Hacker News Reader

Comment by onionisafruit | Hacker News Reader

“What’s easier than making a quick phone call? It’s certainly easier than getting internet access, typing a url into a browser address bar, validating a ssl certificate, establishing an http session, authenticating with your credentials then finding and clicking the cancel button.”

View on HN

2010's GoDaddy, is that you? They used to pull this, then you would stay on the phone seemingly forever until you got a (the?) CSR that would first try the carrot of more services for free if you just re-upped then tried to browbeat you into the deal if you still weren't convinced. Also, the New York times did this, I think you can cancel online now. There should be multiple ways people can sub/unsub, but if you sub in one manner, you should be able to unsub in the same manner without jumping through hoops.

Some might try that but one call with the FTC legal team will make any company stop that shit immediately.

You don't piss off gov't regulators

> You don't piss off gov't regulators

Yep. If you deal with them you learn quickly that all that “splitting hairs” stuff you see in Hollywood dramas buys you nothing. For a lot of administrative compliance, with the state or Feds, they are judge jury and executioner and the rules are what they say they are. Unless you have a lot of money and influence don’t play games with them.

> Unless you have a lot of money and influence don’t play games with them.

There are a fair number of companies that do these dark patterns that have a lot of money and influence though.

Yup, the same rules apply to building inspectors. You better hope you get the good one because they can twist codes around on a whim and they are always right.

Depends on the inspector and the contractor. More than once I’ve had contractors successfully win arguments with building inspectors in the wrong.

You're certainly right for personal advice, but does the New York Times not have a lot of money? They've certainly got the influence bit covered. Once you can buy enough of your own bureaucrats to tie up their bureaucrats, regulators' power isn't so clear.

More powerful than that though is that you don't want the regulators to have to do any work. Once they have work to do they are insanely efficient, at least when it involves punishing the person who made them do work.

Perhaps you are being cynical, but..

I absolutely detest having to make phone calls, especially when a simple email (or web page click) will do the job.

My main hate is companies that make a big fuss about their availability on the web, right up to when you need to contact them, when suddenly they are absolutely uncontactable, unless you are prepared to hang in a phone queue for hours.

that's not even mentioning seperately fetching, parsing and evaluating the html, css and javascript code, decoding the image formats, often multiple different ones, to render any images on the page and still having to also render the page itself. god help you if it's an SPA and you have to asynchronously make further requests, only to then have to parse those resources also

This is the most tone-deaf thing I have read today. Logging in to a website is miles easier than waiting hours in a phone queue.

Given the quotes around the parent commenter’s text, I think they are mocking the absurd response of a fictitious company trying to argue that a phone call is easier than a button.

Bingo.

It’s pretty obviously sarcasm, and an example of what some ill-intentioned company could try and argue. Thus the quotes.

The quotes indicate this is the subscription service playing dumb.

Don't feel bad. I missed the subtext too.

I think its pure sarcasm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com