Hacker News Reader

Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

I heard someone say a while back that “cancelled customers are just potential future customers”. Anyone that’s had an easy cancellation process will remember that flexibility if they ever need that service again. No idea why no large subscription service seems to understand that. Make me go thru annoying hoops and you’ve lost me for good!

View on HN

I worked for a business similar to Daily Harvest (used in OP's website as an example dark pattern) and this is absolutely true.

We did have some confusing terminology and the distinction between "Cancel" and "Pause" was often times not obvious. "Pause" meant you wouldn't be charged again until you Unpaused your subscription. "Cancel" meant the subscription was dead and could not be re-activated. If you wanted to subscribe again, you'd have to re-enter your payment information. This led to a lot of confusion so we had to message those things better. This was mostly due to the backend tech and I'm not sure how much that impacts some of the sites mentioned in the article.

What I see happening now with those services is that the "pause" function might allow you to pause for n-weeks but not indefinitely. That's a shit pattern as well.

Part of the appeal of monetizing through subscription is that they pay more than they would through other methods.

Adobe doesn't want $21 for each of the 3 months that you used Photoshop, spread over the last 7 years. They want the guaranteed, "he didn't bother to cancel" $1800. If subscription plans actually worked such that people were paying less than if it was just a flat-price-per-major-version, then we'd still be seeing them do that.

I have my doubts that easy cancellation would change that... people would probably just remain subscribed anyway. Humans didn't evolve to deal well with persistent, parasitic threats quite like this. We have no psychological armor to protect us. But even so, why would they risk it by making cancellations too easy?

If legislation were to demand automatic cancellation after some period of time where data indicated the user wasn't using it, how they would howl. Imagine not showing up to the gym for 3 months, and it's cancelled whether you ask for it or not. They only get to bill you for those 3 months, and not try to send it to collections that you've had 19 months of access.

Yup. I remember how hard it was to cancel Spectrum’s cable subscription, took almost 2 hours

Now a year later I wanted TV again for playoffs season, thought about Spectrum and was like nope. Went with an online streaming serving instead.

I mean, just thinking through it logically, it _must_ be harder getting someone to sign back up for a service they quit right? I mean, they tried it and then they left it because ostensibly they didn’t think it provided value. How does that equation change?

The sample we’re talking about is people who want to cancel. It’s going to be hard to win them back no matter what, but it’s harder if the last interaction they had felt like being scammed.

Also a lot of people cancel for reasons like current finances, solving the problem they signed up to solve, or their usage is seasonal.

Compared to a random person, no, it shouldn't.

They know about you, understand your service, and clearly value it within the error margin your publicity material implies.

People's value evaluation change all the time, somebody that values it just a bit too little to subscribe has large odds of eventually changing into just enough to subscribe.

Or they left because it was no longer providing them value - but that is a consequence of circumstances which are always changing.

I subscribe and unsubscribe from Netflix a couple times per year when there is something I want to watch most easily available on Netflix. If unsubscribing from Netflix was an hour endeavor, I would never re-subscribe and instead go through the extra effort of finding a good torrent.

Agree, I've been finding myself pausing some of the Streaming services in the late spring thru fall, when I typically don't have time to watch tv with the nice weather outside. But I've been one-click re-enabling every October or November.

Perhaps many of the decision makers have their compensation tied to short-term results.

Well, exploiting brand loyalty is also a dark pattern. The better your brand, the more you can sell it for.

Presumably people have brand loyalty because they think they're recieving a good product they like. That's not a dark pattern, that's good!

Or maybe I'm being too idealistic as to what drives "brand loyalty".

If the "better" really corresponds to the "more", that's not exploiting brand loyalty. That's just when a brand is an honest signal of the branded product or service. Exploiting the loyalty is when they cheapen the product or service, but keep the pretense of the brand. Singer sewing machines and Pyrex glass cookware come to mind as prime examples, but I'm sure there's many, where someone buys the company for the brand, and then drives it to the bottom for quick profit.

I don't think most people care, and so, businesses are not incentivized to be nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com