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How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

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Re: How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

#161

Post by kornhole »

liendolucas wrote: post #58

Another way to forcefully cancel a subscription is simply registering with a card to which you can manually add or recharge credit, the day that you do not put money in it (or remove from it), the subscription should be automatically cancelled as they can't debit that amount from you (yeah, it doesn't work if you're subscribed to several services. Or maybe it could if you meticulously add/remove credit the exact days…

I am happy to see this other option. I have been using privacy.com for virtual cards along with an anonymous domain from njal.la with catch all email address. I do this for most all my subscriptions, donations, and online purchases. In addition to control over subscriptions, nobody needs to know what I buy, subscribe to, or patronize.

Re: How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

#162

Post by npteljes »

ouid wrote: post #14
graypegg wrote: post #3

I heard someone say a while back that “cancelled customers are just potential future customers”. Anyone that’s had an easy cancellation process will remember that flexibility if they ever need that service again. No idea why no large subscription service seems to understand that. Make me go thru annoying hoops and you’ve lost me for good!

Well, exploiting brand loyalty is also a dark pattern. The better your brand, the more you can sell it for.

If the "better" really corresponds to the "more", that's not exploiting brand loyalty. That's just when a brand is an honest signal of the branded product or service. Exploiting the loyalty is when they cheapen the product or service, but keep the pretense of the brand. Singer sewing machines and Pyrex glass cookware come to mind as prime examples, but I'm sure there's many, where someone buys the company for the brand, and then drives it to the bottom for quick profit.

Re: How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

#163

Post by npteljes »

graypegg wrote: post #3

I heard someone say a while back that “cancelled customers are just potential future customers”. Anyone that’s had an easy cancellation process will remember that flexibility if they ever need that service again. No idea why no large subscription service seems to understand that. Make me go thru annoying hoops and you’ve lost me for good!

I don't think most people care, and so, businesses are not incentivized to be nice.

Re: How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

#165

Post by joshlemer »

I find that Audible is quite rude in one respect when cancelling a subscription. The way an Audible subscription works is that when you're subscribed, you get 1 credit for a free audiobook every month. If you don't use it, you keep accumulating them. If you have a few months where you don't buy anything, you can accumulate a lot of credits. But if you cancel your subscription, you lose all your credits, which you paid for! Yes, you can spend all your credits before cancelling, but I don't know right now which 5 audiobooks I want to buy, and I don't want to waste them on things I won't download, so I don't cancel right now.

Re: How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

#166

Post by pmontra »

hayst4ck wrote: post #122
chasing wrote: post #24

You know which services I don't have problems cancelling? Ones I subscribe to via Apple's in-app payments. I get that it sucks to have Apple scrape a percentage of my payments for themselves, but if you're a company I don't fully trust and/or want to have total control over my subscription without a bunch of hassle, Apple's IAPs are the way to go. Mostly this is great with the big streaming services. Want Disney+ or…

Every individual company has an incentive to be a bad actor when it comes to subscriptions (or dark patterns in general). Apple is a regulatory authority acting on this tragedy of the commons. Apple has created a situation where it has a near monopoly of force when it comes to apps in the apple'sphere and is using this to the benefit of consumers. It's no wonder people prefer apple's walled garden to libertarian andr…

> It's no wonder people prefer apple's walled garden to libertarian android.

Do they? Or, is that the reason why people in the US buy more iPhones than Androids and the rest of the world buy more Androids than iPhones?

Re: How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

#167

Post by liendolucas »

kornhole wrote: post #161
liendolucas wrote: post #58

Another way to forcefully cancel a subscription is simply registering with a card to which you can manually add or recharge credit, the day that you do not put money in it (or remove from it), the subscription should be automatically cancelled as they can't debit that amount from you (yeah, it doesn't work if you're subscribed to several services. Or maybe it could if you meticulously add/remove credit the exact days…

I am happy to see this other option. I have been using privacy.com for virtual cards along with an anonymous domain from njal.la with catch all email address. I do this for most all my subscriptions, donations, and online purchases. In addition to control over subscriptions, nobody needs to know what I buy, subscribe to, or patronize.

Hey thanks for suggesting about privacy.com. I'd have never thought that such thing could ever exist! I'm very surprised to see that this very countermeasure is mentioned in their landing page. Awesome!

Re: How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

#168

Post by josephcsible »

chasing wrote: post #24

You know which services I don't have problems cancelling? Ones I subscribe to via Apple's in-app payments. I get that it sucks to have Apple scrape a percentage of my payments for themselves, but if you're a company I don't fully trust and/or want to have total control over my subscription without a bunch of hassle, Apple's IAPs are the way to go. Mostly this is great with the big streaming services. Want Disney+ or…

That's a good argument for requiring App Store apps to offer Apple in-app payments for anything that costs money, but not for requiring App Store apps to only accept Apple in-app payments for anything that costs money.

Re: How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

#169

Post by garbagecoder »

alistairSH wrote: post #154
garbagecoder wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Pretty sure I was responding to somebody else? But, if Family Share doesn’t let you view and mange a child’s subscriptions that you’ve approved, that is awful, no disagreement there.

My bad. Deleted.

Re: How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed

#170

Post by JohnFen »

npteljes wrote: post #160
JohnFen wrote: post #20

Signing up for subscriptions is rarely a good idea.

What's wrong with it? One-time payments don't make sense for a lot of transactions. Apartment rent is the most obvious example, but any other continuous service that is in use is hard to imagine without subscriptions.

You are right, of course, that there are many sorts of transactions that "subscriptions" make sense for. However, subscriptions (particularly relatively inexpensive subscriptions) are dangerous and people get into trouble with them all the time.

The current fashion in our industry is to make everything a subscription even when it doesn't make sense for the product (a large portion of SaaS is exactly this). They do that because people don't tend to do well with them, and so it helps to maximize the company's revenue. Combine that with making it hard to cancel subscriptions and there's a real reason to be cautious about them.

Fixed recurring expenses are famously dangerous things, and should be avoided when at all possible.

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