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Comment by exhilaration | Hacker News Reader

It's worth it. They run sales all the time, I've been paying $7.50/mo since January for a basic online subscription. There's enough new content every day that you'll never run out of interesting stuff to read.

Just sign up for a free account and watch the promotional e-mails for a sale.

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Last I tried I had to immediately cancel on principal since the pricing was deliberately obscured.

Credibility was lost before I could even read the articles.

If The New York Times, a 166 year old newspaper with a tradition of fine reporting, can lose all its credibility over that ... I don't even know what to say. You sound like a terrible customer and I'm sure they're happy not to have you?

To be fair they have some shady practices. They were forcing you to call to cancel for example. I am sure this works well for them to act as a deterrent, but it's still shady I think.

Yeah that’s annoying, but going so far as them losing all credibility over that seems extreme.

Maybe crediblity isn’t quite the right word, would you go for losing all good will?

I'm sure they prefer having another customer, and would probably try to educate them about principal vs principle.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/principal

Sorry, auto correct..

I could also excuse myself as not being a native English speaker :)

But I'll go with the autocorrect excuse in this instance..

As all brokers say: "Past Performance Is Not Indicative Of Future Results".

And okay, maybe it's not all credibility, but it certainly loose the ability to do business with me.

Just go to nytimes.com, click subscribe, and try figure out what it's actually going to cost? Because I honestly can't figure it out.

I concur. They might be a highly respectable news organisation, but their sales team or whoever is coming with their consumer advertising tactics are outright nasty. Deeply discounting the first few periods to let people forget about it and then start to charge X times as much on autopay is pretty much the shadiest tactic that’s still legal.

Oh, it's definitely illegal in the EU.

It's not. Other popular european companies like Vodafone or Sky do the exact same thing. They tell you upfront that it will be X € for 12 months, and Y € starting with the 13th month. Unless you cancel.

I hate this as much as the next guy. However it's clearly stated in advance and if you miss it you haven't paid attention during sign up.

Also you can read offline after a refresh. Biggest feature for me

If they would really focus on interesting articles like these I would follow that. But their political bend has just become too pedantic. Of the big paper WSJ is for me the last one readable as I find their slight conservative bend a lot less obnoxious in their tone.

Agreed, I subscribed to NYT since subbing was an option, and read daily for a decade, until they decided to double down on partisan politics (I presume as a business decision over quality) since the last US election. The switch was very noticeable if you were paying attention. Maybe coinciding around the time the new Arthur took over as lead...

I too switched to WSJ and don't mind paying the extra cost. I miss the days when NYT feigned neutrality and focused on the balanced reality of stories over fermenting outrage via opinion pieces packaged as breaking news.

You can still find the good NYT content as the pop up on content filters like HN, Twitter, and Pocket without having to put blinders on to ignore half the other content on the site.

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