Hacker News Reader

Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Stamps.com is so scammy. You sign up for a free trial, then get enrolled without asking you into their payment plan. Then when you go to cancel, you can't. You have to call. But guess what? It has weird hours. When you finally do call during their hours it's a machine that you're talking to, not a person.

Ok, so you have hours of when I can cancel...clearly not because you have shift hours, since I'm talking to a machine. So why do you have specified hours?

Stamps.com billed me for 8 months before I noticed they were billing me. I only noticed it because I was doing my taxes. The billing size was just small enough to fly under my radar, but just big enough to hurt a bit. I feel that chose that pricing for that reason.

Anyhow, I saw they were in this story, so I felt I would expand upon their "dark patterns."

View on HN

I have yet to work out whether "limited hours for an automated system" is a dark pattern, or sheer stupidity.

The most horrifying variant I've seen recently was a government website that kept 9am-5pm hours. No human interaction or real-time events anywhere, but logins were locked after business hours. I'm guessing they didn't want to arrange special downtime periods for changes, and the only alternative they could think of was 16 hours/day of scheduled downtime.

It's a bad day when registered mail would be easier than using the automated system.

In the case of the website, could also be security, or enforced work-life balance...?

Whenever I see a page like that, I imagine there is a guy in a low-rise building in Sacramento. Every day he arrives at work at 9 am, switches on the computer in the corner of his office, and then he switches it off when he goes home. After 20 years he will retire with a pension and move to South Lake Tahoe.

This is how I came to understand the concept of crab mentality.

In Sacramento, landing a "state job" is kinda like winning the lottery because you know you're set for life. What's not to like about a job with no perceived accountability or risk and a perceived loot table that just gets better with time.

The inevitable flip side are all the "losers" of the lottery who have to suffer the vagaries of market forces. What's not to dislike about someone else lucking their way into having all those wonderful things?

There's a strange love/hate relationship with civil service in Sacramento, at least from my own experiences.

I work in a gov financial institution, after working hours we have a lot of batch processing to do. Our servers are overworked and there are legal problems about operations date. Sometimes there are some sense behind the madness!

B&H Photo Video famously won't accept online orders on Shabbat (in the time zone of the business in New York). Not just not fulfil the orders then, but not allow users to place them, either. I don't know how they decided to use only the time zone of the company and not the time zone of the person placing the order, and indeed where they see the desecration(s) of the sabbath as occurring if they didn't enforce this policy. Interestingly, their web site is still online at that time; it's only the online ordering feature that gets disabled.

I thought it was because their NY office is closed and nobody would be there to maintain systems or assist in the event of any screwups.

But then again, that was just an assumption so I may be way off base.

If you're interested, B&H actually commented on on this thread.

Looks like the Sabbath violation would be on their end, when they take money for a service, so the problem only arises when during their local Sabbath hours.

Ordering involves commerce. Commerce, you paying us for merchandise, is prohibited on the Sabbath. We use NYC time because NYC is our only location. We regret any inconvenience this temporary hiatus cayuses but it is unavoidable. -- Henry Posner / B&H Photo-Video

I am super-impressed that someone from B&H found my comment, made an HN account, and replied to it directly.

> ...a government website that kept 9am-5pm hours...

Sometimes this is done because the "opening times" are baked into existing process, (or in some cases, legislation), and so the digital replacement for the old meat-and-paper process must be subject to the same seemingly crazy time restrictions.

It seems mad, but if you're an underfunded branch of the state, trying to replace a paper-based process with a website, on a staff of junior developers and over-stretched project managers, well....

EDIT: or the process hinges on an aging perl/oracle/Solaris stack, with a pile of cron jobs which process the day's activities overnight. And of course, the definition of a "business day" is baked into the legislation, so the first job needs to start at 5:10 sharp.

Source: I've seen it with my own eyes.

Actually the reason usually is parity across digital divide. So those without access to digital services are not disadvantaged by being forced to use business hours, while digitally-enabled get access 24 hours.

Free internet at libraries could've been a way to work around this inequality of access, but the libraries have business hours too

This actually makes a lot of sense. You do 8 hours of business every day no matter what the medium is, satisfy your legal requirements, and say that everyone gets an equal chance in person or online. Then you run your hideous 12 hours of cron processing to clean up the day's mess.

"Makes sense" does not mean "good", but I do understand the madness a little better now...

I always assume that any "free trial" where they have my payment information is going to automatically roll over into a paid subscription, and avoid the whole thing unless I already want to pay for the service.

This is kind of like "overdraft protection" used to be before they cracked down on it (somewhat).

If you're savvy or have had it happen before, you know to avoid it, but otherwise it's a financial landmine ("profit center") waiting to be stepped on.

I lost a bank card last week and in the 3 day wait I found $15/month just being casually stolen for no services rendered. One of the so-called subscriptions could only be cancelled on a specific tablet, second service I've seen impose that as a requirement this year.

If you're an HNer and you perpetuate this rubbish please stop and grow some ethics.

It really should be against the law to offer a paid subscription that you can sign up for online that you can't cancel online.

How can I vote for this? Is there such a bill we can pay --er..encourage congresspeople to endorse?

Ha ha. I'm English, so I've never been entirely sure how American lobbying works, but ever since I learned of it I've thought it could be an idea to set up a website (lobby.com) where people could propose laws and people could pledge donations to get laws enacted that they like the look of. If a particular law gets enough pledges to reach a particular financial threshold then the money is deducted from the accounts and a lobbying process is started to get the law enacted.

Anyone else think this could work?

[edit: forgot a word]

Or how about a more general law, saying whichever medium you used to subscribe must also be available for cancellation? That way we also cover the inverse: tricking old people into signing up for someone via phone, and requiring cancellation online (if that is allowed, I'm not sure).

When this topic has come up here before, people have mentioned jurisdictions in Europe that do have such a legal rule.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com