This is an interesting topic. If a company does something you approve of (e.g. do journalism) and something else you disapprove of (e.g. make canceling hard), is there a good way to signal both as a consumer? This is also relevant in the context of companies like Target, which has been boycotted by both sides of the US political spectrum for various reasons.

I have also wondered about this when boycotting companies for reasons that I suspected were not the most common reasons.

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.

Thus the thing to do, for funsies, is to subscribe, and then cancel, and give the poor customer service person on the other end of the line, a piece of your mind, every time you cancel. Boycotts generally don't work. But the goal is to make a signal that gets noticed by the C-suite. Unfortunately, the routes I see are in the pocketbook, the customer service department, and via Twitter, if they do actually happen to be there. A sustained prolonged boycott would work, but most people don't care. Screaming at the customer support person is just shitty to a low level employee that doesn't have the ability to affect change so empathetically thats horrible to do to them, so that's a no go as well. But that is by design. Thus, one way is to overcome that and be horrible to the CSR. But that sucks.

Yay, American "capitalism".

Being horrible to the CSR will never be noticed by the C-suite.

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.

Even then, it's a share price that matters to them. Revenue affects that, but unless they get a K1, it's the share price that really matters.

> If a company does something you approve of [...] and something else you disapprove of [...], is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?

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.

You know I spent a lot of my professional work life on the receiving end of these messages and if I had even one ounce of power to change anything for the better I would have.

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.

The flipside of companies not caring is that sometimes they tend to throw you a bone in the form of something they can control, like a free month of service, or a coupon for a free/discounted widget.

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

I spend quite some time in the political field and practically each paper letter I saw (aside from professional mass letters) was on the weird side.

So I'm not sure the theory holds up.

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

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.

There’s a form of Gell-Mann amnesia at work here. Why would you expect a company that is unethical in its business practices to be ethical where it counts, in its reporting? The answer is that it isn’t.

The product they sell is trustworthy news but they still have accountants. The high-quality news business is a rough business and few are profitable. I can understand why they might feel defensive and a more than a little spooked. How many profitable quality newspapers can you identify? NYT and WSJ - any others?

Good point. I vote with my dollar and do not support Amazon (directly; AWS is unavoidable). But that's your point!

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

I think it's pretty simple: the value of good journalism vastly outweighs the crappy subscription practices, but the value of stuff like same-day delivery does not outweigh th e harm Amazon causes.

Your dollar is always your vote. What society spends its labour on is the society it creates, far more so than a random tick in a box.

AWS is totally avoidable. Since the felted both my accounts, when I asked them to merge them, I am a very happy non-amazon, non-AWS user.

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

I don't host my own stuff there but as a general web user it's unavoidable.

It's a core question to public choice theory, and why people are generally very unhappy with politics in general. You end up with aggregations of baskets of goods that aren't just suboptimal for you, but suboptimal for the bast majority of consumers, but where there's no practical opportunity to offer the alternative. The barrier to even begin to compete is so high, so the agents (the owner of the newspaper, the retailer, or the politician) end up twisting the available options in their favor.

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.

>is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?

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.

> If a company does something you approve of (e.g. do journalism) and something else you disapprove of (e.g. make canceling hard), is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?

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

Cancelling yhe subscription does both. You can't cancel if you're not subscribed.

> This is an interesting topic. If a company does something you approve of (e.g. do journalism) and something else you disapprove of (e.g. make canceling hard), is there a good way to signal both as a consumer? This is also relevant in the context of companies like Target, which has been boycotted by both sides of the US political spectrum for various reasons.

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.

In this particular case, presumably if you value their journalism you would not cancel your subscription!

Automatic script that subscribes and unsubscribes every month and uses AI to waste their time on the phone as much as possible :-)

FYI you can get Money Stuff delivered by email without a Bloomberg subscription.

Thanks for that! I have been on Levine's website recently and for some reason thought they may deviate in content or something. But will try it out. It's a daily newsletter which is kind of high volume for me (which is why I hadn't subscribed prior) but will check it out. I actually may have been sub'd previously and had to check out because the push-model was slightly too much; would kind of prefer a pull model.

For anyone else interested, here’s the link to the newsletter: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

If you prefer pull, subscribe to it with https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com/

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

Great idea and just a note to anyone doing this (as I just did) - Bloomberg will send a confirmation code to the email which you have to get out of the feed. Took a few minutes, but it worked!

Great idea and thanks, will check it out!

The quality of the New York Times as a product is irrelevant to them being predatory about subscriptions.

The quality of the NYT as a product is relevant to GP’s assertion that everyone should unsubscribe from the service though.

When you say you’re sharing with a SO, do you mean you’re doing the dance of re-authenticating with their two factor code every few days now that they clamped down on sharing a subscription even within the same household?

This new change has really disappointed me.

At least a couple years ago we created a new email for shared online accounts, which is only NYT. It hasn't come up yet and I wasn't aware of their changes; we do not have 2-factor configured and SO says they do not read NYT much... Good to have a heads up for this though.

So subscribing to NYT somehow changed your stance on online privacy? Color me confused...

I like their content. I would subscribe, but knowing how their unsubscription process is deliberately broken, I never will.

I won't even read the NYT lol let alone pay for it.

Iraq war: not even once.

If you only read news from companies against the iraq war your options consist pretty much solely of companies that didnt exist on 9/11.

If that's what it takes

Except this strategy doesnt actually accomplish anything. It doesnt tell you anything about what they wouldve published had they been publishing back then

Supporting the war is a hell of a lot different from laundering lies and justifications to build public support for the war. They lied, they knew they lied, and they knew a lot of innocent people would die because of it but did so anyway.

Maybe don't only read the corporate news, then? It's not like sites like Talking Points Memo didn't exist in the early 00s.

gp's comment had nothing to do with value of the publication. are you implying it ok for them to do that because value?

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

No, I am not implying it is OK for them to do that because I read their paper.

> And making it hard to cancel is not just "marketing"

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

You’re not responding to anything the parent said.

The parent didn’t respond to anything their parent said either.

Parent comment urged everyone to cancel NYT subscriptions and the child comment respectfully disagreed and explained why they still find value. That seems like a very direct response. These aren’t formal arguments and rebuttals; just opinions. I appreciate hearing both perspectives.

If my polite neighbour smiles, holds the door, but also pisses on my doormat every few days, I call him LOUD a jerk and tell him to stop. I never approve the piss because he said good morning.

How is this a fair analogy? The NYT isn't pissing on your doormat. Making it harder to cancel is an annoyance, but it's not like they don't let you.

If the NYT subscription indeed has a tremendous value, surely it can attract and retain the subscribers without resorting to dark patterns in their products.

The problem is people who get actual news from a decent newspaper (and let's face it, after Bezos trashed the Washington Post, the NYT has no serious rival in the US) is a value for society more than it is for individuals. People might say "I don't need to read a newspaper; I can get news from my social media" but that's kind of the problem with today's society.

Bloomberg is crazy expensive. They used to have citylab articles without a paywall, but looks like they've fixed that.

I've used this pattern for ~10 years now:

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).

Re: Matt Levine. You can sign up for his 4x-per-week email for free, and he doesn't spam you.

Thanks for this

For some balance, add the WSJ.

I've read NYT regularly over the past 30+ years, and roughly fit in this boat. They have become monetizing addicts like everyone else. They keep showing pop-ups about "family subscriptions". I've written about their desperate seeming practices in comments on appropriate articles.

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.

You probably already know this but sou can get a lot of Levine’s writing without a paid Bloomie subscription by subscribing to his Money Stuff Newsletter.