Netflix stops charging customers who never watch • Hacker News Board

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#321

Post by virgilp » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:01 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #305

elcomet wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it exists, it is not followed. In France, Le Monde (most famous daily newspaper) requires you to send a paper mail (and not a regular mail, but a registered mail, which costs around 5-10€) to cancel your subscription. Even if you subscribed on the website, for a 100% online subscription. It's really shady.

> "In France, Le Monde (most famous daily newspaper) requires you to send a paper mail (and not a regular mail, but a registered mail, which costs around 5-10€) to cancel your subscription." What is it with French companies? BlueCity, the UK arm of the French "Autolib" car sharing service, had this same ridiculous "send us a letter in the post to cancel" policy. Since they charged to a credit card rather than use dir…

Can you not call the bank to block the card on account of fraud and get a new one? The subsequent payments would surely be declined...

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#322

Post by customersmoney » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

mywacaday wrote: post #168

sytelus wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting charged by rhapsody.com every quarter for no apparent reason. I used their service like may be 8 years ago. They have a phone number in their merchant line which is invalid. When I filed request to void the charge to American Express, initially they declined! Then I filed appeal with angry comments and they finally voided it. It took over two months for the process. I just saw new Rhapsody charge again. T…

Companies that make it difficult to unsubscribe should be penalised, I live in Europe and got the New York Times on a 12 month trial for €4 a month. Trial just ended and it's now €8 a month, only way to cance is to ring them, have tried once so far and was on hold for 20 mins before I hung up. There should be a law that if you can sign up online you can cancel online.

“Legally speaking, we can’t allow you to cancel via the app. You can only cancel via a web browser but unfortunately that system is down. Please mail a letter to PO Box 937192 or send a fax. We will process your cancellation with 4-6 weeks once we have the legally required paper request. Thank you for being a valued customer.”

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#323

Post by mattkrause » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

smabie wrote: post #48

spiralganglion wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do this at my company, and it is purely for altruistic reasons. If people aren't happily making good use of my service, I don't want their money. That's the entire calculus. Netflix is vastly bigger, granted, so who knows what machinations are afoot for them. But it is certainly believable to me that a company could choose to do something explicitly anti-greedy.

Really the only valid reason to do this is that the goodwill will help them make more money in the future. Strictly losing money with no upside in the future is in violation of the "duty of loyalty" that all corporate officers have toward shareholders.

That's not really true.

The standard, from In Re Walt Disney, is that business decisions aren’t reviewable unless “the exchange was so one-sided that no business person of ordinary, sound judgment could conclude that the corporation has received adequate consideration".

In, Shlensky v. Wrigley, the Chicago Cubs’ were sued for refusing to install lighting for nighttime games: their president believed baseball was best as “a daytime sport." This is absurdly nebulous (and kind of bizarre), but the Cubs nevertheless won.

That decision was based on Davis v. Louisville Gas and Electric Co, which says “the directors are chosen to pass upon such questions and their judgment unless shown to be tainted with fraud is accepted as final. The judgment the directors of the corporation enjoys the benefit of a presumption that it was formed in good faith, and was designed to promote the best interests of the corporation they serve.”

It is probably true that this policy earns Netflix some intangible goodwill. It might plausibly make them more money. However, even if it didn't, it would still be within its rights to implement such a policy.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#324

Post by CuriousCosmic » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #235

Jd wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using privacy.com for this reason. You can spin up a separate card number for each transaction type with its own limit (e.g. $100/month or $200). You can also just turn them off at will.

privacy.com looks great. I think the only disadvantage is that you lose all the 2-5% cashback, travel benefits and so on. I wish they could produce card while keeping these benefits but still its good card to have for shady websites.

Depending on who your card is through, some companies started offering this. It's often just hidden in the web UI.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#325

Post by ryandrake » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #262

sytelus wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You obviously understand payment systems more deeply but to me this is like someone explaining why I need to deal with mainframes with tap drives in 2020. Many of us don't even need credit cards, we just need a way to transfer existing money from our bank account on agreed upon transactions safely . There are far more modern ways to electronically "agree" on a transaction then to use exact same 19 digit number for ev…

What you've got here is an is/ought distinction. You're telling me how you think the universe ought to be but my advice was about how the universe is .

I suppose what OP is saying is, if an innovative company figured out how to do those things, obviously using the technology/universe we already have, then they'd have him as a customer and/or investor. They'd have me too. These are all great consumer-focused features that would be game-changers for a credit card company.

It's simply utterly bananas that all it takes is for someone to get a few numbers from me, and then they have the ability to arbitrarily take my money, making it my problem to dispute it. This goes for credit cards and ACH transfers (which only require routing number and account number). The company who figures out how to fix this will have it made.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#326

Post by ideaman924 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

leonroy wrote: post #216

A few years back I started to get a $12 charge from Lastpass on my Paypal account. I cancelled my account at Lastpass over 6 years ago so was puzzled why, especially since they don’t offer any sort of $12 service. It took a lot of emails and complaining before Lastpass told me that it was due to me being an Xmarks (bookmark sync service) customer in 2009! Apparently they owned Xmarks briefly. Why the charge started a…

Go into PayPal and check under "recurring payments," or "subscriptions." LastPass should be under there. Click it and then revoke the authorization and they shouldn't be able to bill you any longer.

Outside of this I am pretty sure no company is able to automatically bill you on PayPal without your consent, except for a select few companies like Nintendo (where you can pay on your Switch without authorizing any PayPal prompts).

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#327

Post by juliand » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

FrojoS wrote: post #258

leonroy wrote: post #216

A few years back I started to get a $12 charge from Lastpass on my Paypal account. I cancelled my account at Lastpass over 6 years ago so was puzzled why, especially since they don’t offer any sort of $12 service. It took a lot of emails and complaining before Lastpass told me that it was due to me being an Xmarks (bookmark sync service) customer in 2009! Apparently they owned Xmarks briefly. Why the charge started a…

Is there no way to block them on PayPal??

If it's a recurring payment then yes, it should be under PayPal's My Preapproved Payments.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#328

Post by kerkeslager » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

Hello71 wrote: post #320

kerkeslager wrote: post #311

If I pay for something, I want to own it. Revocable-access[1] subscription-based services are just a form of rent-seeking, and I'm deeply concerned about how this affects our society. As such, I'm not a direct customer[2] of Netflix and likely never will be. That said, I think it's important to acknowledge when people you disagree with do good stuff--this is how we make sure that our disagreements are based on princi…

> Physical print newspapers were subscription based but they weren't revocable-access: you received the newspaper on subscription, but once you received it, you owned it. This differs fundamentally from web-based subscriptions. With web-based subscriptions, if you let your subscription lapse, the site revokes your access to content which you previously had access to. But with online subscriptions, you also gain acces…

Well, I only brought up physical print newspapers to explain what "revocable access" means, not to make any sort of argument. Arguments by analogy aren't valid logic anyway.

Non-revocable-access subscriptions are, in my opinion, just a convenience layer around the ownership model. The man function of these subscriptions is automating the buying of something you buy on a regular basis anyway. There's an element of vendor lock-in in some models, but not all.

There are plenty of examples of the ownership model gaining access to an extensive archive: it used to be that you could buy the Criterion Collection on DVD, for example. Presented this way, however, it becomes immediately obvious that people don't actually want to pay for the entire archive, at least not at the price the owners of the archive wanted to sell it at. You don't want the entire Netflix archive, you only want a few movies and shows from it. The primary problem here is that archive contents are massively overpriced: nobody wants to pay $8 for every DVD in the Criterion Collection. In an ownership model you have to let people pick and choose the parts of the archive they want and buy only those, or if you're selling the entire archive in one chunk, the price per-unit has to be low enough to justify making the buyer pay for vast swaths of content they don't actually want.

Steam does a good job with this: they generally price their older games at a price that people are actually willing to pay, and their bundles tend to be intelligently grouped so that if you're interested in one of the bundled games, you're probably interested in at least a few of the others.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#329

Post by nadavami » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

dwighttk wrote: post #292

sytelus wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting charged by rhapsody.com every quarter for no apparent reason. I used their service like may be 8 years ago. They have a phone number in their merchant line which is invalid. When I filed request to void the charge to American Express, initially they declined! Then I filed appeal with angry comments and they finally voided it. It took over two months for the process. I just saw new Rhapsody charge again. T…

your credit card 8 years ago had an expiration date beyond 2020?

The major credit card companies have a service where they can notify the merchant of the new details when the card expires. I believe Visa calls it Account Updater.

https://articles.braintreepayments.com/guides/account-update...

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#330

Post by distances » Sat, May 23, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #304

distances wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this even happen? I'm just curious here. Don't you check your bills? I find it hard to imagine I would miss a recurring payment on my credit card receipt.

There are people out there who make enough money that they don't bother with an item-by-item check of each charge. I can't blame them. Being that careful is a huge cognitive load that scales with the number of charges even if it comes back to bite them when times aren't so good.

Now that I think of it, in the US people probably pay everything with a credit card? That would definitely be a longer list of expenses to check. In Europe the default is to use debit for physical card transactions, and credit much more rarely mostly for subscriptions and online purchases.