The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and look down at a generally frazzled and overloaded population, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to have you make.

If someone doesn't binge and their lifestyle includes watching things more consistently, they will pay a higher price to subsidize people who don't manage their own money. It is of course possible to accommodate everything by adding all kinds of choices but it costs time and effort and complexity to setup those systems, and those costs are always passed down to the consumer. As someone who manages my own financial life, I'd prefer not to pay those costs for people who don't.

I doubt the ability to look down will go away either, people who lack even this minimal amount of personal responsibility have endless ways of losing money and falling behind those who strive for personal responsibility. It's very costly and difficult for third parties to fix this kind of financial apathy.

And that makes me think a little more. So after doing that thinking, here's what I realized.

It can still be about Personal Responsibility for you and the other person if you have to pay your own freight about it. In fact--it's more! You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't being subsidized by other people, even. When you are standing on your own two feet in such a Personally Responsible manner.

Isn't that nice?

The easiest and most efficient way for a company to know that you're not providing value to them is by cancelling your subscription. I agree that companies making this difficult is bad, but many services don't make this difficult. Instead, you're asking them to read the mind of their customers which is not easy. Netflix does treat extreme periods of inactivity (IIRC more than a year I think?) as a reasonable signal that you've forgotten about it.

> You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't free-riding off other people, even.

I don't think you're really understanding the point. People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you.

Edit: I'm not sure there's anything I can say to sway your mind about this since you've really honed in on the emotional angle to this but I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't really a moralizing thing to me, I have been and know many people who fall short, I don't treat it morally. It's largely about resource allocation and behavioral incentives. Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly, it's overall much more efficient to ask consumers to signal their desires themselves, it's why markets tend to be more efficient. Making consumers pay the cost of mismanaging their finances also discourages them from doing it, increasing efficiency.

People who fail to cancel their subscriptions are not free-riding off anyone, they're paying $X per billing period.

> Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly

Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.

They're not free-riding currently, but what the parent is suggesting is that streaming subscriptions don't charge for months without activity.

> Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.

Creating alternative usage-based billing models when most customers are happy with a monthly model is hard and has real costs. There are already storefronts with a more usage-based model: stuff like iTunes and Google Play Store let you pay per movie & episode, that's typically what consumers use when they don't like a monthly billing model.

But, by that same logic, they should just be charging you by how much you watch. So it's no longer "don't charge them for the month they didn't view" but, instead, "charge them $X/minute watched". If you're going to go with usage based billing, go with usage based billing.

The point is that this is a choice by content businesses. Pausing and resuming payments could easily be frictionless, but it isn’t.

I generally disagree with dark patterns that make it onerously difficult to cancel, but many streaming services (like Netflix) don't make it that difficult and pausing and resuming payments is already easy enough. I just have to actually do it, not ask them to read my mind.

Auto-cancellation or whatever is never ever going to happen. Unless forced by regulation I suppose, which I don’t see a reason for. We’re not talking about fraud or deception, just the general day-to-day scumminess of capitalism.

All that said, I don’t think your argument carries the weight you think it does. “I’m happy my underutilization of a service subsidizes other users” isn’t a compelling story to me and doesn’t seem like a net benefit. To each their own.

(Anyway, a binger whose usage is equivalent to a non-binge watcher, except concentrated rather than diffuse, is not actually underutilizing the service and isn’t really who we’re talking about here. I think.)

I am actually talking about this here. It sounds like you understood my point but also think this is not what I'm talking about? I'm not saying I underutilize my service, I am actually talking about equivalent usage except concentrated rather than diffuse. When you ask companies to automatically omit fees for months of inactivity, you are punishing users who diffuse their use while rewarding users who concentrate their use.

> I mean, for starters this whole conversation is fantasy because streamers, or really, businesses in general, will never on their own initiative stop taking taking money from customers.

Literally false. Netflix did this because they're not trying to build a business on tricking people who don't want their product. But it's a fairly long period of inactivity because anything less and it's not clear if they actually forgot or not https://about.netflix.com/en/news/helping-members-who-havent...

No I get that, my point is that the usage pattern you’re describing isn’t really relevant here.

> Literally false. Netflix did this…

Great!

But here's the rub. While it is true that any given person in practice might benefit from such a pricing scheme, it isn't true that everyone could in principle benefit from such a pricing scheme. The model depends intrinsically on uneven and non-maximal usage of the service, which is what the aforementioned subsidizing is doing. For it to work, it requires that a large share of people overpay for the service, where overpaying means paying more than the value of what you receive (by definition, if you don't use a service, then you are overpaying). If everyone were using the service maximally, there would be no difference between paying for how much you use and paying a flat rate, because you can be sure that the service provider would raise prices to cover costs and reap profits.

So no one is doing you any favors here. Poor utilization is not just an "oops" on the part of the subscriber, but an essential feature of the business model. If everyone was being "personally responsible", the business model simply wouldn't work. And because this isn't a charity, the idea of being happy about subsidizing others users is kind of weird.

So two natural questions to ask are:

1. What could a pay-as-you-go model look like in such cases? Could it cover the expenses of the service? Arguably, no. Those who don't use much would probably continue not to use much. Those who do might reduce consumption, because now you must pay for what you use.

2. Is there a morally sound justification for paying at least a base rate for an unused or underutilized utility to keep it afloat (perhaps charging additionally according to usage)? Putting aside all utilitarian arguments, which I take to be unacceptable, we can find a number of cases that seem to operate similarly that we do not appear to object to. Take the salary, for example. One is not payed strictly according to the value one provides, though you could argue that salary is, ideally, a method of paying for the value provided in a diffuse way (value provided previous year reflected in the following year, esp. bonuses, or upfront payment with expectation of value). So salary doesn't seem quite the same. What about the fact that you can use the service on demand? This is like having a driver who gets payed for being on-call. It seems like this may be a good analogue to begin with to try to grasp the ethical and economic reality of the subscription model in question.

Firstly, I wasn't talking about under-utilization, I was comparing equivalent usage but one person watches most of their media consistently week by week while others binge a lot of content in a month and then take a break. They are not subsidizing each other in a normal monthly subscription model, they are just using the service in different patterns. But if the binger only paid for the month he binges, he's paying less but still consuming the same bandwidth.

Secondly, personal responsibility means different things to different people. It's absurd to suggest that if everyone was "personally responsible" they'd all be spending as much time as possible streaming TV shows to maximally utilize their media subscription. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do with health insurance is be as sick as possible so you get the most amount of medical care for your buck. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do in a buffet is to eat as much as humanly possible.

Most people are not hellbent on squeezing the last drop of value out every service, they accept the simplicity of a consistent monthly price so they don't have to spend the mental overhead of financially evaluating every single thing they consume. If you want to financially evaluate everything, you can go to a digital or retail store and buy one movie or TV season at a time, that way no one is subsidizing anyone else, but a lot of people think that kind of sucks.

The benefit you get in return is variety. In a buffet, it's easy to try small bites that you would otherwise be hesitant to pay full price for and you don't have to financially regret every bad bite of food.

Yeah, some people get less bang for their buck than others but not everyone is obsessed with coming out ahead.

This was Clay Shirky's argument at least a couple decades back about why microtransactions don't generally work. At least for optional small purchases making continuous "Is this 5 cent purchase worth it?" decisions is exhausting.

Music probably provides a better test case for this than video in general because you don't really many exclusives. Given the starting point of a lot of ripped/downloaded music, I could probably dispense with music streaming and just buy an album or two now and then but it's close enough to breakeven I don't bother.

So you -did- use your insurance this (and every) month. You didn't-claim- from insurance, but that's incidental.

Insurance exists to give you peace of mind (or more technically act as a hedge against your risk). You got that benefit/peace/hedge so you used your insurance.

Now, if we take this thought, you could argue that Netflix isn't there to provide "show x" which you may, or may not, watch. Rather its there yo provide you with the -option- to watch show x. Whether you watch it or not is up to you.

I feel this comparison is not equivalent though because risk is very real, while selling a "Netflix option" seems very contrived.

"Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible.

If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.

This is a poor perspective to have, and the purpose of government is to protect its citizens from predatory behavior. You're entitled to the opinion, but I vote for people who protect citizens, because that is where the greatest value is in aggregate improvement (vs "personal responsibility"). Existing is different levels of difficulty for everyone, and personal responsibility projection is of little value. But it is great if you're crushing it taking care of yourself.

(very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)

I think you meant to say "protect citizens from having any personal responsibility", right? Because that's what you are advocating - zero personal responsibility as-if it's hard to look at your bank account and cancel things...

Just enable purchase notifications in your banking app. Any time your account is charged you now get a notice... these are not difficult things to do!

> (very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)

This is a farce. If the proposed changes were well-meaning they'd eliminate overdraft fees entirely - but that would have the effect of banks simply declining transactions. People literally want to spend money they do not have, and also want it to be free to do so. Incredible...

Do you think so little of people that you do not believe they are capable of spending 5 minutes reviewing their bank account per month? So little that they are incapable of enabling transaction notifications on their smart phone (hell, when I first signed into my bank's app it wanted to enable them by default!).

This perspective is the one that believes things "just happen to them" and takes zero responsibility to actions or lack thereof.

You might as well be saying that people should take personal responsibility and do their taxes manually if they don't want to pay $50/year to use turbotax instead of pushing for a system where the government sends you an estimate that is likely to be correct for most people (since they're already doing that anyway).

This isn't a great comparison. Looking through a bank statement once a month and clicking "end subscription" takes a few minutes for anyone. Doing your taxes manually is much more difficult. This is the easiest economic decision to choose to stop partipating in in the history of the earth.

If we take the premise that 10 minutes to review your finances a month and then cancel unused subscriptions is not a burden(and good luck with canceling in 10 minutes) then doing basic taxes takes less time than a full yearly review.

There are a great many people here who argue that doing ones taxes are an impossible burden and the government should automate it away since they have the (most of) the data.

However here it should fall upon the individual to do all this labor in a case where the business has this information already compiled.

And we know that, because Apple basically mandated it with App Store subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions there takes seconds. And we also know that the various subscription companies absolutely hate it.

The one that specifically burns me to no end is I recall hearing from a friend that they were on the phone with a representative from one of those meditation apps trying to cancel their subscription, and just, your product literally is made for people who struggle with mental health issues and especially anxiety, and making that base of customers jump through social hoops of fire, and argue with another person and make them stand their ground on wanting to cancel, is a SUPREMELY CLASSLESS MOVE.

My idea of doing this would be to force banks, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe et cetera to have easy-to-list-easy-to-cancel subscriptions. Just two buttons, one to turn the subscription into an invoice you manually have to pay to keep going and one that cancels it outright through the payment provider.

That should hurt businesses more the more consumer hostile they are.

Unfortunately people for whom $10/mo hurts are usually working three part time jobs while also trying to get the kids to/from school and take care of them. So I can see why they might not have time.

So you are suggesting that these three part time jobs offer more than $60/h and thus are more valuable than a 10 minute finance review where you identify your misspending of $10/mo?

That is an absurdly short time for a meaningful financial review for anyone- whether they have a lot of financial transactions or if they don't (and may be unfamiliar or have anxiety about their finances). Especially if they have kids and serious responsibilities- these companies bank on you forgetting or being too exhausted to change.

I never put any sort of subscription on ACH. All subscriptions go onto credit cards. There were gradually increasing amounts from Netflix, which I got emails about, which I cancelled once I got the emails telling me the price was increasing once again. I waited 6 months because I already had an idea of what I was paying for, when I checked, it turned out there was nothing unexpected.

You calling me names because you can’t formulate a valid argument does not dispute that fact. It weakens your argument and goes against the nature of this site.

Six months in five minutes? How many transactions? (and did you remember them all?) How many different credit cards? How about your bank statements, other accounts, etc?

I still stand by the statement that 10 minutes is an absurdly small amount of time for a meaningful review of anyone's finances, and find your claim that you did it in 5 minutes very surprising. I would ask you to show me, but not interested in watching you take a dump :)

Why not point this logic to companies and ask them to do this for their customers? Surely you can see the value in saving every one of your customers 10 minutes.

I know I don’t have the time for the high transactional overhead of most subscriptions. As such, I don’t subscribe to anything beyond insurance and internet service.

Would it be nice to have other subscriptions? Sure, probably, but the (time) cost is more than I’m willing to bear.

If you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it.

Choose to improve things, even if your ideal is that everyone would take care of it themselves.

It’s all win except for the companies getting free money for no reason. Why not fix this?

[edit] put it this way: if easy visibility into subscriptions and standardized, easy cancellation mechanisms were already mandated, would there be a strong case for changing that?

Cool that you are mentally and physically fit, I am as well.

But there are lots of people who struggle with range of mental disorders or disabilities. Some might have depression some might have ADHD, some might just be much more forgetful so they might think it is good to check account balance but 30 mins later they just don’t feel or remember they had to do it.

That businesses and advocates play dumb when it comes to this basic fact is no longer astonishing to me, sadly

I would say they don’t even have to refund automatically but maybe send an email at least - “Hey are you still with us?” - after they see no activity on account for a month and we also know for sure they track user activity very closely.

But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce.

Doesn't this just add another hull to the titanic? People don't have 2 minutes to check their bank statements a month, but do have time to check their email regularly enough to catch this? I can't tell who this is for that would be strong enough to require governments to get involved.

Proposing that they refund money would be realistic if they would at least agree to send out email - which I do believe will never happen.

So refunding money is fantasy, sending out emails is realistic but since they won’t do it, that makes refunds even more unlikely.

Thing with returning tv would be more “I did not watch 10 days this month, reimburse these for me.”.

I don’t agree it should go this direction.

If someone did not even open list of movies for whole month or two that is a reasonable question to ask - should they get money back or at least a question via email if they really want any to keep the subscription.

I hope you wouldn't ask a person who gets harassed by their boss to take personal responsibility, and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are.

For these subscriptions, the customer holds not just equal power, but all the power. Clicking unsubscribe really isn't very difficult. If corporations held any power, some of them wouldn't try dark patterns.

Between large corporations and large governments, most areas of our daily life are impacted in some way. I prefer to think that I can take personal responsibility in spite of an authority attempting to take that away from me "for my own good."

What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service? You can play the blame game all day, but that doesn't actually give us any reason why not. "Cars shouldn't have seatbelts because you can just not crash your car" is a similar line of thinking that also doesn't make very much sense. Why shouldn't the car manufacturer take some level of responsibility?

Dying in a car crash is much worse than accidentally paying for Netflix so carmakers have a heightened responsibility to try and prevent it.

It doesn’t really map to the scenario at all, “dying in a car crash” isn’t a service people intentionally sign up for and then change their minds about.

Obviously the answer is that they CAN do that, but don't. It's nothing to do with responsibility and everything to do with them making a cheap buck off of human forgetfulness.

They do, through safety tests and improving it over the decades.

Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions.

Any subscription model works by amortising costs over a large population, which always means that some people will benefit more than others. To prevent businesses from charging for unused subscriptions, the only solution would be to ban subscriptions altogether and have everything on a pay-per-use basis. That would also include internet subscriptions and transit passes.

If Netflix will let you pay $2 to buy something from them, they sure don't advertise it. So this assertion requires what the customer wants to buy to be fungible. It's a mindset that requires one to implicitly accept the idea of content-as-gruel, and I think most people don't do that.

It also implies that people are rational and responsive actors and habituation doesn't exist, which isn't true either.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-sues-amazon-...

I don’t think it is entirely fair to demand personal responsibility when the adversary has so much more resources and incentives for making it hard to cancel.

This personally affected my friend. English was not their first language and they were tricked by Amazon into signing up for Prime. The extra charges and difficulty of canceling caused much distress for their limited budget.

We have pages and pages of charges each month, between groceries, camps, classes, school fees, school projects, birthday gifts, and now and then a teen grabbing coffee with friends.

I usually looks the bill quickly and see if there are any large purchases unexplained for, and of course credit card descriptions are very opaque sometimes. Noticing that month to month we had a Peacock subscription that someone signed up for as a promo, and never watched again, means I need to notice the one charge on page 3 AND poll all the family that yes no one watches.

Gym memberships operate the same way. Planet fitness could not operate if all paying members showed up at once. This freeloading behavior that is built into the pricing model is very similar to advertising, philosophically speaking.

The company would have to cover the costs, likely split between some expected decrease in churn and the rest in a price increase.

If the service is willing to afford eating that cost today, why wouldn't they do a price decrease across the board? Surely they'd rather help those who most use their service rather than the minority that pays but doesn't use it.

Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who lack liquidity. (Simple example: if you have $500 in your account, and the following transactions happen in sequence in a day: a +$200 deposit and a -$600 rent deduction, some banks will specifically override chronological order and process -$600 first so that you get an overdraft charge, despite having positive balance all the way when processing chronologically.) This is might not be a common problem for a lot of users of this website (though see a sibling comment re: ADHD), but the problem is real, not "petulance". https://www.nber.org/digest/202103/bank-ordering-debit-charg...

Of course this only happens to you and me, whereas banks can and do use daylight overdraft and can easily go billions in overdraft: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_dlod.htm (There is a 50 basis points charge for uncollateralized overdrafts (and none for collaterized) but that is less meaningful in relative terms than $30 charge for people in above scenarios.)

Indeed, and as the article also mentions, banks will intentionally maximize the number of overdraft fees by reordering transactions in a way that causes most pain. This should not be legal.

Do people need to have personal responsibility when they operate a business? Why is responsibility any less there?

I think it's irresponsible to exploit other people's mistakes (unless they are a competing business, and not always then either). It happens incidentally sometimes at minimal cost, but at high cost or when it can be avoided, it's the businessperson's responsibility to not do it.

Every one makes mistakes; you too. Forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who tresspass ...

It's not. They should be ensuring the service being paid for is available. That's their responsibility.

It's trivial for someone like Netflix to know, and they probably already track it.

It does matter that it's easier. In fact it can be automated. If a user is inactive for 30 days, the subscription could be disabled and automatically reenabled if and when they decide to use it. You wanna argue that would be a lot of work to implement?

And yes, I think this would be reasonable for someone like Netflix, and unreasonable for a paper magazine. What's so hard to understand about that? they're just not comparable.

Because a previous comment said it wouldn't require work. Now you also are saying they'd need to implement it. So we agree it needs work.

> Just admit your argument made no sense

Framing this as "admit" might make it seem like a fait accomplis, but I need a higher bar than that to be persuaded. Biased language only fools very basic readers.

> they're just not comparable.

Why not?

Life is too short to waste energy clinging onto bad arguments simply out of spite or poor self-esteem. Embrace cummingham's law.

Have a good life.

Sure there are a lot of complexities, but it's not that horrendous as someone who literally worked on recurring payments for a bank. You just simplify things by making it a pull system. A recurring payment is just authorization from the bank to withdraw up to X dollars every Y days/months/year (you want a design like this to avoid dealing with holidays and weekends on the bank side which vary for every country).

> Review your bank/credit accounts

I mean, shouldn't it be your responsibility to know exactly how much money you've made and spent? Why should a bank provide this information for you? Does this not serve as yet another lessening of personal accountability (pun *absolutely* intended)?

It's not "personal responsibility" or "ethical business". It's both.

Are there really people who struggle with not canceling subscriptions? It's genuinely hard for me to see how that's not a choice.

I could understand if we're talking about something like gambling addiction, where there's a compulsion.

But there's no addiction here. There's no scam. There's no taking advantage of children.

There's literally nothing but asking adults to be aware of their finances and to cancel subscriptions they don't want to pay for any longer. It's the absolute lowest bar I can possibly think of in terms of basic financial skills.

But otherwise, what are businesses doing to "maximize your chance of forgetting"? That's not a thing. That's not something they have control over or can maximize. For monthly subscriptions, you see it every month on your credit card. For yearly subscriptions, companies generally send a notice a ~week before, reminding you that you'll be charged, and then you get a receipt emailed.

That seems entirely reasonable to me. The rest is called personal responsibility. When you sign up for a subscription, you know full well what you're doing. You know it will continue until you cancel. There's absolutely nothing unethical about it being your responsibility to cancel.

As I've already mentioned, we agree that personal responsibility is important. I believe we can also agree that some people are unable to be fully responsible for reasons that escape them (depression, severe ADHD, other more pressing responsibilities like children who aren't doing well, etc.)

I think it takes a special kind of misanthropy to suggest that it's fine for companies to base their business model on the fact that such people will pay for a service they aren't using. I am not arguing for legislature or anything of the sort, but I still think it's unambiguously unethical.

It is, in the most literal sense, exploitative.

So why not also enjoy the convenience of only paying for what you actually use?

Additionally, hard disagree on your conclusions since it's not about being responsible or not; it's about the process of cancelling subscriptions being convoluted, unfriendly and filled with dark patterns.

Here's an alternate proposition: what if you could quickly and easily cancel any unwanted subscriptions directly through your banking app? Right there next to your expenses statements? What if we took it even further such that you could not only cancel right there but even request a refund for unused billing periods?

And taking it to an absurd extreme: what if you suddenly went into a coma and woke up 50 years later to a large bill from a subscription service you didn't use all this time? Was it a lack of personal responsibility?

Don't expect the police to track the guy down

I also can afford to do that but if that isn’t throwing money away I don’t know what is. I only consistently pay subscriptions that I consistently use. I feel like resubscribing is pretty easy and painless also, so not sure why you’d pay for something you know you don’t use consistently?