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Comment by AJ007 | Hacker News Reader

"A well-designed self-service GUI" doesn't exist once the company is optimizing for the opposite of what your are trying to do (cancel subscription, return item, file insurance claim, etc.)

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Then use the regulatory pen and make them.

Like good grief I know we're insanely politically polarized at the moment but I think every single person in America except for like 200 executives would get behind a law that says "cancelling a subscription must be exactly as easily done as getting one."

The market has already decided. If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

Fuck the market. If that is indeed what it decided, it’s wrong. Markets are wrong all the time. I borrow a line from Rick and Morty, the boos of the market mean nothing to me. I've seen what makes it cheer.

There is no reason at all to require a market to give us permission to make a better society.

> There is no reason at all to require a market to give us permission to make a better society.

Better societies but without good market couldn't compete technologically and militarily, so ultimately they lost. Borrowing a line from Rick and Morty: that was always allowed.

A lot of people don't get that the market isn't a reflection of reality. It is reality - the only reality. That's the point of market realism.

That's... a pretty amazing misunderstanding.

Organized human societies predate markets by millions of years. Markets are reality now, kind of, because of the utter failure on the part of liberal governments to keep them regulated and in their place. This is not a desirable nor permanent nor sustainable situation.

Capitalism subsumes all critiques. There will never be anything other than the permanent market.

Tell that to the coal miners who parked trains on bridges and then blew them the fuck up, and got us weekends and 40 hour workweeks.

If people are too rich, dumb, lazy or some combination of all three to not cancel a subscription because of the "barrier" of several web-pages and reading then they are extremely unlikely to use their money for any productive efforts.

I trust Amazon to make society a better place than lead-brained boomers/millennials who can't figure out how to cancel a subscription

> If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

That's not how the free market works. The free market works companies prioritizing profits over people. So what's "important" for people is only visible in the market when it's also profitable.

No it hasn't. Even the most zealous believers in the free market know this isn't true (assuming they're not wildly naive, too).

Cancellation policies fall into two well-known failure modes of markets to actually indicate what they want: information asymmetry and inconsistencies in time horizons between counterparties.

You have no ability whatsoever to assign market preference to this without at the very least ensuring consumers are actually aware at time of purchase of the friction they'd face at time of cancellation AND the chances they'll want to cancel.

That's all leaving aside that a person's preference for Product A over Product B obviously does not mean that a person prefers every dimension of Product A over Product B.

You forgot to add /s.

1. Customers don't know what cancelling is like before they buy a service. This isn't advertised, obviously.

2. Competing on being easy to cancel is a bad thing, actually. However wins that competition is losing money. That's why you see the competition go in the other direction. As in, who can make the shittiest cancellation interface (Planet Fitness, btw).

3. People who cancel a service are cancelling BECAUSE of the service. Why would they go back to a service they disliked enough to cancel, if the service stays exactly the same? They wouldn't. Meaning, "good cancellation" doesn't count for anything.

So it doesn't help you retain customers, it doesn't help you get back customers you lost, and it doesn't help you get new customers.

> every single person in America except for like 200 executives

Oof sounds like the base is pretty divided in this one. Better send it to committee where it can be studied forever.

I laugh because the alternative is to scream.

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