To supplement other news sources am always reading Apnews, Reuters, Al Jazeera and The Stranger (local to Seattle).

NYT is just not a hill I'm willing to die on re: marketing etc.

If they sent out a survey about "why you're no longer a customer" I suppose it would provide one channel for explaining one's actions. Oddly, I seem to get those constantly when I am a customer, but essentially never when I'm a former or inactive customer.

On privacy grounds I like the idea that non-customers would be left alone, but on boycott-impact grounds it seems like having some kind of predictable "what are we doing wrong?" channel would be nice too.

Yay, American "capitalism".

If you think they give one flying fuck about what customers think I have news for you: the only thing that matters is what the board thinks and if revenue is rising but everyone hates the product/company they won’t even blink.

I'm a fan of writing actual paper letters, which are (marginally) harder to ignore than emails, and (at least I like to think) carry a bit more moral authority, since I'm making the effort to print and (pay to) send them. In my letter I make it clear what I like they're doing, but reserve most of the rest of the letter to express my displeasure at the things I'm most displeased with.

Often these letters disappear into a black hole. Morbid curiosity leads me to wish for a response, but I'm jaded enough to know that even if they respond enthusiastically to my criticism with promises of change, until they actually change, it's just an empty promise. So at the end of the day, often I just want to vent and move on.

I have to believe that if enough people did this, it would move the needle somewhat. If not, well, at least I have the satisfaction of having done something.

My pet peeve with the NY Times online is that there's no escaping the upsell screen after logging on.

In the beginning I would still compile user complaints into write ups for my managers à la “hey these 50 people hate that we do X, maybe we could do Y and win back their gratitude/trust” - but I soon realised that’s just a waste of my lifetime, because PM don’t give a fuck.

And why should they? Even if you improve the thing it won’t matter - the majority of people just want to vent like you; they don’t care anymore if the product improves, even if you would give them the perfect product of their dreams it wouldn’t change their minds.

This might sound jaded but there is a reason why the market is dominated by god-awful products - those that gave too much of a shit were sorted out early enough and only those that focus ruthlessly on the money and only the money survive.

There are a few exceptions of course but those just prove the rule to me.

Even if the faulty product/service never changes, writing those letters can result in savings of hundreds of dollars a year if done right.

So I'm not sure the theory holds up.

I know this is not your point, and you should not be forced to do this, but uBlock Origin has a very nice filter which can hide DOM elements on the page if you set it up. Lifesaver with annoying webpages.

I deleted linkedin a few years ago because of the ridiculous volume of emails and their dark patterns about cancellation. NYT is just not a hill i'm willing to die on unlike linkedin, for example

Same for booking.com or Microsoft which are even more trash.

This kind of knots get solved automatically in markets that are very easy to enter, or by regulation. That's why for the commercial examples, we can have consumer protection laws that create little distortion and have a better equilibrium. Good luck trying to use that lever to fix politics though.

A good way? No. There's a way, which is to get a person with enough clout to yell at them on social media in the hope that it generates attention and scares them. There used to be a time when companies had customer service and actually listened but apparently the C-Suite at some point had the idea that you can just ignore your customers.

Leave a bad review where their social marketing team will see it.

No. at least not as a consumer in the marketplace. That's why people who act like the market creates a good fit for consumer preferences or go on and on about things like "revealed preferences" are just plain wrong.

(I subscribe to Bloomberg, and send their emails to feeds which end up in a https://karakeep.app/ instance for consumption)

This new change has really disappointed me.

Iraq war: not even once.

And making it hard to cancel is not just "marketing" . There are even laws to prevent that sort of thing.

Yes, we should be clear on this. It's fraud. What the NYT is engaging in is fraud.

1 Subscribe at some very reasonable intro rate: $4 a month for 6 months

2 The intro rate expires and goes to $25 a month.

3 I call the number to cancel, say I am canceling because expense

4 They offer the intro-rate again to keep me, I accept

5 goto 2

Lately, however, I haven't even had to call someone. I just go through their webapp and it automatically offers the intro rate again. I suppose that if I decline that, I would have to talk to someone, but I really like the NYTimes and $4.24/month is reasonable to me.

And yes, I think they do have some sense of desperation chasing them. It costs money to do what they do and newspapers are a hard business.

By the way... if the OP really doesn't want to bother with a subscription, many public libraries offer digital access in the form of 72 hour passes to the NYTimes, the passes are unlimited. I realize that public libraries aren't cool for the libertarian set, but it is a viable option. There are tons of other newspapers and magazines available to read online for free too through your public library (needs a library card though).

On their reporting, they want to appear to be objective but their biases are clear. For example, their campaign against Mamdani at all stages (it continues). They always have a couple of crazy "conservative" columnists. And so on.

I send all their emails to spam, and X out of the pop-ups. For now.

One caveat is the subscription "rental" is for only a 3 day period, so you have "renew" your subscription every 3 days. This only takes 2 clicks though. For San Francisco public library: https://ezproxy.sfpl.org/login/nyt.

I can’t promise I would pay $300/yr to access a great public library, but I would like the option to try it.

My in-laws have a decent (not great, but decent) one in their city, and for sure they will never use it, but they aren’t going to drag the documentation up there and get cards just for me.

Many of us do not have that option.

What's your library's page?

I have a few library cards so I'm curious as to which ones have better or worse terms.

It used to be 3 days until some time last year.

Changes every 6-12 months, but that's easy to update.

That hasn't been true for, what, almost ten years? When I cancelled three months ago, it was about three or four clicks through the beg screens, and done. No, I don't live in CA.

Do not subscribe to the NYTimes. Use your library card, if one must read it, and unfortunately as the undeserved "paper of record" one must often read it to be kept aware of what others are being fed. There's no baby here to throw out with the bath water, I find other places have far better coverage for all the topics I care intensely about. For example, their Ukraine coverage is basically Russia-lite, and extremely anti-Ukrainian, I haven't seen such biased coverage anywhere else except for far-right rags.

That was 5 years ago. California's "click-to-cancel" law was amended in 2024, effective July 1, 2025.

This is very surprising to me, I thought they were kind of pro Ukraine biased.

I asked an AI and it came back with this:

> The New York Times' coverage of the war is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine in its framing, tone, and attribution of responsibility, though critics argue this manifests as omission of context regarding NATO expansion and US intelligence involvement rather than direct support for Russia.

Somewhere Walter Duranty is looking up and smiling.

If people stopped buying from unethical businesses it would be practically impossible to function in the modern day. Not only is it extremely difficult to know what businesses are “ethical”, but it’s becoming increasingly easy to assume no business is truly ethical. e.g. Environmentally friendly clothing brand Everlane just sold to SHEIN of all places.

Years later, I wanted to sub again, and this time I did it through the iOS app. Best decision ever, as now it just sits alongside my other App Store subscriptions and is easily cancelable in a single click.

If they got what I want, I don't care about ethics, I care about value. I've just never seen value in NYT.

Well you sound nice to share a society with.

Oh the irony of telling somebody to instantaneously unsubscribe from something notoriously hard to unsubscribe from.

Me personally, I just go on the web chat every once in a while and say I want to cancel, and they give me a nice discount.

Happily, this practice is illegal in California. Sometimes consumer-protection laws work ... and are necessary.

(As a hackaround, try using a VPN to make it appear as if you are connecting from California...)

that's totally irrelevant: Conde Nast for Wired is a shameless offender, for example. took me hours to cancel some autorenewing subscription i never subscribed for, perhaps enabled years ago through some dark pattern in iOS, but i genuinely don't know, and am not easily tricked.

I guess there are more people who give up on unsubscribing than who refrain from subscribing?

Honestly if it was easier to unsubscribe I'd probably have an on and off again subscription, but I'll never subscribe again because I don't want to jump through those hoops to unsubscribe.

FWIW, as a subscriber to both, I have more often found myself manually renewing lapsed subscriptions than going through painful cancellation processes to get out of them. I get the Economist through DiscountMags.com where it is often available with a discount.

You are not wrong for thinking that, but I encourage people to consider that generally the business and editorial areas are largely independent of each other because of the value of editorial independence in case they think that the lack of ethics applies to their journalism too.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/05/new-york-times...

They have predilection for defense of elites, including Trump, and have not challenged his corruption to the degree that they have challenged, say Clinton's accusations of corruption. Their defense of the elite in their coverage that launched the war in Iraq, the outright corruption of their own reporters and editors, is not reflected in the overall reputation of the NYTimes. Holding them up as the beacon of good journalism results in poor judgements on what's happening with current affairs, because they are often quite biased in very disastrous ways that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and trillions of wasted defense spending.

More recently, the circling of the wagons of those considered "in-group" like Olivia Nuzzi has also been despicable, but definitely descriptive of the general editorial choices at the NYTimes.

However I don't expect as many people to agree with me that the NYTimes has an undeserved reputation for journalistic excellence, so I focus mostly on their bad business practices.

This thread has a whole bunch of Charlie Browns in it who are "shocked, shocked" to find that Lucy has pulled away the football once again...

I unsubscribed a couple years ago. It was a click on the website. (Just checked. Cancelling online without talking to anyone is still an option.)

> I've been told they have stopped this predatory practice due to some newly passed laws or something, but they did not stop their predation due to their own values.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...

A couple of years later resubscribed. I also subscribe to the WSJ to make sure I receive a more balanced viewpoint.

WSJ offered me an online cancel option after I moved (cough) to California.

It was a digital subscription by the way - usually they have your address on file anyway because you used it to verify your credit card.

[1]https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...

I moved into a new home. I kept the old one for a few weeks extra. Needed time to move out.

I signed up for CenturyLink at my new home.

After six weeks, I tried to turn off internet at my old house.

* I can’t.

* CenturyLink wouldn’t let me cancel, without waiting on hold for an hour or more

* I work overnight

* CenturyLink is open when I’m asleep

So I’m paying for two plans with the same company. Thanks CenturyLink.

At each of these locations there is one or more necks that can be wrung if something goes wrong with my services

I know it's not really a solution for your nocturnal proclivities, but I think the argument holds. If you had to sacrifice a couple of your sleeping hours but you know you can sort your problem, then you migt be inclined to do so?

Sure name one who is ethical and successful.

Twenty years ago - back in 2005–2006, when the world was just going massive online - they had to explain to newspaper owners what the internet was… and some of them simply fell behind.

In general, we should value all “traditional” media, because what passes for news today are flash-in-the-pans that may not be here in 10–20 years - it has generally been found that links have an average lifespan of 10 years, which means that “today’s new, great, free, independent” news may not be here with us in 10–15 years.

(I’ve been doing really small b2b media for 25 years, so I know how it hurts when a PR agency comes to me - having been paid by a client - and “begs” me to publish their article for free.)

Every year I get offered the intro rate again of maybe $5/week. then cancel when it gets too cold to sit outside and read.

Might cost them more to print and deliver it.