Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

imgur.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 845 posts

Re: Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

#711

Post by hnrodey »

ceejayoz wrote: post #586
christophilus wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gyms will send you to collections for this, as not paying isn’t the same as canceling. I’d be afraid of the NYT doing the same.

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.

Re: Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

#712

Post by namibj »

eplanit wrote: post #593
whoisjuan wrote: post #25

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…

Its brand is about all it has going for it. It's the IBM of journalism. We like to think it's still a leader, but we're kidding ourselves in doing so.

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.

Apart from that, they're great.

Re: Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

#713

Post by throwanem »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #701
throwanem wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

I think Brazil did a better job of this than The Fifth Element , but yeah, I'd love to read/see more modern equivalents. Recommendations welcome.

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!

Re: Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

#714

Post by tjr »

throwanem wrote: post #603
PoignardAzur wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

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.

Re: Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

#716

Post by iscrewyou »

jopsen wrote: post #384
iscrewyou wrote: post #193

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.

Don't credit cards usually expire after 4 years? Otherwise, be European :)

They also expire after a person dies. The burden shouldn’t be on the user but on the company.

If you are American in the living room, what are you in the bathroom? you're-a-peein....

Re: Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

#717

Post by duckfang »

sneak wrote: post #179
jiggawatts wrote: post #53

This is nothing. Try cancelling the "monthly" Adobe Creative Suite subscription without paying out the remaining 11 months!

Fun fact: the Adobe Creative Suite is insanely simple to pirate.

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.

Re: Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

#718

Post by [deleted] »

wodenokoto wrote: post #464
Spooky23 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t understand. If AOL and telcos were scamming people, how did you make money off of their scams?

[deleted]

Re: Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

#720

Post by sequoia »

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.

Post reply on HN