least insofar as the concept of "news" is concerned.
Every single outlet you just listed is just as bad as the New York Times... /r/news is absolutely the worst cesspool shithole I've ever encountered on reddit, with the possible exception of /r/politics.
It isn't just their rabid anti-conservative bias, which I'm more or less fine with as its pretty clear their possessed by their ideologies, but its their fascism of banning anyone who has a different opinion, while hilariously hiding behind "fighting fascism". I guess it makes sense though... fight fire with fire, fight fake fascism with real fascism...
Maybe the problem is with human's inherent intellectual laziness.
Maybe instead of visiting numerous sites and forming their own opinion people wait for a single news source to spoon feed them their thoughts for the day.
You can be lazy or you can get closer to the truth.
Oh got it. Yeah I'm kinda skeptical of reddit as a dedicated news source, it has issues... even just skewing the context of articles with wonky titles and such.
For those of us on Firefox, I'd recommend in using "Bypass Paywalls Clean" plugin. It routes around all the obnoxious webtech that these companies put on their websites.
If these news agencies are relying on fraud in various ways to retain customers, then it's better that they never have their claws in you to begin with.
I bought a new vehicle that came with a free year of SiriusXM, but I never activated it because I've heard how scummy the company is about canceling.
Once a month they mailed me a postcard to sign up, I called them to ask them to stop mailing me a post card, after a few back-and-forths, the person said, okay, we won't mail you anything for two years. I said don't mail me ever, I will never ever use them. The person said okay, they've taken me off their list. We shall see...
FT and WSJ are both worse than NYT in this respect -- they require a phone call at a specific period of time and there is a waiting time. I'm not going to subscribe to FT and WSJ ever again. If I really need to read them, Bypass Paywalls does the job. I much prefer Guardian/Bellingcat/Wikipedia's model, which is based on donations. I donate regularly to all three.
Pro tip: the sales person mentioned reader mode. I read all the NYT articles I want with no subscription through reader mode. A subscription is not necessary. Reader mode is the easiest way to bypass the paywall. I’m not sure this always worked, but in their current configuration you can read just about anything.
I had a similar problem, but the chat was unresponsive so I simply asked my bank to stop honouring their receipts.
They sent me spam for another year, before I finally made a lots of GDPR threats to get cancellation.
Is it even legal to ask for a zip code to cancel when there was no zip code in their system?
Lindsay Anderson the British film director with strong left wing or anarchist views only read the Daily Telegraph ( right wing paper) as "it makes it easier to see the lies".
A good tactic to avoid retreating into one's own news bubble.
All of these comments seem to make it less defensible when people post NYT articles behind a paywall...maybe this kind of information will help people stop doing that here? It would sure make it a much more enjoyable experience.
Not nearly as bad as cancelling a gym membership. 20 years ago I tried canceling my membership to 24 Hours Fitness when my company stopped reimbursing it.
They refused to do it over the phone so I reported my credit card as lost and their charges as fraudulent.
The NYT is a pretty crappy newspaper. I subscribed to it for years, then I subscribed to both it and the WSJ for a few months. If you saw a guy on BART with the NYT and the WSJ every morning, it was likely me.
WSJ's Opinion page is total crap but the rest is good. NYT's Business page is okay and their Arts&Culture are good, but the news is fucking garbage. Their rare centerfold articles are great but everything else is trash news. Just the lowest quality of journalism.
The WSJ reports much more accurately on way more issues than the NYT. It's not about the politics. They wrote about subversion attempts against the CA EPA and the laws in CA keeping the coast free. The NYT is just a lot more like those American news anchors you see who have this obvious slant to their reporting.
If you're foreign, you know what I'm talking about.
I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy.
And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant customer who can sign up later again, what you get is someone who hates your company.
What an incredibly stupid way to erode the brand of a publication, whose major asset to survive is precisely its brand.