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New York Times does this also. As far as I can tell it's literally impossible to cancel a subscription. I had to close the card attached to my account.
I don't think that's accurate today. I recently cancelled my NYT subscription from their website, didn't even need to call them. How long ago was your experience?
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Nicely timed, thank you. They have a sale on I was contemplating taking up. Nope.
I heard that as far as web cancellation of NYT goes, the Cancel button magically appears if you enter your location to be in California.
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Etsy does a "Only 4 items left, but 7 people have it in their cart" or something similarly worded
That one is based on real data (I worked there for a bit), but I generally agree this pattern is exploitative
Great I'm going to submit one about how the Apple iOS store forces you to get rid of your old devices and buy new ones. They make it extremely inconvenient to find out which apps are supported on your device. They don't hide the apps that aren't, so you are forced to download the app and wait to check to see if it's compatible or not.
Think about it this way: you want to haul Apple into federal court because they poorly cache app store search results on a CDN. The DoJ will have to hire new expert attorneys to prosecute this, and it could take years. That means they either stop prosecuting other federal crimes while working on that one, or your taxes increase to pay the new attorneys necessary for this case. The ultimate outcome for Apple will be paying some tiny fine that probably is less than a year's salary for a software engineer and being forced to fix their CDN setup, while the taxpayers pay millions of dollars. Best case. The worst case could be years of legal costs for the government, and absolutely nothing in return for the taxpayers.
I think you have to choose your battles, and this isn't the pick. Consumers aren't getting severely fucked, it's just kind of annoying to some people. We can use our limited tax dollars more effectively.
also all of medium and linkedin
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About 10yrs ago NBA did this to me. They made it impossible to cancel a $99/m sub. Their instructions were login and go to the cancel button but the cancel button was broken and said call this number. But no one ever picked up the number. I will never buy a NBA branded thing after that obvious bullshit scam.
New York Times does this also. As far as I can tell it's literally impossible to cancel a subscription. I had to close the card attached to my account.
Be wary if a company avoids Google. For example Tinder started forcing users to subscribe directly instead of using Google. This is because most people cancel almost immediately since once you subscribe you find all your matches are bots.
The entire purpose is to make it just hard enough so you think ohh it's only 10$ a month. Another trick is to offer a month free. Hulu does this. If you cancel on their website you get several pages which try to convince you to stay.
Google also makes it easy to manage all your subscriptions in one place. What is all this crap I'm paying for, I can quickly see what and delete it. Also I'm much more likely to try a service ( I'm studying Chinese right now and have used various apps) if I can do it via Google Play .
The worst one is probably trying to make it hard for users to stop paying for a service, like cancelling a subscription. That shit should be punishable by literal prison time.
Companies are required to provide California residents with an easy-to-use mechanism for cancelling subscriptions, and any subscription that you sign up for online must be cancellable online [1]. This actually works quite well. I've had no trouble cancelling any subscriptions in the past few years, including the New York Times, which took maybe 3 or 4 clicks from the account screen (IIRC, there was an optional "why a…
Ecommerce sites showing a "27 people are watching this right now" alongside the product but from source code it turns out to be a Math.random()
Etsy does a "Only 4 items left, but 7 people have it in their cart" or something similarly worded
I haven't been there for six years now, but one of the problems I worked on at Etsy was getting people to stop using their cart as a bookmarking tool. While I was there I worked on the functionality to fave an item as well as the functionality to add items to a List of favorites. There was another tool called Treasuries for this purpose that we phased out, so there were at least three systems that Etsy built to try to help people keep track of items they like without putting them in their cart. I know when we introduced Lists, several colleagues and I worked on that functionality for a few months before it ever saw the light of day. Even so, users continued to put things in their cart "so they wouldn't forget them". It was a very frustrating result; this was the exact behavior we were hoping that Lists would eliminate.
It wouldn't surprise me if it's true that the item really is in that many carts. I would also agree that it's not useful or accurate information for you, another shopper, since an Etsy user "having it in their cart" is in many cases not a very strong signal that they will purchase the item in question. Inflating the number intentionally would definitely be a dark pattern. If that number is intentionally inflated or is known to be inaccurate or fictional, dark pattern for sure.
Whether the current functionality qualifies as a dark pattern or not is a lot harder to judge. Is it poor design? Yes. For sure. Is it harmful to the user? Again, I think yes.
Is it a dark pattern if you design something poorly unintentionally? Does that term measure intent or impact? In a legal context I would expect the measure to be intent, so in that context this is probably not a dark pattern, but HN is not a court of law, so in this context... probably yes?
The worst one is probably trying to make it hard for users to stop paying for a service, like cancelling a subscription. That shit should be punishable by literal prison time.
I haven't used the Scribd app, but cancelling the service through the web similarly takes more than one extra page of customer retention "special offer" pages.