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Comment by davidcuddeback | Hacker News Reader

I joined ACM several years ago. It took filing charge backs with my credit card company to cancel my membership. Even after canceling, I still get non CAN-SPAM compliant emails from them from which I've found it very difficult to unsubscribe.

If you're interested in joining a professional society for computer scientists, software engineers, and electrical engineers that doesn't resort to dark patterns, I'd recommend checking out IEEE. I don't get spam from them and they respected my decision to cancel my membership. I generally find their digital library to be of higher quality as well.

My two cents. YMMV.

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I found it rather appalling that the IEEE sent me junkmail disguised as a bill—using an IEEE envelope no less. "Payment required" it says on the outside. Open it up, and it turns out they're just trying to sell you insurance.

Thanks for the warning. I was serious about joining, so I'm still going to give it a try. I'll use a disposable credit card.

So .. I'm a professional scientist. ACM isn't a fly-by-night operation. It is very similar to IEEE in terms of stature. In CS, I consider ACM conferences slightly higher tier but this is not a hard and fast rule.

Yes .. they do send a lot of material I don't care for. But if you are a student, it is definitely cheap and worthwhile to join. As a professional, you have to make your own call .. I pay for it because I feel the money goes to conferences, student subsidies, etc. (not really charity but I feel like I am paying it forward). You get discounts at conferences but my employer pays for those anyways.

Agreed on all points.

Also agree. Plus, if you sign up for the ACM Digital Library, you get online access to a tremendous library of papers, publications, conference proceedings, etc.

For what it's worth, I didn't have any issues when canceling my membership. I did get some emails for a while, but those tapered off or were easy enough to unsubscribe from (link in the emails). Regarding auto-charging the CC, just don't let them. There's an option to store your CC credentials and automatically renew (I believe the default was to not store and to not auto-renew), you can either not store them, or not automatically renew, or both. I received a notice in September of every year to renew my membership, with a deadline of October or November. That was a bit nagging, but not terrible.

I did find it difficult to unregister from ACM SIGs (Special Interest Groups), had to press on through several screens to get to one that let me unselect them. That was obnoxious, but only resulted in my being a member SIGGRAPH one year longer than I desired and being out $20 or so, interesting reads but wasn't an active pursuit or career-wise applicable topic anymore.

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