Re:The California Exception
by distributedsean on Wednesday May 05, 2021 @08:20PM
(#27057627)
I'm not standing up for dark patterns here (as a person who runs a subscription business I hate them because it makes it harder for people like me to run an honest business) but there is a big difference between offering a virtual service (i.e. Slack) and shipping somebody a physical product like a Newspaper.
They do the same thing for digital-only subscriptions.
In Musk’s biography it mentions how he argued it should be trivial to get your money out of x.com or else people won’t deposit in the first place.
This is almost like that. The WSJ is bad too. But I’ve noticed that cancelling and restarting my Audible sub was totally painless.
Fwiw I think slack absolutely nails this and is a net positive for them in the long run. They automatically refund inactive users which means you don't need to "think" too much about adding people. I wish more companies would experiment with this kind of "honest" billing vs expending all their effort on layer upon layer of dark patterns.