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Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

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Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#41

Post by MattGaiser »

stolen_biscuit wrote: post #20
MattGaiser wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has worked plenty on me. Am I really going to make a phone call over $10 month? For months and months, no, I will not.

I'm the opposite, once you make it difficult for me to cancel a service, my resolve to be rid of you increases 10 fold. It overwhelms any discomfort making a call would put me through.

It is not so much discomfort (although I do hate phone calls), but rather an unwillingness to give up somewhere between a half hour and 2 hours of prime daytime hours waiting on hold.

Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#42

Post by [deleted] »

dylan604 wrote: post #14
MattGaiser wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has worked plenty on me. Am I really going to make a phone call over $10 month? For months and months, no, I will not.

I mean, you could be lighting a cigar with that $10, so you're losing out on something. It's much more than $10/month => $120/year. It's the principle of the matter that a shitty company's best way to make money is to make it hard for the people that tried it out to leave. You are just proving their business model works. You (royal you, but you personally as well) are part of the problem.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#43

Post by eloisius »

ywain wrote: post #32
sidr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where are the companies that don't pull this shit? Netflix? Amazon?

I recently cancelled my Netflix account. Cancelling was easy enough. However about one week later, I got a churn email in the style of "Hey Ywain, here are 3 good reasons for you to ~~give us your money~~ subscribe again". I was pretty sure my account was set to not receive any kind of promotional emails, so I clicked the "Unsubscribe" link. The link asks you to login, and immediately after login it redirects you to…

Mark it spam. This is becoming a mantra for me. Companies don’t respect marketing consent preferences, or just don’t provide an option. If you didn’t ask for an email about a specific transaction, it’s spam.

Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#44

Post by wy35 »

So funny startup story that is tangentially related...

For a while, we didn't have an unsubscribe button at all!

Not because we were malicious or intentionally adding a dark pattern, but because critical stuff was breaking literally every day and we didn't really have the bandwidth. It was fine because we had few customers, and on the rare occasion one of them churned, they just shot us a quick email and we immediately canceled the subscription for them.

Well on the day we actually had time to breathe, we decided to finally buckled down and add the unsubscribe functionality. Turns out, it was as simple as flipping a switch in Stripe. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#45

Post by MattGaiser »

Aeolun wrote: post #33
dylan604 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you could be lighting a cigar with that $10, so you're losing out on something. It's much more than $10/month => $120/year. It's the principle of the matter that a shitty company's best way to make money is to make it hard for the people that tried it out to leave. You are just proving their business model works. You (royal you, but you personally as well) are part of the problem.

That’s a form of victim blaming. Companies shouldn’t do this shit, and shouldn’t legally be allowed to do this shit.

Eh, I freely accept my share of the blame in being exploited. It just isn't worth prioritizing fixing though. I have to find an hour or two to deal with it.

Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#46

Post by woutr_be »

perlpimp wrote: post #25

I get a kick out of cancellation of internations social networking site cancel threats: You still owe €32.85 for your Albatross Membership subscription. Your payment has been overdue since 05 Feb 2020 and we have sent multiple emails to notify you. Since your Albatross Membership subscription is a legal contract, it can only be terminated by following the proper cancellation procedure. Withholding your payment for a…

I don't like doing this, but I've been in your position multiple times. One was my mobile phone plan, I wanted to transfer to another provider, since they had a cheaper contract, so I just let my current contract expire. Turns out, if you don't explicitly cancel, they'll just keep billing you.

So I started receiving billing letters, where the amount just kept going up. It stopped after about 6 months. Never really heard anything about it after that, pretty sure I can't go back to that provider, not that I would want to.

Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#47

Post by FireBeyond »

robbedpeter wrote: post #28
fartcannon wrote: post #7

Management decisions like this policy are indicative of a sick company. This is your canary in a coalmine scenario. Get out before it becomes too toxic to survive.

Where are the companies that don't pull this shit? It's more like a pickaxe and railcar than a canary. Most companies use dark patterns because they're profitable and not illegal. People doing profitable work get bonuses - this is what sales teams are for. People won't do ethically ugly shit unless you pay them enough commission to hide the stink, or if you're good enough at bullshitting the bullshitters. Half the sh…

Shout out to Code&Quill. I had a notebook subscription. Canceled it the other day.

Manage subscription > Cancel.

No confirmation[1]. No incentive. No survey. No guilt. No ultra light grey buttons. Just click. "Your subscription has been canceled".

[1] Which isn't a huge issue, I feel, it takes about 30 seconds to re-establish.

Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#48

Post by woutr_be »

epa wrote: post #39
gitgud wrote: post #21

Could use a CaaS product (credit cards as a service), basically a custom card for each subscription you use, so you can cancel it... There's often legal and contractual issues with this though...

privacy.com

I really wish there was a non-US alternative to this.

Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#49

Post by exdsq »

perlpimp wrote: post #25

I get a kick out of cancellation of internations social networking site cancel threats: You still owe €32.85 for your Albatross Membership subscription. Your payment has been overdue since 05 Feb 2020 and we have sent multiple emails to notify you. Since your Albatross Membership subscription is a legal contract, it can only be terminated by following the proper cancellation procedure. Withholding your payment for a…

Hahaha for real? My trick to get rid of junk subscriptions is to cancel my card from time to time and resubscribe to things I miss. Can’t remember seeing this before!

Re: Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

#50

Post by exdsq »

woutr_be wrote: post #48
epa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

privacy.com

I really wish there was a non-US alternative to this.

Wise let’s you do this with virtual cards - not on a per subscription basis - but you can wipe them all then get a new one.
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