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Comment by feu | Hacker News Reader

>They're deliberately trying to get people to take on debt rather than just do card payments

So what? It's 0% interest. It's incredibly helpful to have easy-access financing to split purchases across a few months.

>even simple things like buying a book through a web site requires declining several offers for paying with credit.

This sounds so specific it seems like you're taking a bad experience with one website and pretending all websites are like this. Most e-commerce sites I've used in the past year offer Klarna or some similar service and all of them have been implemented as just another option in a set of radio buttons.

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> It's incredibly helpful to have easy-access financing to split purchases across a few months.

I don't know, it seems like a failure at adulting to have to do that for small to medium sized purchases. If you need the feature, you probably should not have it available. Maybe this is my German attitude about money - basically, only take on debt for investments, a notable example being housing.

> So what? It's 0% interest. It's incredibly helpful to have easy-access financing to split purchases across a few months.

Unfortunately, this often isn't the case of people who are worse off, not good at managing their finances, and often overwhelmed by bureaucracy.

They fall behind on payments, and then get taken to the cleaners on fees, deferred interest etc., often paying several times the actual price of the product. I've seen this happen (with different but similar services).

Less savvy people being sold stuff they can't afford on credit has been such a problem that some countries have made it illegal to extend credit to someone who can't afford it, which is obviously extremely hard to enforce.

This is hard to grasp for many here, because HN readers tend to be well above average intelligence. Try to think in terms of "imagine how dumb the average person is, and now realize half the people are dumber than that". Now add mental or physical health issues into the game.

> So what? It's 0% interest.

Debt is slavery and so on. Let's not get too hung up on the fact that I dislike it.

> Most e-commerce sites I've used in the past year offer Klarna or some similar service and all of them have been implemented as just another option in a set of radio buttons.

Radio buttons is fine. It's the defaults and "are you sure you don't want to pay with credit?" questions I'm bugged out about. I don't have an issue with them offering it as an option. I've seen it with multiple websites using Klarna for payment handling.

>Debt is slavery and so on.

No it's not, and statements like that trivializes the mistreatment that actual slaves went through.

I agree, but just to clarify: inability to pay one's debts has historically been one of the primary ways into forced labour with unfavourable conditions. A bit away from slavery still, but not a completely out of the air connection.

You missed the point. It was a deliberate simplification (hence a simplification of a biblical quote and the addition of "and so on") intended to steer the focus away from my personal opinion about debt, and towards the second point, i.e. dark patterns in order to get people to pay with credit rather than with a debit card.

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