The New York Times uses the dark patterns it derides

I have adopted a zen posture to this sort of hypocrisy which involves believing both these things:<p>1. It is good to call out hypocrisy like this article does where a publishing entity is engaged in behavior completely contrary to the behavior called for in their published words.<p>2. It is also good that the reporter’s journalism is sufficiently free (as in freedom) that they are able to write so independently of the behavior of the mother ship.<p>Like, the world would definitely be a worse place if reporters at Bloomberg declined to do some of the excellent reporting they’ve done on tech company tax dodges just because (hypothetically) Bloomberg was a tech company that did some corporate tax dodging. It’s good that they do it. It’s also fine that people note the cognitive dissonance.<p>It’s sort of like how I feel about Googlers protesting sexual harassment or the China search project. Personally I still think they are affiliated with a company that engages in a lot of bad practices but good on them for at least trying to change some thing however small. And at the same time I feel free to say “well ya they’re protesting this guy who was abusing his underlings but their company is abusing all of us” or whatever.

I called to cancel. I was offered $14&#x2F;month promotion, and then after I agreed to the deal and gave them credit card they said I will be charged $14 every 4 weeks. I said agreed to $14&#x2F;month, that&#x27;s not the same as $14 every 4 weeks, because $14&#x2F;month is $168 per year, but $14 every 4 weeks is $182.49 per year. They said they will charge $14 every 4 weeks, and I decided to cancel because of their scammy offer.

I&#x27;ve considered actually subscribing to news media but the behaviour of the NYT and a few known others have left me not to trust the entire industry to behave responsibly with a subscription, so I am at least 1 anecdote of someone not subscribing because of knowledge of the cancellation process

Nir here, author of the blog post. Question - Did anyone else notice that the NYT did not accurately describe what the &quot;roach motel&quot; dark pattern is in their original piece? They wrote, &quot;To prevent your information from being shared with third parties, you have to opt out after the payment screen.&quot; But that&#x27;s not the roach motel, that&#x27;s a default. According to DarkPatterns dot org, a roach motel is when the &quot;...design makes it very easy for you to get into a certain situation, but then makes it hard for you to get out of it.&quot; Why did the NYT get something like this wrong?

&gt; I told the representative I wanted to cancel. Then I was offered reasons not to. I responded with “no thanks” each time. Then, I waited for the representative to reply and come back with several rounds of offers to get me not to cancel. On and on, the process went until I was finally allowed to leave.<p>That&#x27;s fairly easy to deal with. Answer every question, argument, and pitch from the representative with &quot;please cancel my subscription&quot;.

Ironically, there&#x27;s no &quot;Unsubscribe&quot; link anywhere visible on the author&#x27;s website for his newsletter.<p>You have to wait for his <i>weekly mail</i> or add &quot;unsubscribe&quot; to the URL.

A newspaper isn&#x27;t a monolith and, by design, the members of the editorial board have very little connection to the business side of the newspaper.<p>You&#x27;re absolutely right to call out bad behavior of the subscription department, but the &quot;liar, liar&quot; heading is unfair.

That&#x27;s happened to me too, and every time I consider re-subscribing, I remember my terrible experience canceling my subscription so I decide not to. Summary of my experience: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;esesci&#x2F;status&#x2F;1357280929316622336" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;esesci&#x2F;status&#x2F;1357280929316622336</a>

Normally I&#x27;m not a huge fan of throwing in new laws but I do think it would be reasonable to legislate that unsubscribing from a service must be as easy as subscribing. If we are going to give companies the legal ability to auto-charge you each month, we should give people the legal ability to stop that at any time easily.

There was a thread about this recently:<p><i>The New York Times criticizes dark patterns, but fails to criticize themselves</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27120686" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27120686</a> - May 2021 (31 comments)

&gt; I was surprised, however, to find the New York Times uses the very same dark pattern it derides to prevent its own subscribers from canceling.<p>It was very simple for me to cancel my NYT subscription. I got a new credit card because the old one was getting mysterious charges on it. I forgot that NYT had that card on my subscription. I soon started getting dunning notices on it, and logged in to change the card number. The NYT kept rejecting the new card, and I gave up.<p>No more NYT for me!

For me, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy.com</a> has been a lifesaver in situations like this. Can&#x27;t cancel a subscription? Just cancel the card. Voilà!

If a company does this, I am NEVER subscribing again.<p>Whereas if a company makes cancelling&#x2F;renewing super painless I&#x27;m going to come and go as a customer as it fits my needs. This results in more overall business for the company.<p>I am literally going through this right now: A company called &quot;Ooma&quot; makes dongles that provide voice-over-IP for landline phones (inc. a telephone number), for $10&#x2F;month with &quot;no contract.&quot; But our use-case isn&#x27;t <i>every</i> month, it is once every few months, and they require call-to-cancel&#x2F;hassle-to-cancel, so now we&#x27;re reviewing alternatives that are more legitimately flexible.<p>They&#x27;re literally going to lose my recurring business <i>only</i> because of this anti-consumer practice.

I don&#x27;t understand how dark patterns like these are ever a good long-term business strategy for a company<p>You drain user trust for short term gain. What is the point of continuing to take someone&#x27;s money if they no longer use your product? If someone doesn&#x27;t want my product, I sure as hell don&#x27;t want their money and would be embarrassed if they ever paid by mistake

The irony is NYT ran an article chastising Amazon for the very thing they also engage in.<p>I recently had to call NYT to cancel my membership. The person on the other side ran me through a script, and each time I told them I didn’t want their counter offers. It was annoying.<p>To be honest here, I canceled my NYT subscription because of the very subtle yet obvious propaganda laced in their articles on a recent news event. They present themselves as honest reporters, when in reality there’s language that in a subtle manner takes a clear side and provides a distorted view of a complex situation.<p>The honest truth in my opinion is the NYT isn’t honest or more objective than other papers. Yet time and time again, their reporting is viewed as gospel.

Best way to ensure easy subscription cancelling is via an in-app purchase. Then cancelling is a few clicks without talking to anyone.

Kinda related but the NYT somehow kept on charging me even after I froze and then closed a privacy.com card associated with the account (this went on for months). No idea how it happened but I eventually had to spend 30 minutes going through the maze to cancel.

I had the same experience cancelling my subscription. I was able to avoid the sales pitch the author received (I guess I was a little firmer), but I doubt I&#x27;ll be subscribing again after I realized there was no unsubscribe button.

LPT: sub things using a Privacy virtual debit card. If unsubbing is hard, email the company you want to unsubscribe and then shut the card off with a single click. They tend to unsub you quickly when you stop paying.

I think apple&#x27;s in-app ads have the worst dark patterns. I tried to find a game for my elderly mom that didn&#x27;t try to get you to install some other app every few minutes via a full-screen popup. No dice.

This reminded me of the time where I read somewhere (I don&#x27;t have the source, unfortunately) that the fastest way to cancel the NYT(?) subscription online over the chat was to say &quot;I am going to jail.&quot;

Hmm, the author&#x27;s post contains lots of tracking images&#x2F;scripts.

NYT&#x27;s GDPR compliance UI is hilariously user-hostile. You can&#x27;t even opt out. There&#x27;s no chance this is accidental.