Tell HN: Udacity dark pattern to cancel a subscription

[gt565k]

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".

[spike021]

Somewhat of a tangent, but I recently left a company. While working there, they automatically associate your ID so that you can dogfood the product of the org I worked for (in hindsight I should've had them use a new secondary account, oh well).

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.

[carbocation]

This sounds like the kind of dark pattern that the FTC has announced it will crack down on:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-r...

[muttled]

Will this apply to gyms that make it incredibly easy to join but require hoops to leave?

[oefrha]

Cancellation dark patterns are endemic at this point. Case in point: I recently cancelled Dropbox Pro subscription. I didn’t record the entire process so what follows is my rough impression. I had to go through screens after screens of urging me not to leave. On the penultimate screen, at a glance I had no idea if I have successfully cancelled, there were something like two big primary buttons luring me back, I had to read very carefully before I noticed a secondary or unstyled button tucked in a corner that’s actually the cancellation button. Honestly felt like fishing out the real download link on one of those scammy file hosting sites.

[fartcannon]

Management decisions like this policy are indicative of a sick company. This is your canary in a coalmine scenario. Get out before it becomes too toxic to survive.

[robbedpeter]

Where are the companies that don't pull this shit? It's more like a pickaxe and railcar than a canary. Most companies use dark patterns because they're profitable and not illegal. People doing profitable work get bonuses - this is what sales teams are for. People won't do ethically ugly shit unless you pay them enough commission to hide the stink, or if you're good enough at bullshitting the bullshitters.

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.

[voltagex_]

I'm pretty sure most of these patterns were thought up by the brain geniuses on this very site.

[MattGaiser]

It has worked plenty on me. Am I really going to make a phone call over $10 month? For months and months, no, I will not.

[notyourwork]

Thought up or implemented are not always the same.

[zhte415]

These patterns may also be very nasty for the one that ends up trying to convince you to stay.

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

[apollo1213]

Today I tried to cancel uber pass. The instruction on their website: To cancel your Uber Pass in your app: 1. Tap the profile icon in the bottom menu bar to access your account view. 2. Tap ""Uber Pass"" to open your Uber Pass hub. 3. In the hub, scroll down to find the 'Auto-Renew' toggle and turn it to ""off.""

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.

[riwsky]

Shout out to California and… the App Store? for disallowing this kinda shit

[DavideNL]

ProtonVPN has another dark pattern i found out this month;

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.

[mlsmith]

I ran into the same issue. It was a sad moment for me because I backed them during their crowd sourcing days but ended up cancelling both their VPN and "Plus" mail service. What solidified my decision was after cancelling the mail service I was no longer able to export all of my email. I ended up having to temporarily reactivate the subscription so that I could export to mbox.

[exdsq]

So I sign up and cancel courses whenever they have free trials to check them out. You can get around this pattern because they categorize the 'reason' you have to give them when you cancel. If it's an objectionable reason they take you to an agent, if it's a financial reason they sometimes offer you a discount to stay on (50% off per month) or you can cancel, and if it's a non-objectionable reason like the course content not being what you want they let you cancel straight away.

Edit: I use virtual cards to sign up under [email protected] addresses to try multiple courses at a time so I have cancelled a lot.

[makeupsomething]

Have been through this pattern twice with Udacity. The first time I ended up not cancelling when the agent offering me a 50% discount on my subscription and the second time I just needed to keep replying "I want to cancel my subscription" to every response

[heartbeats]

There is a very simple way to deal with the agent. Just don't answer any questions. Open the conversation, and then respond with "I want to cancel my subscription", no matter what they ask. If they ask if you want some other service instead, don't say "no", say that you want to cancel your subscription.

[kjerzyk]

I remember Udacity was doing some 'get 1 month free' deal about a year ago. Most of the online learning platforms had that deal (in different forms - weekend, week, month). And even though most of their courses say 4-5 months to complete, if you really want to study, you can easily complete them in a month. And so I did.

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...

[iab]

You are not based in California I presume? Maybe try the change-of-address trick next time. It is a terrible practice though, I agree

[rohitpaulk]

What's the change-of-address trick?

[wagslane]

This is really sad, but I run a competing service so in my greedy business mindset I'm glad their doing it and getting called out. On Qvault.io I've done my best to make cancelling easy. I've lived the horror stories of dark patterns trying to cancel stuff. My vasa gym was the worst, I had to pay a fee to cancel.

[nyuszika7h]

I had an experience with BritBox a few years ago where I signed up for a trial with a Revolut card on an account that had zero or very little balance. (I only did this once, so I wasn't abusing multiple trials.) When the trial expired, they decided to overdraft me (it showed up as a "delayed transaction" in Revolut, which was completely invisible to me beforehand, only a $0 authorization charge was shown). And when I went on the website, there was only an option to "restart your subscription", no option to cancel it and prevent future charges. Since I didn't want to risk being charged again to try to restart it first and then cancel, I ended up contacting support to cancel. At least they didn't try to convince me to stay though.

[88913527]

Blue Apron at one point had a similar cancellation flow. For a year I'd login and cancel the next week's shipment -- one time I missed that, and got a surprise delivery -- and that caused me to fully bounce. They got one more sale out of me, good for them.

[wy35]

So funny startup story that is tangentially related...

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)_/¯

[marginalia_nu]

I tried to delete my Spotify account a while back. Was beyond tired of their constant UI changes and decided that silence was better than constant frustration. I wanted not just to cancel, but delete the account.

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.

[perlpimp]

I get a kick out of cancellation of internations social networking site cancel threats:

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.

[woutr_be]

I don't like doing this, but I've been in your position multiple times. One was my mobile phone plan, I wanted to transfer to another provider, since they had a cheaper contract, so I just let my current contract expire. Turns out, if you don't explicitly cancel, they'll just keep billing you.

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.

[exdsq]

Hahaha for real? My trick to get rid of junk subscriptions is to cancel my card from time to time and resubscribe to things I miss. Can’t remember seeing this before!