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Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

Good. The worst experience I ever had was with NY Times when I wanted to unsubscribe I had to go through multiple call/chats with a person and it was almost impossible since it was hard to get in touch with one.

I am glad FTC is doing something others are afraid to do.

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Ah, lucky you. I read your comment on my phone and came to my desktop to type comfortably my rant.

Have you ever tried to cancel a loan? The following story may or not apply to you. It happened in a small country called Spain:

Some time ago I bought a car. They offer you a very nice discount if you, instead of paying upfront, finance the purchase. Why? I asked the seller, it makes no sense. He gave me a list of more or less valid reasons, leaving the most important out: the draconian interest rate, which I inmediatly noticed. Noticing also the lack of integrity I decided to play along and took the loan with the intent of cancelling it ASAP. To summarize: it took something like 10 calls and saying on the last one that I was going to send a certified mail and forbidding my bank to pay a single €. I paid the loan and saved several thousand euros, even after paying "cancellation costs".

The whole enterprise has changed my view about regulation. It was regulation that gave me the right to cancel the loan against their will, and capped the cancellation costs, which I find it amazing they are even allowed, to compensate "for lost earnings". After the 2008 crisis a lot of regulation has been put in place affecting the banks. It's incredible they are allowing still this kind of scam to buy a car.

> nice discount if you, instead of paying upfront, finance the purchase

Save $3,000 today so you can spend $12,000 tomorrow!

You took a loan and "the draconian interest rate" was a surprise?! I would've thought that was the most important factor.

You're missing the "car dealership game" that has to be played sometimes. Lots of places will offer you a cash discount and/or 0% interest if you finance with them. They get cash kickbacks and sometimes a cut of the interest.

Now you, the savvy customer, see an opportunity here. You were going to buy the car in cash and so there's an obvious play; buy the car, take the financing, and then immediately pay off the loan (or when the 0% interest expires). It's a win-win right? Not for the bank unfortunately which is why nowadays there are early payoff fees and dealerships will try to make it annoying to pay them. Terrible terrible incentives but the discount can be worth the headache -- the discount is almost always more than the early payoff fee.

In the US, financing is also a lucrative profit source for car sales, but I think prepayment penalties are less common.

Strange that this hit HN today. 2 days ago I wondered what the cancellation policy was for the WSJ and checked. At the time I did not plan on cancelling but after finding out that it was "call to cancel" I called at that moment. I cannot stand the policy where it takes 3 seconds to sign up online but you have to call in to cancel. If I can help it I wont give money to companies that do it. In WSJ defense (barely) it was a quick process, probably took 5 minutes.

5 minutes is still 4 minutes and 55 seconds too long. There's no good reason it should take 59 times longer than it ought to.

No argument from me. They asked why I was cancelling and I told them it was because I had to call to cancel.

Next time pay for the subscription by check (mail it in). They can’t bill you again automatically.

Is this legal? I assume if they wanted to (which admittedly is unlikely) they could send you to collections for not paying for the renewal that you agreed to when you subscribed.

In short, no it's not legal. Just because they can't take the money from you doesn't mean you don't have to pay them.

The subscriptions are fixed terms. Not lifetime. Why should they be allowed to bill me beyond the subscription term?

That depends, if the subscription is until canceled, then yes, it's a lifetime term.

You’re subscribing for a year or whatever is the fixed period. How is it illegal to pay for it with a physical check?

It's not illegal to pay for it with a physical check; it's illegal (unless your original agreement automatically terminated after a year) to not then pay for the automatic renewal at the end of the year.

Happy to break the law in self-defense.

At least you admit now that it actually is breaking the law.

Getting the physical WSJ paper is ridiculous, but the digital subscription to the WSJ is great.

It's the only one I pay for happily.

I have wanted to cancel WSJ for over a year now but their process kept me from doing it. I started a few times and then was like I really don't have time for this nonsense right now. I wonder if I do it now if I can get my subscription fees refunded.

You have to be firm and terse. They try to drag you into a sales dialog and offer a much lower rate. Tell them, “I don’t want to discuss why I’m canceling, and I’m not interested in continuing, regardless of your rate.” Just keep repeating that.

Now that I think about it I think they did try and convince me to not cancel but I have become so disassociated from human niceties since I started working from home the last few years I just interrupted them and told them to stop and I wanted to cancel. Kind of worrying that I did it without thinking or realizing. Might be time for me to reintegrate with society.

I tried canceling WSJ and they wouldn't take the call outside business hours. So I just called their Hong Kong office and cancelled with them, and refused to discuss anything but the immediate cancellation, and stopped them in their track when they veered off.

> Strange that this hit HN today.

these 'exciting' new dark pattern strategies spread very quickly among firms. many people are suddenly dealing with them. not strange imo

I just canceled the WSJ. It is not terrible. They will try and convince you to cancel but will eventually let you cancel. The worst is SirriusXM Radio.

I was waiting for SXM to pop up. Literally one of the worst companies for this and I say this as someone who sadly worked for them for a little bit. You can manage everything in the web portal but to cancel you click a button and it tells you to call them. I know they have content and some people use them but they literally have so much friction in cancelling that it is a huge part of their business.

Just out of curiosity: what would have happened if you had just stopped paying them after sending them an email informing them that you wanted to cancel?

Its the online version so they have my cc on record and charge me monthly. I guess I could have changed my cc to an invalid one but not sure if they have some sort of authentication process before accepting a new one, likely. If that was possible likely they would cancel it after a couple declined charges but you always run the admittedly small risk that they will just send you to collections which is no fun at all. Even if you are in the right you still have to deal with a ton of annoyance and try and get your credit restored if they report it to the credit agency.

You could probably also have let them charge you and then disputed the charges with your credit card company with your email as proof you shouldn't have been charged.

Anyone with access to a public library (photo ID will get you a free library card) can access eLibrary services that get updated daily. No need to pay for NYT, for WSJ, or any major national newspaper. By paying taxes, you're already paying for digital access to this media.

I applaud the FTC's decision but I wish people realized there's more practical means for accessing media that is more frequently locked behind paywalls these days. You fight it with a library card.

>photo ID will get you a free library card

Results may vary.

No, Librarians are pretty liberal with this. Many in big cities, e.g. Chicago, Seattle, etc don't even need to see an ID, just a bill but if you show up and pester back and forth a few times they'll still give you one.

No government identity needed. A bill helps.

In large cities especially, libraries will have an "independent" charitable foundation attached to them. It is very prestigious in the local community to be on the board or to donate large sums to these foundations. Thus, large city libraries are typically excellent with plenty of funding and can afford to offer services to the poor and indigent which smaller libraries cannot.

In the US, a lot of libraries are funded by property taxes, and the various laws that allow these taxes to be collected (for library purposes) will state that the library cannot offer services to people outside the geographic boundary for a lower cost than is charged to the people inside the boundary and are paying the taxes. That's why they need "proof" of where you live before giving you a card. But then you also have laws requiring services to be provided to the homeless regardless of proof of residence (how do you prove your residence when you are homeless?). How does the library resolve that legal conflict? It pretty much always comes down to money and local attitudes (see first paragraph).

This depends on your library system. I am under a provincial library system which is woefully underfunded. We get “flavours of the month” services that are likely trial versions offered to libraries before lock-in. Some of the choices over the years were Freegal Music, Ancestry.com and some sort of language training thing.

Our Overdrive tier is probably the cheapest and I occasionally use my parents’ library card for expanded Overdrive access, who live in a place with a much better funded library system.

Fully agree. My local library system is badly funded (as in, they let a building full of books rot rather than simply move them, and the main library has been closed for several years due to roof and sewage leaks) and we have no easy option to pay for a good one.

We should have funded libraries in the infrastructure bill. A rounding error would have been enough to supercharge them.

Governments have realized that an uneducated populace is easier to control. Or maybe that is too cynical a view for HN?

Not only is this not true everywhere, it can also be much more cumbersome to access.

Not to mention that supporting quality journalism is probably one of the best things you can do today to make the world better.

I agree, and thats why I donate to ProPublica, which is free and doesn't use it's reporting as reputation laundering for an Opinion section that promotes billionaire profits ahead of humanity.

Also, using the library is supporting journalism. The library pays for a digital license

ProPublica does such good work. If anyone reading this hasn’t checked them out, I encourage them to, soon.

Honest question: where can I actually find quality journalism?

I always recommend folks get a library card, as they will generally provide free access to these as well as many other newspapers... However there's often 30-90 day embargo to access current issues/articles online.

I’ve tried that workflow with multiple public and university libraries. While the experience varies from Library to Library— my current underfunded city seems not to have current non-archive digital newspaper access at all— and some new commonly adopted platform I’m not aware of might have solved the problem, the workflow isn’t compatible with the way most people discover news stories. It works decently, even if a bit clunky, if you are moderately database savvy and your use case resembles a print user’s— i.e. browse today’s headlines from a small number of sources and use them to decide which articles to read. (Which is also probably the best way to avoid algorithmic bias if your source choice is solid.) However, most people access their news on a whim through social media, web searches, and aggregators designed to provide only the most relevant and appealing selection of stories without having to think about it.

While you say it’s more practical, that’s an extremely subjective metric. For many people, spending a few bucks a month for something that works with their current workflow and saves rather than costs time is far more practical. Also, I’ve never seen a Library setup that gives access to desirable paywalled extra features like podcasts or NYT Food. I’m sure that’s quite deliberate on the NYT’s part.

I’m happy to give a few bucks a month to news orgs; in fact I wish they were nonprofits that would somehow let me pay enough more to abandon their asinine surveillance capitalism tendencies and expand free access, but I have no idea what that would look like logistically. If there was a network of newspaper-like organizations that operated like PBS and NPR, ideally with its own news wire, that would be a great start, IMO.

People having free and easy access to news from non-government-run sources (PBS and NPR are not government-run, naysayers) is a public good. I wish we could figure out how to shape the industry to reflect that.

When I had to go through that about 7-8 years ago, actually on behalf of a boss of mine who couldn't be bothered sitting through the whole thing, it took a full 15 minutes.

I will continue to bring it up when I can, no matter if they change their ways.

I called their BS and told my credit card company that this subscription was no longer authorized. They were happy to cancel it on my behalf and refunded the last charge.

The Economist does this as well. Very frustrating to have to explain multiple times over chat that I just want to cancel and that no I don’t want any deals and that yes I understand the terms of the offer being made and that no I still don’t want the deal even though I understand you are telling me that this deal really is in my best interest.

And yet I didn’t need to talk to any employees at all before giving them my money.

The economist also does not have unsubscribe links in their marketing emails, the ones that you get after you’re a subscriber.

That's why I mercilessly hit the spam button on such emails. Any email which is slightly uncalled for is spam in my books.

Yep, I had this experience with The Economist as well.

It was very difficult to cancel and it was by phone only.

I my home country the law says that you must be allowed to unsubscribe the same way you subscribed. Which makes sense.

Stuff like this is why I'm a happy ad blocker and piracy user. Even if you want to play by the big corporations' games, they find a way to screw you over.

My family just cancelled NY Times and our local paper, and switched to online-only for the NYT. It was quite a rigamarole. First, we had to call during business hours. Next, they went through a lengthy selling process before letting us cancel.

We were simply filling the bin with too much paper every week, and the local paper raised its prices. I can get Prince Valiant online.

I wonder if I somehow got on a super secret VIP list and get special treatment?

I called, got through quickly, told them I did not want to renew because I found that I wasn't actually reading it all that much, and they promptly canceled.

Somewhere in there I realized I should make sure they were only cancelling the paper so I told them I wanted to keep my crossword subscription and that I realized that this would mean I'd pay full price when my crossword renewed instead of the 50% off price paper subscribers get.

They told me it was indeed only the paper that I had cancelled, but told me I was wrong about the crossword price. The offer for paper subscribers is to buy a half price crossword subscription and that's what I bought. It remains a half price crossword prescription as long as you keep it.

Not being sarcastic, but what's special about the NYT crossword? Why not just go to a Barnes&Noble (or whatever) and grab a crossword book off the shelf?

The NYT crossword subscription gets you full access to their app which has every crossword they’ve ever published, and a bunch of other crossword-like puzzles.

I cancelled NYT by simply emailing them and telling them that I would be stopping payment. I was curious to see if they'd do anything. I never heard from them (and my subscription was miraculously cancelled).

I'm not sure if it's a factor that I live in Europe?

I don't think I ever want to give NYT my money again though. I have no wish to deal with scummy businesses.

I've successfully cancelled my NYT sub online before. It's a little tucked away but it exists. I remember when I first subscribed that wasn't possible - because a few months in they sent me an email basically talking about how awesome their new "online subscription self management system" is.

I tried to cancel my NYT subscription a few weeks ago after my heavily discounted rate went up to normal, and the second web page in the process offered to cut the price by half, which was acceptable to me. Although it is still a pain to cancel, the no-haggle rate reductions are nice.

Not only news sites , but all kinds of business should adhere to this. Good job!

When they want you to call, tell them you’re deaf. Works every time.

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