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Comment by gmurphy | Hacker News Reader

I was so mad at their cancellation dark patterns I cancelled my otherwise-useful subscription. I live in California, but still didn't see an easy way to do it, so I swapped my billing method to PayPal and then cancelled it in the PayPal UI, which worked great.

You then have to deal with weeks of constant spam from the NYT about the failed billing process, further cementing the my view that cancellation was the right thing.

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I did the same thing.

As I'm in Europe I couldn't call them nor reach them via "instant chat" as hours it was open didn't make sense.

I liked the service and it wasn't that expensive, but after that whole cancellation UX I'm done with NYT forever.

I cancelled via chat 2 weeks ago. Was just asked 1 question by the bot which then forwarded the transcript to a live agent who then went ahead and cancelled without further questions. Maybe they updated their policy recently?

Yes same, was pretty easy over chat. However I'd probably resubscribe if they made it easier to cancel. Sometimes I get news overload and want to cut down on publications for a bit. If I could subscribe for a few months, cancel, then resubscribe again with no hassles I'd do it (and do that for other things).

Fwiw I think slack absolutely nails this and is a net positive for them in the long run. They automatically refund inactive users which means you don't need to "think" too much about adding people. I wish more companies would experiment with this kind of "honest" billing vs expending all their effort on layer upon layer of dark patterns.

I'm not standing up for dark patterns here (as a person who runs a subscription business I hate them because it makes it harder for people like me to run an honest business) but there is a big difference between offering a virtual service (i.e. Slack) and shipping somebody a physical product like a Newspaper.

They do the same thing for digital-only subscriptions.

In Musk’s biography it mentions how he argued it should be trivial to get your money out of x.com or else people won’t deposit in the first place.

This is almost like that. The WSJ is bad too. But I’ve noticed that cancelling and restarting my Audible sub was totally painless.

Cancelling the billing in paypal isn't the same thing as cancelling the subscription, the same was as cancelling a check or charging back via credit card doesn't cancel the subscription. NYT could still pursue collecting this debt.

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