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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

I once subscribed to NYT. Canceling required a phone call, and the guy laughed out loud at me when I refused what amounted to a nearly free 6 month extension. Made me so mad, they'll never have me as a customer again.

I also decided I would never buy another subscription to a news site that also has advertising. In my perception, ads seem to be predictive of low quality journalism.

Most recently I've had an Economist subscription. I like them. They don't make canceling as easy as subscribing, and I do hold that against them, though they aren't as terrible as NYT.

But honestly, I let that subscription lapse and I don't buy any news right now. I actively avoid it, in fact. My sanity and happiness needed a break from the drip-drip-drip of negative stressful world events that I have exactly zero control over.

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I had a similar ordeal cancelling The Economist subscription in 2020.

I had to call someone (offshore) who tried to retain me with months free, and then started trying to push emails (???) which I explicitly said no to... and then they turned them all on anyway when I cancelled. I don't have a way to turn them off so they go straight to spam now ("unsubscribe" doesn't work, and I don't care enough to escalate any further)

Never subscribing for news again - they're killing themselves at this point.

Yup, The Economist are terrible spammers. I tried many many times to get them to stop sending me all that garbage about their events and whatever, and they just don't do it. Fortunately I have an email address custom to them, so I just deleted it. Now when my subscription lapses I won't get the notifications.

Here's the thing about The Economist: everything they do that is not related to journalism is a complete shitshow. Subscriptions, phone app, spamming, just awful.

I can’t say I’ve had an issue with spam. I remember receiving a few emails that I unsubscribed from. The link at the bottom of the email worked.

Phone app - subjective, but it’s one of the few I allow on my phone.

Agree, but this isn't all bad: their broken Web platform gave me free online access for years, because I noticed the "temporary instant access" link from the original subscription confirmation email was both reusable, and had no apparent expiration date, so continued to yield "temporary instant access" on-demand for at least five years after my subscription lapsed, and only stopped working as an apparent side-effect of a site reorganization that included a new authentication flow that wasn't compatible with the old link.

As far as I know, it'd still work if I took the time to figure out how to enter promo codes into the new system, but, hey, it was a good run.

It's a little easier now. They have a chat interface. When I cancelled recently I included "I'm not interested in offers for reduced price subscriptions" in my first message. They didn't push it and my subscription was canceled 5 minutes or so.

I wonder if it is still possible to subscribe by mail. I originally subscribed that way awhile ago, but within the last couple of years let my subscription lapse and that was the end of it (other than the frequent letters trying to get me to re-subscribe).

> My sanity and happiness needed a break from the drip-drip-drip of negative stressful world events that I have exactly zero control over.

I used to be engaged in politics (volunteering at elections, doing administrative parliamentary work, community boards, and having opinions about matters). Becoming apolitical has removed a burden in my life. I don't watch horror movies, and I don't watch the news. I don't subscribe to anxiety and violence, and I just accept and cherish that there is peace in my area of the world.

I followed the Ukraine war out of a sense of necessity; I have friends who went to the border to help refugees cross and prevent human trafficking. If you're not doing something like that, I'm not sure that the combined violence and pain in the world is something we, on average as individuals of our species, are well-equipped to handle.

I think the difficulty of following news with any sense of fluency, not to mention more in-depth technical issues like energy and ecology, makes me think that democracy is at its stressing point. Education alone cannot be the answer — unless we think we can educate people to the point of being general experts on such a broad but critical slate of issues like energy, geopolitical strategy, domestic healthcare, etc.

Perhaps the future of democracy is made of voters who subscribe to institutions of intellectual or moral credibility that tell people directly how to vote (churches, policy groups) rather than a firehose of content where you make up your own mind on how to vote. It sounds more anti-intellectual than it is, but many people are already cognitively and emotionally maxed out.

Very little news needs to be followed to be a good citizen of a democracy. Local news, sure, on perhaps a weekly or monthly basis (i.e. you probably don't need to check in every day). National, state level (at least for states that aren't so tiny that state news is local news), and international, perhaps quarterly, but you don't really need much of that.

A better use of time for someone wanting to be a good citizen would be reading major books and papers in political philosophy, political science, international relations, public policy, economics, statistics, media studies, history, et c. Not the news.

Seems like in an ideal world political parties would be the "institutions of intellectual or moral credibility that tell people directly how to vote". Of course, in the current United States that doesn't work because there is a practical limit of 2 major parties, and neither are really bastions of intellectual or moral credibility.

I'm not super well-versed in non-US politics, so I wonder if there is any democracy where parties actually work in that ideal way?

I don't think things are much different than they were, say, 100 years ago. Back then there was a dearth of information, so you needed representatives, or parties, to vote in your interest when you had to do other things.

Now we have a glut of information, but the problem is the same - there are so many topics, it's hard to prioritize and determine what is necessary or important.

Look at our government. We have committees, and experts brought to those committees to help them draft law. Instead of trying to be an expert in everything, we should focus on what we want to be experts in, moving forward in these areas and trusting those working in other areas to do what's best. There is no other realistic path.

It is hard to trust any expert/gonverment if main motivation is profit. Look what is happening right now. Poor are more poor and rich are getting rich even more. So, naturally, trust in expertise is relative if it cannot bring you food for survive.

> Perhaps the future of democracy is made of voters who subscribe to institutions of intellectual or moral credibility that tell people directly how to vote

It already is this way, and has been this way for centuries. Be it religion, ethnic identity, economic class, geographic loyalty, or political ideologies. The average voter is not an independent minded participant.

Political parties. Community Organizations. The Political Machines of the Gilded Age and the Unions of the late industrial.

Human nature never changes. Democracy just gives us a chance to have a say in how society harnesses that nature, rather than a small group of people born into power because their ancestors were part of the inner circle of victors in the war that established their nation.

Edit: I’m big believer in democracy and republics, but a really cynical take on the whole system is “the peasants get a chance to choose who which aristocrat rules them…and occasional elevate one of their own.”

I like the New York Times but I was infuriated by the unsubscribe process. I also turned down a super cheap extension.

I am now subscribed via the Google Play store, which means the NYT loses a big chunk of the money, all so I can be guaranteed an easy cancellation button.

I can easily cancel from the nytimes.com website by going to my account settings.

That must be new, maybe in response to some recent FTC opinions that every web site should have a cancelation option that was equivalently easy to the subscribe option. Used to be you could only cancel over the phone.

California address.

Or international address

Figures. I wonder what it would cost to buy myself a functional California address.

I just now unsubscribed from NYT, in response to this thread. I had to do an online chat, but at least it wasn’t an overly prolonged process. I am quite certain that I did not have an option to unsubscribe from account settings.

I also unsubscribed from The Washington Post. It did have a non-chat-based unsubscribe option, which I greatly appreciated.

I also unsubscribed from The Economist. It was the worst. They went through multiple but-here’s-an-even-better-deal stuff, then tried to subscribe me to email newsletters.

Thanks, HN, for the incentive to do this; I had meant to for some time.

I didn't have any trouble cancelling the NYT. My credit card number changed, and that was that :-)

That sounds like tremendous trouble if you have your card on any sites like Amazon.

It was indeed a nuisance, but when a fraudulent transaction appeared on my statement, it had to be done. I just found it convenient to not update the card on the NYT.

Virtual cards are great for this. My brother keeps recommending privacy.com, I need to look into it.

I used virtual cards for decades. PayPal had a Firefox extension that did this in the early aughts.

I used getfinal.com for several years too but they went bankrupt. I don't even try anymore

I had a newspaper send me to collections when I tried that; over a matter of about $18 for newspapers they never delivered because I hadn't paid.

The NYT cut me off when the old card got declined, so if they had sent it to a collection agency, I would have disputed it.

We started receiving the Sunday paper from one of the local papers around here. We all checked our accounts and none of us had been charged. We didn't get mail, email, or anything else from this paper. Originally I thought it must have been someone else's newspaper, so I just left it out there to see if anyone came asking and also asked a couple neighbors, but nothing. Figured whoever it was would call the paper and complain, but this went on for about 12 Sundays and ended up resolving itself somehow (maybe the subscription lapsed?). Just ended up throwing them in the recycling as a matter of course.

There was no way in hell I was going to bother with a call to the newspaper. They'd be confused for the first half of the conversation, then even if they figured it out, they'd spend the second half trying to sell me a subscription, like I wasn't already getting it for free.

In the mid 90s I bought some VHS tapes from Playboy. They put me on a subscription to the magazine. Never subscribed, was never charged for it. I had just gotten out of college and so was still living at my mother’s place. That was a little embarrassing. Once I made it clear I wasn’t actually interested in the magazine, her husband grabbed them as they came in. I forgot about it.

My mother eventually divorced him and one day I was visiting and she pointed out that Playboy was still being delivered and that she certainly didn’t have any interest in it. That was 8 years after they were first being sent. Got on the phone and thankfully the unsubscribe process was easy.

This is the way I'd go - subscribe to publications that don't have advertising, or have minimal, and subscribe to ones that are monthly if possible, weekly at worst.

The reality is you do NOT need the day-to-day news, anything that's important will still be talked about in a month.

I live in California, so all of this is online. I just go online and cancel. I remember before, though, when I had to call. Everyone was total shit: the Economist, the WSJ, the NYT.

But California baby. You can hate us. But we lead the USA into a better world.

News websites are so terrible about canceling that its actually a feature on a news site I built at https://legiblenews.com/upgrades/hassle-free-cancelation

It has to be one of the stupidest features I’ve ever written, but sadly it’s where we are today with the average news website.

Another really stupid feature is simply building a news website that doesn’t blast you in the face with 10Mb of ads. Legible News has a 100 score on Google Page Speed insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flegiblene.... It FULLY loads in about 1s on mobile and desktop.

Compare that to NYTimes that takes about 10s to fully load: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytim.... Pretty much any news website you plug in there will get a score of 25, take 10s to load, and hardcore spy on you. Thanks advertisements!

I wrote more about the many problems of traditional news websites at https://legiblenews.com/about.

Check it out at https://legiblenews.com/ — daily news is free, there’s no third party scripts or tracking, and if you like it the cost is $10/year at https://legiblenews.com/plus (I’m probably going to raise prices soon by a few bucks)

News services, like the NYT, is doing themselves a HUGE disservice by making cancelling so hard. I’ve subscribed to NYT twice, and in general I’ve been very impressed by the quality of their content. But the second time I had to go through all their BS to cancel, i swore I would never subscribe again.

I decided (other than this site) to actively avoid all news that has a comment section.

I will never subscribe to the NYT again. Unsubscribing was an infuriating process.

I love The Economist, and their podcasts. I've never had to unsubscribe because I just pre-pay for 1-year subscription offers that I find on Slickdeals.

I subscribe to a big paper in the city I live in (like, the actual sunday paper delivery). I tried to explain MULTIPLE times to their support people that I did not want all of the extra advertisement crap that came with the paper (pretty standard with any paper - not the small amount of ads/classifieds in the paper itself - all of the extra pamphlets they include)

Their support people could just not even comprehend WHAT I was even talking about - they kept circling back to "pop-up ads" and if I had tried a pop-up blocking extension. It was a never ending circle of confusion :-D

> I tried to explain MULTIPLE times to their support people that I did not want all of the extra advertisement crap that came with the paper

Is this even an option they offer or just one you wished existed?

No idea but I figured I might as well try. I would have been willing to pay a few bucks extra if it was - relatively cheap just for sunday delivery as it is. Mainly thought it was funny they were so confused

It's not like asking to leave pickles off your burger. I'm kind of amazed that anybody would make this request and think it reasonable but shoot your shot I guess.

Yes, as a former paperboy I can say newspapers (obviously!) don’t have some bespoke assembling process for each customer that would allow for this level of individualization.

I've been through that twice but now I'm on a $1 a month subscription which is worth it even if I read nothing some months.

I've also had that experience at one point (cancelling NYT sub over the phone).

Then there was a big discount, I bought it again, wasn't reading it again, so cancelled it recently again...

and this time there was actually a button in the UI to do it in a few seconds. Might be related to me being in the EU though.

I always use cards I can freeze or PayPal and the like, so I don’t have to call anyone, I just freeze the card or stop recurring payments via PayPal.

For WSJ if you change your billing address to California you can cancel online. I dunno if that's true for every subscription, though.

Its a california law so most places accept it.

Forcing you to talk to someone to unsub is a gross dark pattern, but fwiw, I used the live chat and it wasn’t that bad.

There's no incentive to ever make cancellation easy nor any incentive to make cancellers feel valued.

Of course there is. If you piss someone off while they're cancelling, it's less likely you'll get repeat business. People cancel and then renew subscriptions on all kinds of things all the time.

Aside from making it much less likely that customers will return, it'll also lead to threads (and word of mouth) like this which will deter some, and if you overdo it, it even risks attracting regulation.

That may not be enough of an incentive to overcome the immediate benefit, but it's not nothing.

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