I signed up for America's Test Kitchen one time, because they had a nice program for learning the basics. Probably used it for a couple months, and then I was done with that content and wanted to cancel. Of course, even though you can sign up online, you have to cancel on the phone. On hold for 20-30 minutes during work hours, then talk to the rep, then listen to their retention offer, then it's successfully cancelled.

I actually loved the content, and would probably have resubscribed for a month here and there. (Cook's Illustrated is part of the same group and their content is also great.) But I will never do it again because of this experience.

How many people decided to get the new Playstation next time because of a frustrating experience cancelling their xbox subscription? You won't see those numbers in a spreadsheet.

I will never use Xfinity/Comcast again in my life if I have a choice and will try to make sure everyone knows how shitty they are. Unfortunately they have monopolies in many areas and can be as shitty as they want, but if you have a choice I recommend never using them.

I can't believe that in 2021 these tactics are still legal. It's also stupidly shortsighted because in the long term I'm pretty sure they lose money by making everyone hate them. If it was easy to cancel, I would happily sign up again in the future without giving it much thought and would think positively of the company.

Edit: I also want to add that I was paying extra to not have a contract so I could easily cancel.

For a time, I resorted to having an attorney cancel my Comcast service to ensure it actually happened.

But once, months after the attorney forwarded my Comcast cancellation confirmation, I received a notice from a collections agency for the exact Comcast account I had cancelled. The attorney took care of that too.

My new (and best) method for dealing with Comcast is to use a fake name and social. I've been using the cats' names for the past few years, and it works great!

I recently wanted to quit Comcast service at one of my properties, so I went online to chat. No agents available, so I just removed my credit card from the account and stopped paying. They'll figure it out eventually. And good luck of they're going to try to collect from Westley the Cat. He's unemployed.

I will never willingly use Comcast (and they don't care, because monopoly).

Like shibboleet, but for cancellations.

They let you use a fake social security #?

"Why are you cancelling?"

"I'm moving overseas."

"Where to?"

"I'd prefer not to say."

"North Korea"

Ask me a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

1. You have all the necessary data and

2. You are interpreting it correctly and completely

This is almost never true, so instead “data driven” is mostly “data covering-your-ass.” Maybe the future will yield leaders more capable of wielding data less like a cudgel, but I’m not optimistic.

I was able to switch to a new company with transparent simple billing and I will never go back to Comcast even if they offer me a better deal on a better product.

Their customer service policies were horrible and anti consumer. They also routinely throttle certain types of traffic. BitTorrent and Xbox were both verifiably throttled for me during different periods of being a customer of theirs. They increase billing every few months until you complain.

I had to constantly fight to prove that my modem was owned by me. And they just kept adding it back as their equipment and charging me a monthly fee for it. They wanted me to prove I bought it. Wanted to know where I bought it. Etc. I had to call and prove that I indeed bought and paid for it myself numerous times.

Point being. I will never go back. I suspect many others will not go back either once given another option. And options are coming through community fiber projects, 5G and Starlink to some of the areas where Comcast has been the only option.

I'm a fan of Serious Eats for cooking content. Again, ATK was great except for the subscription thing. Looking at their Support page, it looks like nothing has changed with their cancellation policy[1] (the fact that you can cancel your physical magazine subscription online, but not the website subscription is hilarious). I would LOVE to know if they have support for online cancellation for California customers, that they just disable for non-California customers. I've heard of companies doing things like that.

Not sure if Playstation did the same, but Xbox doesn't make this difficult this anymore anyways. In fact, recently I started a Game Pass Xbox subscription on my xbox account and used it for a couple days. Then I realized I should do it on my main microsoft account instead (so I don't have multiple accounts anymore), so I cancelled. They gave me a full refund automatically without me needing to ask or do anything. So companies do change, although I imagine it's just easier to implement it this way anyways. Phone-based customer service is really expensive.

[1] https://www.americastestkitchen.com/support#change-membershi...

Now I use a privacy card for all subscriptions to avoid the hassle

I'm mad that it works.

The crazy thing is they replied, but refused to take me off the list unless I sent them an actual physical letter in the post. A few emails in they claimed it was due to a "technical" issue. That BS annoyed me so much, I am now into the 3rd decade of my own personal British Airways boycott

Edit: I realise that's insane but it makes me giggle everytime I deliberately don't book BA, and I wonder to myself how much money I would be willing to loose by going for the next most expensive ticket, just to keep my boycott going

Even if it’s PEANUTS to them. I feel better, because at least I’m not participating in perpetuating a shitty system.

I feel especially good about it when those companies are ubiquitous and hard to avoid, because I feel rather righteous against an all encompassing behemoth that likely would have got my money otherwise.

I just use Gmail's "Report as Spam" feature in these cases. If enough people do it when they can't unsubscribe easily, it's gonna start eating into their deliverability.

I end up engaging in the same type of behaviour with companies that also do not make unsubscribing obvious, or, worst of all, have slightly annoying GDPR-mandated tracking-denying UIs. Trying to get me to go through two sub-menus and not having a "Deny all" toggle ? Good, good, good. See how petty I can get, $COMPANY !

I'm surprised BA even had email in 1991 or earlier. Since britishairways.com doesn't even make an appearance in the Wayback Machine until late 1998, perhaps we can forgive them their anachronistic practices of the day.

If someone says they are "into the 3rd decade of" something (for example, programming experience), I would generally assume that means 30 years or more.

But what you're saying is that it could mean as little as 11 years, e.g., from 2010 to 2021 (yes, 2010 is still part of the '00 decade¹ and 2021 marks the beginning of the '20s, strange as that was to me).

¹ https://www.farmersalmanac.com/new-decade-2020-or-2021-10090...

It's much more fun for me to think of that as "in to the 3rd decade", rather than just over 20 years ago.

And the English version of the government website about it: https://business.gov.nl/regulation/automatic-renewal-subscri...

Which says: "Consumers must be able to cancel their agreement in exactly the same way as they signed up for them."

As well as disallowing an automatic fixed term renewal. After an initial contract the customer must be allowed to cancel at any point not just yearly. This one had a big impact on the telecom industry a couple of years ago.

No it's not. The VP is maximizing their bonus and career growth within the company. That is likely tied to relatively short term metrics and especially to not having drops in metrics.

On the other hand, it's quite well-known how easy it is to stop/start a Netflix subscription.

I haven't been in this situation, but I always imagined that there is a simple way out: send them a certified letter instructing them to cancel your subscription. If they continue charging after that, it's chargeback time.

Any opinions on whether or not this would work?

And digital "purchases" aren't really purchases.

I'm pretty sure a business that accepts credit cards cannot decide to 'opt-out' of chargebacks!

Says all purchases are final. You may only request a refund and they reserve the right to deny it. Forcing it via chargebacks basically locks your account.

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psn-terms-of-service...

Reserves the right to suspend and terminate accounts associated with chargebacks.

> How many people decided to get the new Playstation next time because of a frustrating experience cancelling their xbox subscription

If you make it hard to unsubscribe when people are short on time/money/interest, they will probably be less likely to resubscribe when they have the time/money/interest.

Long-term customers on something like Xbox Live have a larger incentive to resubscribe to recover access to their game library.

On the other hand, random web site X is probably just looking to churn through subscribers.

It's something of a tragedy of the commons; the incredible difficulty of unsubscribing from (everything that's a monthly bill) makes people wary of subscribing to anything.

If you are optimizing for money made in the next month - or even next two years - then by definition making it hard to cancel will bring in more money. But it does hurt the brand long term (which is harder to measure)

Companies rely too much on analytics.

Eventually most states passed similar laws and so we opened it up to all US accounts. I'm not sure what the experience is like today.

Personally I think that any time you grant permission to anyone to bill you automatically on a recurring basis, you need to be able to revoke that permission. This ought to be a fundamental mechanism of personal banking that you ought to be able to manage on your bank account online. It's astonishing to me that your bank can't even tell you all the ongoing recurring payments that are permitted on your account (or if they do, it's an ad hoc implementation that tries to detect recurring payment amounts, vendor names, etc.)

I think that was the point of the comment.

While I agree it should be a default setting, it's a useful little trick.

Vote in the next election for people/party that are more consumer friendly than industry friendly.

For all its flaws, CA had some of the most consumer and employee friendly (such as no non compete) laws.

Vote.

But hey, we get startups whose usp is cancelling services.

Seems pretty normal to everyone I complain, that I still pay for my O2 bill after sending the cancellation letter(Physical piece of paper) for the umpteenth time.

My understanding is that this will be reflected in credit reporting as delinquency- seems like a lose-lose in that sense. Can someone who has done this weigh in?

When you say “you can”, are you just saying “you can ask”, or that you’ve had success doing this?

If the latter, mind sharing which card provider that was with?

If there's hope for beating this dark pattern, it lies with banks/CC companies

I.e., user can cancel subscription on website, system automatically writes cancellation letter, letter is sent to corresponding company address. If cancellation fails, then an official complaint is served to the company, and from there it follows the usual court process.

That's a very bad argument. If you guide yourself by that logic then you can't really blame anyone for doing anything, because everything is justified.

It’s possible for the argument to be true in this context and false in another context.

Ye goode olde self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is the norm.

The one I'm still hooked on, that this reminds me I've now given something like $3,000 dollars to over 3 years because I've been too lazy to make a phone call and wait on hold, is the YMCA.

Even religious nonprofits are engaging in dark patterns.

Maybe the immediate threat of developers quiting wouldn't have, but I think something might have eventually. Probably change from the top. My recent experience with the xbox gamepass app on Windows let me cancel my subscription fairly easily on both the console and the pc (two different accounts) without ever having to call someone. I like to think the culture at xbox has changed, maybe not microsoft, but maybe it will trickel up eventually.

You mean shady subscription business models right? Because Microsoft is certainly not alone.

Just the other day I had to CALL (as the only option) Network Solutions to cancel a security product.

so what that Microsoft isn't alone, their (poster) experience allows them to know unequivocally that Microsoft and the employees that work there make decisions that don't align with their personal ethics -- so they take out their anger on Microsoft.

the statement '...but we all lost a little bit of faith in shady subscription business models ' makes no sense -- the shady ones don't self identify, and it's not the methodology that is generally despised, it's the entities that that employ such methodologies against the public.

It went live, and almost immediately the number of ad clicks dropped significantly. It turned out that the older site was so hard to use that customers would inadvertently click on ads, bringing up the revenue. The new site was so much easier to use that customers clicked on less ads.

The changes were almost immediately rolled back.

I think eventually the new site was put back in, but only after they ensured that ad clicks wouldn't go down precipitiously, but I had after by then.

A few publications that I enjoy is on my "Never subscribe" list because of the difficulty of unsubscribing. On the other hand, unsubscribing from HBO Max (at least via Apple TV) was so easy that I don't hesitate to unsubscribe and resubscribe and have done so a couple of times.

Unfortunately that's the allure of dark and customer-hostile patterns - they extract a lot of money from people, at least in the short term.

If you're Microsoft/Xbox, though, you might want to think a bit about long term.

IE, you're part of the problem. You're just rationalizing to make yourself feel better.

That's not true. Governments exist to deal with this kind of situation. If companies make it difficult for citizens to cancel subscription, it is time to regulate subscriptions.

Why is the responsibility of some developers to lose their jobs to stop a company doing something that is completely legal. If they have done that, they will have my gratitude and admiration. But, the developers are not "part of the problem". Microsoft is the problem, and the lack of regulation the other part.

General Premises: 1. Agent A enforces Action X onto Agent B 2. Action X hurts C with some probability. Not Action X hurts B with high probability. 3. For all persons D under A, the probability of Not Action X is vanishingly small.

Reasonable Argument: 1. If B performs Action X bad things happen to C. This makes them partly responsible. However, under premise 3, B's counterfactual contribution is vanishingly small, whereas A's contribution is close to 100%.

Unreasonable argument: 1. As the final link in this particular chain of events, B is wholly responsible for the harm done to C, because had they suffered harm with high probability, they would have ensured the reduction of the probability of non-harm to C by a vanishingly small amount.

I would have resubscribed shortly thereafter if the cancellation flow had been good, or even just average. But because of how bad it was, I have never resubscribed, and most likely never will. Their cancellation UX cost them 5+ years of subscription revenue from me. Not only that but I go around telling people about how bad it was

Unionize.

That is human dignity from the sales point of view: that of a particle.

I sympathize with you. If you have quit, you would have my admiration and gratitude. But, what you did is reasonable. Microsoft was not doing anything illegal.

This is the reason why regulations exists. If companies are abusing consumers by making it difficult to cancel a service, developers cannot be the responsible to bring justice. Governments have that responsibility.

> I ran the diff. Each file had the same change - they had added code that makes an ajax saveEmail() call onBlur. In other words, email addresses were being saved to the database when a user inputs an email and the input loses focus.

e.g. The article situation is solved by the GDPR. This would completely break the GDPR as it requires informed consent before saving personal information like an e-mail.

If your government is not solved this issues, it is time to get a better one. I wish people, including in this threat, stop blaming employees for the fault of the bad action corporations. Corporation morality is a good example when the total is less than the sum of its parts.