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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

From the thread:

>The secret to not dealing with crapty company practices is to avoid ones that advertise literally everywhere 24/7 nonstop around every single corner you look.

This is so true it nearly qualifies as physics.

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my goto explanation for this is the crappiest companies out there have highest profit margin simply because they have a whole host of bad practices available to pick from. that basically means they have most resources to burn on marketing & promotion.. egro most highly advertised stuff is what one should avoid the most.

Bad practices increase cash-on-hand at the expense of long-term outlook. That cash-on-hand can be funnelled into more bad practices.

It's kind of like a wooden building burning down: something that was previously in stable, long-term equilibrium state (no fire, no energy release, serving a useful purpose) switches suddenly to a runaway reaction (exponentially accelerating, pulling in more and more reactants from the environment, serving no useful purpose.)

* This is so true it nearly qualifies as physics.

I am going to (over)use this phrase from now on. Thank you.

Oh nice. I wasn't sure how it would land.

Audible might be the exception, I'm very happy with it.

Very crappy if you want to cancel after you forgot to get new audiobooks for a few months. You lose all your credit, and they don’t say that during the cancellation process. I gifted 6 months of payment to Audible just because they avoided to inform me about that.

FWIW last time I tried to cancel & still had credits, Audible did warn me I'd lose them if I cancelled (so I quickly used the credits before cancelling - thanks to their generous return policy, shouldn't be an issue if I change my mind about one of the books I chose hastily before cancelling)

They also have a limit on the number of active credits you can have. I luckily found this out via someone else. But yea that part of Audible sucks massively. But I wouldn't be shocked if you emailed customer support they would just give you the credits, it's Amazon after all. Also, if you sign up and the system doesn't say you're eligble for a 30 free trial, customer support will give it to you. I found that one out when my payment method wouldn't work and I cheekily asked and they hooked me up.

That's rough but on the scale of company bad practices that leans more towards being an oversight than truly malicious. I'm not saying it's an oversight but it's not on the same level as making cancellation take 10 clicks or having only phone support or turning off features when you turn off auto-renew.

Good point actually.

Maybe better since Amazon bought them but before that they had an atrocious reputation for making their subscriptions impossible to cancel.

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