Comment by tppiotrowski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tppiotrowski | Hacker News Reader

I think subscriptions are a "dark pattern" on the web. Often they start after a free trial with minimal knowledge. This could be one category of subscriptions that are not cancelled.

Personally on my projects I never auto-renew anything. If you find value you'll take the time to come back and pay again. I wish by default subscription services like Netflix would not charge you for months you don't use the service (I.e. if you never logged in once)

I know this probably won't happen because forgetting to cancel is good for the bottom line but if your company is truly customer obsessed, I don't know why you would charge your customers for a service they're not using at all.

Edit: Also, omitting the "cancel subscription" button from your website if it's that simple and instead redirecting users to call a number that's hard to find in your Help section is another "dark pattern" of subscriptions.

Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns.

I also have to keep switching the shipping method on an order page, from the paid option, to the free (non-Prime) option. And there's a long spinner (sometimes ~15 seconds) to punish me when I click the radio button. (In the past, they've also hidden a default trial of Prime in the shipping option radio buttons, so that's another reason to check that.)

(If only Walmart.com, Target.com, Walgreens.com, etc. would close the gap to even current Amazon, we'd have better options and less trashiness. Anecdotally seems like Amazon -- either from the top, or from individuals juicing their metrics -- are taking advantage of Amazon's enviable competence and position, and cashing out excess goodwill.)

"Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns."

I just got myself a month of Prime because of this. And cancelling requires you to go through around 5 screens with buttons "Do you want to cancel?", "Yes, I want to keep Prime" and so on. And the colors of the cancel button are always different. So you have to closely read and understand each button or your cancel attempt will get cancelled.

The company that made such a huge fuss over the idea of one-click presumably appreciates the effects of gauntlet-of-confusing-clicks. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Licensing

Obviously, if Netflix adopted a pay-per-use model, earnings would crater. AOL made so much $ from ppl forgetting to cancel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com