Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription
I expected better from Udacity, but apparently it's not enough to click the "cancel" button on your subscription. You have to chat to an agent that has to convince you Comcast style why you shouldn't cancel.
Funny enough, they'd put a "cancel" button and then a popup shows up telling you to chat to an agent.
Granted chatting with the "agent" took about 5 mins, but it's still kind of a sh!tty pattern.
If I can enroll online by clicking through and filling out my info, I should be able to cancel just as easily, not be coerced into chatting with an "agent".
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadhttps://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-General-Delivery
Companies shouldn’t do this shit, and shouldn’t legally be allowed to do this shit.
I clearly stated it was a shitty company for doing these things. There are things in life that are difficult and shitty to have to deal with, but not dealing with them is just sticking one's head in the sand. We've all been guilty of it, at least I know I have and am on other things. It doesn't make it wrong to call me out on it. By actively not doing anything about the only thing I can control (myself), I am allowing them to prey on my $10/month.
You feel differently, and that's your right. I just choose to not coddle those that choose to be the victim. They've moved into the enabling role.
If you are in a position to find out you are getting screwed, it’s not suddenly your fault if it continues. The root cause is still that the company did it in the first place.
And, I make sure to leave a negative review or call attention to the shittiness of the company involved somehow, much as the OP as done.
It is annoying, and possibly not the most effective use of my time, but I have come to see it as a kind of civic responsibility.
The shit needs to be called out!
Eventually a new CEO took over and the cancel online page appeared in the nav whereupon I canceled that way and wrote them a quick note of thanks for putting it in the nav.
Worst part was: we genuinely enjoyed the service for over a year and many of their recipes have become part of our regular menu at home. We stopped only when the recipes got somewhat repetitive and then the convenience wasn’t quite worth it. I liked and recommend it (now), but this attempt to goose the retention numbers really sat poorly with me.
Half the shit being done in crypto would count as fraud if the assets weren't digital. NFT is literally pump and dump, and people are being blatant about it.
Customer retention - harassing and cajoling and exhausting people into paying more - is not standard global business practice. It won't go away unless it's made illegal.
Appealing to the people doing the dirty work is silly. They're not in it to be good nice citizens of humanity. They're peddling shinola to the great unwashed, getting their nut.
Before we fix the ones that only whine insistently when you cancel, let's get a handle on the Hotel a California, every human has an account, "you can never leave" companies.
Legislate strict privacy rights requiring ephemeral storage, continuous consent, and fast, lethal penalties. If your company can't protect customer data like its fucking Fort Knox your company has no business handling private information.
There are sufficient existing enforcement and watchdog groups, they simply need legislation and executive direction.
Refine nuanced interactions, setting limits on "retention" activities, and establish a framework of legally prohibited dark patterns by setting clear boundaries around what constitutes acceptable sales, data, and account management behavior.
Nuke offenders from orbit, as frequently and fast as possible.
Anything less and the circus will continue. Shitty little clowns will keep getting out of the car, mugging audience members, and it's just a matter of time before the lion tamer takes center ring.
It's way past time for laws that account for the fact that the world is digital. Analog metaphors don't cut it.
Netflix? Amazon?
Fubo is my favorite because when you cancel they send an email to notify you of a "better option" - Pause the membership so that they can continue to bill in 3 months.
Cancelling was easy enough. However about one week later, I got a churn email in the style of "Hey Ywain, here are 3 good reasons for you to ~~give us your money~~ subscribe again".
I was pretty sure my account was set to not receive any kind of promotional emails, so I clicked the "Unsubscribe" link. The link asks you to login, and immediately after login it redirects you to the one-click page to resume your subscription rather than the communications settings page.
Even after manually navigating to the communications settings page, I was able to verify that my account was, in fact, set to not receive any kind of emails at all from Netflix, so there's nothing more I can unsubscribe from.
Very disappointed in Netflix, and won't be resubscribing any time soon.
Re. Amazon, the process to unsubscribe from Prime is a textbook dark pattern which requires 3 or 4 clicks on pages with 3 buttons where 2 out of the 3 will stop the unsubscribe flow and the third button being of course the less obvious one.
Surprised, I went to check my subscription, and it turns out they had just stopped charging me somewhere spring of 2021… I’m still baffled by the fact that any company I was voluntarily paying would just freely stop charging me.
Manage subscription > Cancel.
No confirmation[1]. No incentive. No survey. No guilt. No ultra light grey buttons. Just click. "Your subscription has been canceled".
[1] Which isn't a huge issue, I feel, it takes about 30 seconds to re-establish.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-r...
Edit: I use virtual cards to sign up under gmail+udacity1@gmail.com addresses to try multiple courses at a time so I have cancelled a lot.
It's not unusual to have compensation for a team or a business unit based off signups. That's a ride on Easy Street when a company's surfing on a wave of marketing, word of mouth and general growth.
When maturing, that ride becomes harder. Some orgs work cancellations into a negative part of compensation, while the bonus for the initial sign-up has already been paid out to the last incumbent in the role/team, or perhaps the now business head when they did your job.
Negative compensation models. Companies that end up running such models are no longer learning organisations. I hope Udacity isn't one. If they are, just remember the person trying to persuade you to stay is not sitting in a particularly nice place
You still owe €32.85 for your Albatross Membership subscription. Your payment has been overdue since 05 Feb 2020 and we have sent multiple emails to notify you.
Since your Albatross Membership subscription is a legal contract, it can only be terminated by following the proper cancellation procedure. Withholding your payment for a service you subscribed to is not equivalent to cancelling your contract.
If your balance remains unpaid, we’re legally required to follow a debt collection process and additional administrative fees may apply.
So I started receiving billing letters, where the amount just kept going up. It stopped after about 6 months. Never really heard anything about it after that, pretty sure I can't go back to that provider, not that I would want to.
Well, it turns out for employees they have it set up to create a new monthly subscription at $0.00/mo.
When an employee leaves, they don't notify them that on the next billing period the rate will go to full cost ($19.99/mo).
A few days before that bill date, I happened to be checking my personal account since that's what I'd linked it to. Lo' and behold, I find out my subscription is being auto-renewed for that price with zero notification. I then went through the public process to cancel the thing, and it was multiple steps (I think 3 separate cancel pages and each one was set up so the cancel button is the non-primary or whatever the term is so you'll subconsciously press the opposite button).
What a pain.
But there is absolutely no "Auto-Renew" toggle in their browser dashboard or android app.
I have to remove all payment methods and see if it works.
For a while, we didn't have an unsubscribe button at all!
Not because we were malicious or intentionally adding a dark pattern, but because critical stuff was breaking literally every day and we didn't really have the bandwidth. It was fine because we had few customers, and on the rare occasion one of them churned, they just shot us a quick email and we immediately canceled the subscription for them.
Well on the day we actually had time to breathe, we decided to finally buckled down and add the unsubscribe functionality. Turns out, it was as simple as flipping a switch in Stripe. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's nice if you're aware of it and willing to use it for discounts (faking that you want to unsubscribe, knowing that you'll get a better deal during the attempt), but if you actually want to cancel the service it's awful.
If you cancel your subscription it will be canceled with immediate effect, and the remainder of the month will be given back to you as "credits", which you're supposed to spend on some of their services at some point.
The only way to stop the subscription and not loose money/value is to cancel it exactly on the last day of your subscription.
So... of course people end up missing the reminder and get stuck with another month.
Vicious.
Ending the subscription was relatively smooth, only some sad violin music and a questionnaire about why I wanted to close it, but man oh man did I have to go through an obstacle course to actually terminate the accounts. Emails had to be exchanged where I repeatedly confirmed that yes, this was actually something I wanted to do, and yes, I knew I could cancel the subscription instead.
Few months after that users got a lovely popup saying they can't complete the last unit (or last few units) that were required to get the certificate because they were on a free subscription. Why offer it to users, ask them to invest their time and then do something like that...
How did we come to a conclusion that any online process should be 'easy'?