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The wording on that notice is atrocious, but it seems like the actual behavior isn’t horrible. In reality, they seem to be trying to convey: If you cancel your

by akerl_ 6y ago

The wording on that notice is atrocious, but it seems like the actual behavior isn’t horrible. In reality, they seem to be trying to convey: If you cancel your subscription, any content which you still have in your account will revert to the privacy options of the free plan. If you don’t want some content to be public, delete it before making this change. Whoever at Prezi manages this UI should definitely clean it up to actually say that, but the behavior itself doesn’t seem crazy to me.

svrtknst 6y ago
imo that intention was clear, but atrocious
Beltiras 6y ago
It's absolutely bonkers.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
Agreed, this is likely how this happened: 1. At a growing startup, nobody is incentivized to implement the necessary-but-not-initially-related-to-growth features, like a sane account closure and unsubscribe process. 2. This, the easiest path forward was essentially "we'll turn your private account into a free account, where everything is public" because implementing something where there would be a deletion or export option in the unsubscribe flow would take more work, and nobody is getting bonused on that.
londons_explore 6y ago
I wonder what happens if you just block the card payments? Do your presentations also suddenly become public?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
codetrotter 6y ago
> Whoever at Prezi manages this UI should definitely clean it up to actually say that, but the behavior itself doesn’t seem crazy to me. IMO they ought to change it from a single checkbox to a pair of radio buttons, and give something along the following as options: “You are about to cancel your subscription. However, you have x private presentations in your account. Private presentations are not available without a paid subscription. How would you like to handle this?” (_) Delete all x of my private presentations (_) Make all x of my private presentations public And then have a button or link as well where you can go if you wish to review your private presentations in order to delete any of them prior to making the remainder public. Also, in the listing of private presentations, provide a button or link that allows you to download a copy of each of them before you delete them.
- antsar 6y ago
  They could just email the user a zipfile of all their presentations, and then delete them. No need for radio buttons, and IMHO this is the most user-friendly/intuitive option because it doesn't force you to make any hard choices but still leaves you in control. Want to re-subscribe later? Cool, you can re-import those presentations. Need the data for archiving? You've got it. Privacy? Preserved. Let's be real, there's no benefit to involving the private/public setting here other than making the service more sticky / difficult to leave.
  - enumjorge 6y ago
    I’m not familiar with the services provided by the company this thread is about (prezi), but giving a user a zip file with their data is not always straight forward. At a previous team we had to deal with this because of GDPR. Especially for data that has some visual element to it, the process is usually lossy because the user is also losing access to the client that renders their data. This company seems to do web based slide decks. What file format do you give users, HTML and CSS files? A PDF printout of their presentations? I agree that giving users a copy of their data would be ideal, but without a program that can view the data, the data itself might not be that useful.
muststopmyths 6y ago
Call me crazy, but if I was running this service, I would delete all your past data if you reverted from a paid to a free plan. Otherwise it's hard not to impute a malicious motive to suddenly making private data public. Then just say If you don't want your content to be deleted, pay us (with a side of "entitled freeloaders can fuck right off") Kinda what Flickr does now. Which I dislike (finally cancelled my Pro yesterday), but I respect that they can't keep providing the old service for free.
- whakim 6y ago
  In my experience of working at startups, I disagree that they probably had a malicious motive when designing this feature. While I think they should allow you to delete the data, the genesis of this experience was probably (1) it took less work to build; and (2) no strong advocacy for user privacy on the product/engineering teams responsible. As others have mentioned, I think "keep the content and make it read-only" would be the best possible experience, but I also understand (1) that would probably require even more work; and (2) sometimes you need to make business decisions to keep people from unsubscribing.
  - sslalready 6y ago
    I think it’s just a strategy to take advantage of unique content to drive traffic to the site. I’ve seen this before.
- anonymousab 6y ago
  >I would delete all your past data if you reverted from a paid to a free plan. Then we'd be seeing posts about momentary subscription lapses (or glitches along those lines) resulting in tons of user data being irrevocably lost. I think the safest option would be to force the user, when they unsubscribe, to select between "keep everything but on the public free plan" vs. "unsubscribe and then delete everything."
  - muststopmyths 6y ago
    >Then we'd be seeing posts about momentary subscription lapses (or glitches along those lines) resulting in tons of user data being irrevocably lost. Sure, and this is where, for example, the old Flickr policy was great. You could only see the 1000 newest pics, but all the rest of them were actually still there (and inaccessible to anyone), in case you decided to renew later. But the way I see it, if you didn't stay on top of payments, my service wasn't important enough to you anyway. A grace period with notification seems perfectly reasonable to me before I delete all your data.
duxup 6y ago
A checkbox to just delete that content along with it would be nice ....
nemetroid 6y ago
The behaviour is still crazy. If you were OK with having your content public, you likely would want your content to already be public, and you would have acted to make it public from within your paid-for account.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
james_pm 6y ago
They won't say it in a way that makes sense because then users will a) go do just what was suggested and then cancel, or b) do a) and also complain that there isn't a way to easily do that.

by akerl_ 6y ago

svrtknst 6y ago

imo that intention was clear, but atrocious

Beltiras 6y ago

It's absolutely bonkers.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

Agreed, this is likely how this happened: 1. At a growing startup, nobody is incentivized to implement the necessary-but-not-initially-related-to-growth features, like a sane account closure and unsubscribe process. 2. This, the easiest path forward was essentially "we'll turn your private account into a free account, where everything is public" because implementing something where there would be a deletion or export option in the unsubscribe flow would take more work, and nobody is getting bonused on that.

londons_explore 6y ago

I wonder what happens if you just block the card payments? Do your presentations also suddenly become public?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

codetrotter 6y ago

> Whoever at Prezi manages this UI should definitely clean it up to actually say that, but the behavior itself doesn’t seem crazy to me. IMO they ought to change it from a single checkbox to a pair of radio buttons, and give something along the following as options: “You are about to cancel your subscription. However, you have x private presentations in your account. Private presentations are not available without a paid subscription. How would you like to handle this?” (_) Delete all x of my private presentations (_) Make all x of my private presentations public And then have a button or link as well where you can go if you wish to review your private presentations in order to delete any of them prior to making the remainder public. Also, in the listing of private presentations, provide a button or link that allows you to download a copy of each of them before you delete them.

antsar 6y ago
They could just email the user a zipfile of all their presentations, and then delete them. No need for radio buttons, and IMHO this is the most user-friendly/intuitive option because it doesn't force you to make any hard choices but still leaves you in control. Want to re-subscribe later? Cool, you can re-import those presentations. Need the data for archiving? You've got it. Privacy? Preserved. Let's be real, there's no benefit to involving the private/public setting here other than making the service more sticky / difficult to leave.
- enumjorge 6y ago
  I’m not familiar with the services provided by the company this thread is about (prezi), but giving a user a zip file with their data is not always straight forward. At a previous team we had to deal with this because of GDPR. Especially for data that has some visual element to it, the process is usually lossy because the user is also losing access to the client that renders their data. This company seems to do web based slide decks. What file format do you give users, HTML and CSS files? A PDF printout of their presentations? I agree that giving users a copy of their data would be ideal, but without a program that can view the data, the data itself might not be that useful.

muststopmyths 6y ago

Call me crazy, but if I was running this service, I would delete all your past data if you reverted from a paid to a free plan. Otherwise it's hard not to impute a malicious motive to suddenly making private data public. Then just say If you don't want your content to be deleted, pay us (with a side of "entitled freeloaders can fuck right off") Kinda what Flickr does now. Which I dislike (finally cancelled my Pro yesterday), but I respect that they can't keep providing the old service for free.

whakim 6y ago
In my experience of working at startups, I disagree that they probably had a malicious motive when designing this feature. While I think they should allow you to delete the data, the genesis of this experience was probably (1) it took less work to build; and (2) no strong advocacy for user privacy on the product/engineering teams responsible. As others have mentioned, I think "keep the content and make it read-only" would be the best possible experience, but I also understand (1) that would probably require even more work; and (2) sometimes you need to make business decisions to keep people from unsubscribing.
- sslalready 6y ago
  I think it’s just a strategy to take advantage of unique content to drive traffic to the site. I’ve seen this before.
anonymousab 6y ago
>I would delete all your past data if you reverted from a paid to a free plan. Then we'd be seeing posts about momentary subscription lapses (or glitches along those lines) resulting in tons of user data being irrevocably lost. I think the safest option would be to force the user, when they unsubscribe, to select between "keep everything but on the public free plan" vs. "unsubscribe and then delete everything."
- muststopmyths 6y ago
  >Then we'd be seeing posts about momentary subscription lapses (or glitches along those lines) resulting in tons of user data being irrevocably lost. Sure, and this is where, for example, the old Flickr policy was great. You could only see the 1000 newest pics, but all the rest of them were actually still there (and inaccessible to anyone), in case you decided to renew later. But the way I see it, if you didn't stay on top of payments, my service wasn't important enough to you anyway. A grace period with notification seems perfectly reasonable to me before I delete all your data.

duxup 6y ago

A checkbox to just delete that content along with it would be nice ....

nemetroid 6y ago

The behaviour is still crazy. If you were OK with having your content public, you likely would want your content to already be public, and you would have acted to make it public from within your paid-for account.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

james_pm 6y ago

They won't say it in a way that makes sense because then users will a) go do just what was suggested and then cancel, or b) do a) and also complain that there isn't a way to easily do that.