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Comment by mihaaly | Hacker News Reader

I am reluctant to subscribe to anything nowadays. I contemplate hard and long before deciding to go ahead, more likely not going ahead. And this is mostly due to the rubbish client relationships many providers allow for themselves. Most times it does not worth the effort.

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The pain I went through to stop The Economist has made me reluctant to subscribe to anything too - and I run a subscription publication business. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this approach hurts revenue overall.

Oh! I thought about re-subscribing to The Economist. I was subscriber several years ago. I like their content and buy the paper version occasionally. You made me think again.

And yes, unluckily those toxic 1/3 being hostile to subscribers hurt everyone else. : (

I've had good luck subscribing through third party resellers. I can set the subscription to auto-renew at the same price I had the year before or If I want to cancel, I notify them and they do the cancellation for me. Currently, I have my Economist subscription through https://www.discountmags.com. It's cheaper than the Economist site and easier to manage. There was about a 4 week delay in starting my subscription though, so that's one drawback.

It's tough because everything is a subscription now. In the early days of steaming products like Netflix was great because you had access to so much for a small price. Now subscriptions services are so granular so you really have to pick and choose.

And because it's so easy for everything to be a subscription now, most of them are of negative value to the subscriber. That is, the subscriber gets nothing useful from the email subscription and has to deal with the useless emails taking up decision space (do I delete it now? what if there is something valuable inside? maybe I save it for someday because I might use that coupon?) when they come in.

In other words, they are clutter, or litter.

> It's tough because everything is a subscription now

Eh, it's not so tough. I just don't subscribe. It's their loss more than mine.

This is me as well.

I wonder if as the subscription landscape gets more “toxic”, it’s a net negative for the whole industry. Even above-board offerings will get ignored by would-be customers that no longer trust.

For sure. I don't want to "subscribe for offers and new products" even if I like the company because I already get too much clutter and I expect that I will ignore/delete 9/10 of their emails.

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