Hacker News Reader

Comment by colejohnson66 | Hacker News Reader

California actually passed a law requiring unsubscribing from a subscription to be as easy as subscribing to it. NY Times is infamous for requiring calling to unsubscribe, but if your billing address is in California, you can do it on the website.

View on HN

Such businesses deserve canceling customers to be as inefficient and costly as possible in the cancel call.

"Ah, my name? I'll spell it out. It's a bit long and difficult to understand through a phone"

"D like the first letter of De…o…xy…ri…bo…nu…cle…ic". A few seconds pass. "You can confirm you got it right? Right, D, D like Deoxyribonucleic, the first word in DNA. That's what you have in your cells. Okay, were was I? Let me start over… What, you are what you say? Ah, annoyed? It'd be easier on a form on your website you know… bear with me…"

While this sounds fun and satisfies our justice reflex, the only person you're "getting back at" here is a low paid call-center worker who you're causing stress by missing their targets and tanking their metrics, who has no power over decisions like this.

It's the equivalent of trying to inconvenience BigStoreCo by harassing a register worker and something best avoided.

If everybody started doing it:

- suddenly all low paid workers would miss the same targets, in which case no individual can be blamed anymore

- the madness might stop rapidly because it would make the dark pattern worthless

I sympathize with the low paid workers. I also don't like the fact that by that logic, businesses can just use low paid workers to protect themselves from the consequences of their dark patterns. Like, it's all too easy to go full evil and just put relatable human shields in front so nobody feels like lifting a finger. What are we supposed to do against this?

Of course, it won't happen: the effective way of fixing this would be through law.

Now, while this comment is serious, the previous one was more intended as humor.

I disagree here. The right action is boycotting the company and lobbying/protesting/voting for better consumer and worker protections. Or organize it as a concentrated group action so your first point holds, but don't just do it solo.

Boycotting is a nice counter measure. Effectively, you don't even participate in funding the dark pattern and you put a pressure on fixing it because of the loss of income.

You need to know the issue beforehand though.

lobbying/protesting/voting for better consumer and worker protections is obviously the right thing to do, and acting collectively too. Only collective actions will be effective against such tings, most probably.

This brings up a good point that harassment of dark pattern implementors is an untapped market. Just slap on AI and sell it as a service…

“You paid them to waste your time, pay us to waste theirs!”

Just don't use the word "harassment" in your marketing material, and find a solid justification for the existence of your business for legitimate purposes, while at the same time reaching your target xD.

They just hang up on you if it's taking too long

P for pneumatic, X for xylophone...

I unsubscribed to two mailing lists just yesterday. Open the mails, click unsubscribe, confirm. I do remember the old days, though.

Or:

Robert Loggia. R as in Robert Loggia. O as in "Oh my god, it's Robert Loggia." B as in "By God! It's Robert Loggia." E as in "Everybody loves Robert Loggia." R as in Robert Loggia. T as in "Tim, look over there! It's Robert Loggia." Space. L as in "Look! It's Robert Loggia."...

Ah, you make me yearn for the days when I had time to troll someone like that over bad business practices.

The difference is that the other side is paid to do it, and the caller is wasting their time.

Another difference is that the customer wants something, and the other side can just hang up if their patience runs out.

Maybe other countries are different, but terminations here are a unilateral declaration of intent. Would it occur to you to tell a company exactly how its communications (e.g. invoices) should look like? No, of course not. And neither can a company tell you exactly how your terminations should look like. It's none of their business.

Same rule has been in place in the EU for a few years, such a godsend. Before there were still a lot of places where subscribing could be done online, but unsubscribing required a registered letter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com