Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

I get really angry with this site. I signed up and paid for a premium membership to watch a TV series the same day it aired in Japan each week. When the series finished I cancelled my membership. Ever since then, I get almost twice daily "private messages" from fake people, which generate e-mails to me asking me to log in and read them. When I log in and open the PM, it's an ad from Crunchyroll offering me a discount on upgrading my account again.

I e-mailed customer service to let them know I was unhappy with the constant and deceptive advertising through PMs from fake personas and they essentially told me to bugger off. "Minor things like this" (being upset over deceptive emails) are just "an excuse to validate pirating anime"... they write this to someone who's never pirated anime and has paid them to watch it legally.

Personally, I would post the entire conversation between you and them somewhere (pastebin, blog, etc) and try and point a lot of publicity towards it. Especially now that they are getting some good press from Arstechnica, you could reach critical mass with disseminating that information. Perhaps you could even point the author of that article at your information, which may even get an update to that article.

I often wonder to what extent these kind of sites understand that there are many people who will see this behaviour and think "Well, if that's what happens when I pay, I might as well just pirate".

It's undeniable that there are plenty of people who pirate because it's free, and because they can. But if legal, practical alternatives are to survive, even if it's only as they begin, the key shouldn't be profitability, it should be making sure customers enjoy the experience.

Of course, that then leads to Hulu's problem - trying to introduce a paid structure too much too soon.

I found that I had the same problem. My solution was quite simple; Crunchyroll has the distinct honor of being the second domain to be wildcard forwarded straight to the trash folder.

Hm, mine were all from one person (the admin)

Certainly annoying and spammy to send 10 over the course of 10 days before I was motivated enough to click unsubscribe.

Strange, I did the same and didn't get these messages.

I feel obliged to say that I've not had spammy emails from crunchyroll, either. Their "notifications" are quite spammy, however.

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