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Comment by Centigonal | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting topic. If a company does something you approve of (e.g. do journalism) and something else you disapprove of (e.g. make canceling hard), is there a good way to signal both as a consumer? This is also relevant in the context of companies like Target, which has been boycotted by both sides of the US political spectrum for various reasons.

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I have also wondered about this when boycotting companies for reasons that I suspected were not the most common reasons.

If they sent out a survey about "why you're no longer a customer" I suppose it would provide one channel for explaining one's actions. Oddly, I seem to get those constantly when I am a customer, but essentially never when I'm a former or inactive customer.

On privacy grounds I like the idea that non-customers would be left alone, but on boycott-impact grounds it seems like having some kind of predictable "what are we doing wrong?" channel would be nice too.

Thus the thing to do, for funsies, is to subscribe, and then cancel, and give the poor customer service person on the other end of the line, a piece of your mind, every time you cancel. Boycotts generally don't work. But the goal is to make a signal that gets noticed by the C-suite. Unfortunately, the routes I see are in the pocketbook, the customer service department, and via Twitter, if they do actually happen to be there. A sustained prolonged boycott would work, but most people don't care. Screaming at the customer support person is just shitty to a low level employee that doesn't have the ability to affect change so empathetically thats horrible to do to them, so that's a no go as well. But that is by design. Thus, one way is to overcome that and be horrible to the CSR. But that sucks.

Yay, American "capitalism".

Being horrible to the CSR will never be noticed by the C-suite.

If you think they give one flying fuck about what customers think I have news for you: the only thing that matters is what the board thinks and if revenue is rising but everyone hates the product/company they won’t even blink.

Even then, it's a share price that matters to them. Revenue affects that, but unless they get a K1, it's the share price that really matters.

> If a company does something you approve of (e.g. do journalism) and something else you disapprove of (e.g. make canceling hard), is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?

Leave a bad review where their social marketing team will see it.

> If a company does something you approve of [...] and something else you disapprove of [...], is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?

I'm a fan of writing actual paper letters, which are (marginally) harder to ignore than emails, and (at least I like to think) carry a bit more moral authority, since I'm making the effort to print and (pay to) send them. In my letter I make it clear what I like they're doing, but reserve most of the rest of the letter to express my displeasure at the things I'm most displeased with.

Often these letters disappear into a black hole. Morbid curiosity leads me to wish for a response, but I'm jaded enough to know that even if they respond enthusiastically to my criticism with promises of change, until they actually change, it's just an empty promise. So at the end of the day, often I just want to vent and move on.

I have to believe that if enough people did this, it would move the needle somewhat. If not, well, at least I have the satisfaction of having done something.

My pet peeve with the NY Times online is that there's no escaping the upsell screen after logging on.

You know I spent a lot of my professional work life on the receiving end of these messages and if I had even one ounce of power to change anything for the better I would have.

In the beginning I would still compile user complaints into write ups for my managers à la “hey these 50 people hate that we do X, maybe we could do Y and win back their gratitude/trust” - but I soon realised that’s just a waste of my lifetime, because PM don’t give a fuck.

And why should they? Even if you improve the thing it won’t matter - the majority of people just want to vent like you; they don’t care anymore if the product improves, even if you would give them the perfect product of their dreams it wouldn’t change their minds.

This might sound jaded but there is a reason why the market is dominated by god-awful products - those that gave too much of a shit were sorted out early enough and only those that focus ruthlessly on the money and only the money survive.

There are a few exceptions of course but those just prove the rule to me.

The flipside of companies not caring is that sometimes they tend to throw you a bone in the form of something they can control, like a free month of service, or a coupon for a free/discounted widget.

Even if the faulty product/service never changes, writing those letters can result in savings of hundreds of dollars a year if done right.

> My pet peeve with the NY Times online is that there's no escaping the upsell screen after logging on.

I know this is not your point, and you should not be forced to do this, but uBlock Origin has a very nice filter which can hide DOM elements on the page if you set it up. Lifesaver with annoying webpages.

I spend quite some time in the political field and practically each paper letter I saw (aside from professional mass letters) was on the weird side.

So I'm not sure the theory holds up.

Good point. I vote with my dollar and do not support Amazon (directly; AWS is unavoidable). But that's your point!

I deleted linkedin a few years ago because of the ridiculous volume of emails and their dark patterns about cancellation. NYT is just not a hill i'm willing to die on unlike linkedin, for example

I think it's pretty simple: the value of good journalism vastly outweighs the crappy subscription practices, but the value of stuff like same-day delivery does not outweigh th e harm Amazon causes.

AWS is totally avoidable. Since the felted both my accounts, when I asked them to merge them, I am a very happy non-amazon, non-AWS user.

Same for booking.com or Microsoft which are even more trash.

I don't host my own stuff there but as a general web user it's unavoidable.

Your dollar is always your vote. What society spends its labour on is the society it creates, far more so than a random tick in a box.

>is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?

A good way? No. There's a way, which is to get a person with enough clout to yell at them on social media in the hope that it generates attention and scares them. There used to be a time when companies had customer service and actually listened but apparently the C-Suite at some point had the idea that you can just ignore your customers.

Automatic script that subscribes and unsubscribes every month and uses AI to waste their time on the phone as much as possible :-)

It's a core question to public choice theory, and why people are generally very unhappy with politics in general. You end up with aggregations of baskets of goods that aren't just suboptimal for you, but suboptimal for the bast majority of consumers, but where there's no practical opportunity to offer the alternative. The barrier to even begin to compete is so high, so the agents (the owner of the newspaper, the retailer, or the politician) end up twisting the available options in their favor.

This kind of knots get solved automatically in markets that are very easy to enter, or by regulation. That's why for the commercial examples, we can have consumer protection laws that create little distortion and have a better equilibrium. Good luck trying to use that lever to fix politics though.

In this particular case, presumably if you value their journalism you would not cancel your subscription!

Cancelling yhe subscription does both. You can't cancel if you're not subscribed.

There’s a form of Gell-Mann amnesia at work here. Why would you expect a company that is unethical in its business practices to be ethical where it counts, in its reporting? The answer is that it isn’t.

The product they sell is trustworthy news but they still have accountants. The high-quality news business is a rough business and few are profitable. I can understand why they might feel defensive and a more than a little spooked. How many profitable quality newspapers can you identify? NYT and WSJ - any others?

> This is an interesting topic. If a company does something you approve of (e.g. do journalism) and something else you disapprove of (e.g. make canceling hard), is there a good way to signal both as a consumer? This is also relevant in the context of companies like Target, which has been boycotted by both sides of the US political spectrum for various reasons.

No. at least not as a consumer in the marketplace. That's why people who act like the market creates a good fit for consumer preferences or go on and on about things like "revealed preferences" are just plain wrong.

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