11 ms·

Caught by MuseScore's Dark Patterns (2021)

thih9 3y ago
The article is from 2021, can we add “(2021)” to the title?
maxehmookau 3y ago
MuseScore is one of those services that can benefit from the fact that a really good subscription service to the main publishers legit catalogues of sheet music simply doesn't exist. Instrumental sheet music subscription service seems like an industry ripe for disruption.
- bluGill 3y ago
  I wouldn't mind subscriptions to copyright music, but I mostly play classical which means it hasn't been in copyright for hundreds of years (if the idea even existed when it was composed)
- powersnail 3y ago
  Henle has their own app and subscription, which is said to be pretty decent by some of my friends who subscribe. But its catalogue is basically within classical music, so not that much overlap with MuseScore, which has a large number of transcriptions of film/game/pop music. For many pieces of film/game/pop music, you can't even find a place to buy the original sheet music. There might not be an original sheet music in the first place; let alone a fitting transcription for the instrument you are looking to play. What musescore.com offers, is largely built upon hobbyists' transcription efforts.
  - ycan 3y ago
    > is largely built upon hobbyists' transcription efforts. Which is the same model as one of the other holdings of Muse Group, Ultimate Guitar. It has a wide database for user-created guitar tablatures for most popular songs. Starting from 10 or so years ago, the experience has deteriorated rapidly; they - push their "Pro" versions at the top of each search result, - overlay a bullshit video on the actual tablatures which is easily mistaken for a video tutorial for the song you are looking at, - user created GuitarPro tabs require an account to download, - there is an ever-present countdown until their 80% runs out, which resets every two days or so. When I first heard of MuseScore and the fact that Tantacrul worked on it, I was quite excited about an open source notation app but I want nothing to do with it because of their parent company.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Tantacrul himself has questionable ethics at best. He posted a long video ripping on Dorico, got hired by MuseScore, and then stole many of the design elements he'd just been ranting about.
    - jemmyw 3y ago
      I subscribe to ultimate guitar. The "official" tabs are worth it. Even though I'm subscribed I get sales emails about their courses or something and I could not unsubscribe because whatever they use for newsletters is adblock blacklisted. So eventually I just marked it as spam, which means account related emails from them will also go to spam.
- microtherion 3y ago
  sheetmusicdirect.com has a fairly large catalog available for unlimited online access at $99/year.
  - maxehmookau 3y ago
    Thanks, I'll check it out.
  - Tokkemon 3y ago
    Right, Hal Leonard's digital outfit.
- Tokkemon 3y ago
  musicnotes.com has a subscription at this point. Not a "traditional" publisher in that way, but it's a huge player for PVG (piano, vocal, guitar) scores that isn't Hal Leonard.
deepspace 3y ago
The article is from a couple of years ago, but their bad practices continue. I subscribed to their PRO offering, but due to some kind of glitch on their side, I am unable to actually download any scores listed under PRO. When I try to download, the site just says "PRO subscription required"; when I go to my account, it says "PRO subscription active". The thing is, downloading scores is not something I do every day. So, I would run into the problem, submit a support request and forget about it for a while. Next time I want to download a score, I run into the same issue again, and realize that their support never even bothered to reply to my previous request. Rinse, repeat. What a terrible company to do business with.
- raincole 3y ago
  It makes me sad because MuseScore is actually a good software (at least for learning music notation). I was tempted to pay them but I read horror stories here and there.
- sammorrowdrums 3y ago
  That’s not a glitch. You cannot download all PRO scores. With PRO you can: - download regular scores - access PRO scores but only download ones that are not “official HQ” with copyright restrictions. > The new category of scores called official HQ scores is not allowed to be downloaded or printed according to the copyright owners' requirements. However, these scores can be viewed, played, and used in Practise mode. https://help.musescore.com/hc/en-us/articles/209542669-Download https://help.musescore.com/hc/en-us/articles/209542669-Downl... This bit me recently as I was confounded trying to download a PRO score myself.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    If it says “pro subscription required” though like the GP mentioned, that sounds like it is still possible to download the score they’re trying to download. Unless maybe this is just how the site tells the user this is a HQ score… as cryptically as possible.
  - deepspace 3y ago
    I was using "download" in a very broad sense. I wanted to view them on my iPad. Is that what you mean by 'access'? In any case, the site is stupidly bad ad describing what exactly you get for your PRO subscription.
Bud 3y ago
Just use forScore, which is what every single professional musician I know uses. It's vastly better software, it's been around a lot longer, and the company isn't evil.
101008 3y ago
I know Paypal receives a lot of hate but for these type of things is great. You can start a suscription with Paypal and then disable it from Paypal very easily.
- thousand_nights 3y ago
  this is one place where middlemen actually shine imho, like apple managing your app subscriptions for you all in once place making them easy to cancel
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Yep, but the middlemen that is on the correct position and should do that is your card operator, not the merchant's payment processor. You should be able to do it on your bank's site. And the fact that you can't is symptom of a really large problem.
    - thousand_nights 3y ago
      i'd love to learn more about this but i think banks don't actually know you have a subscription or how long is it, they just let the vendor charge you repeatedly and you have the option to revoke this permission through your bank (so the result would be a transaction failed upon next renewal, which not exactly the same as cancelling your subscription through the vendor)
      - wizofaus 3y ago
        I'm not aware of being able to revoke permission to charge a card for a particular merchant with banks - at any rate these days the "merchant" from the banks' POV is often a processor like PayPal or Square etc. But you're right that banks themselves don't have direct visibility into subscriptions - there might at best be a flag to indicate that a particular transaction should be authorised as part of a recurring payment.
        3y ago
ztgasdf 3y ago
Obligatory: https://github.com/LibreScore/dl-librescore https://github.com/LibreScore/dl-librescore
- drukqs 3y ago
  It's a cat and mouse game, and currently the ball is in LibreScore's court. This message is dated Aug 8. https://discord.com/channels/774491656643674122/776384156602335254/1138594006176120923 https://discord.com/channels/774491656643674122/776384156602... > MuseScore has patched the LibreScore App. The server will be down for the foreseeable future until I find a solution (possibly by the end of August). In the meantime you can download MIDI, MP3, and PDF using the browser extension.
bluGill 3y ago
This is why I rarely sign up for the X day free trials, and never if I need to enter payment information. I don't trust myself to cancel in time. Either I know I'm willing to pay and don't need the trial, or I'm not sure and don't want to risk it. The 90days no interest deals everyone offers on the credit cards counts as they type of scam. I don't trust myself to remember so I refuse to sign up even if there are other bonuses.
- seanw444 3y ago
  For potentially shady services, I use privacy.com to generate a card to use. You can limit the amount it can spend to a total amount, monthly amount, yearly amount, or one-time use. Really handy if you want to be sure that you won't forget to cancel your trial.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Maybe, but if they push, technically you did sign an agreement to pay whatever dollars and they may win in court against you and then you owe not just the fees, but court costs and interest (depending on what they ask for in court). While odds are against this, it is still a risk that I'm not willing to take)
- tzs 3y ago
  I just add a "cancel X trial" event to my calendar and then don't have to worry about forgetting it.
- tempnow987 3y ago
  With Apple Store subscriptions I've had good experiences with clarity of the terms which they put in literally the same font as the teaser free trial deal. You can cancel immediately and use out the free trial in most cases. Apple also seems to remind me to cancel subscriptions when I delete an app I'm not using that has a small subscription associated I forgot about. They also turn off subscriptions it seems when apps become unavailable. They also seem to send a notice about a month in advance of any auto renewals, but that may be something I turned on. They also let me cancel subscriptions without going through the developers own flow / retention game and this is the SINGLE biggest win for me having had to threaten to sue folks both at work (were subscriptions are much higher) and personally. On non apple products I especially hate the "must cancel at least 60 but no more than 90 days in advance of renewal" terms of service games non-apple subscriptions play, or ones where you have to call in (yes, the same newspapers complaining about apple can make it hell to cancel). This used to be common in copier sales where you'd auto renew for another year after FIVE years unless you carefully calendared and remember to cancel service in time. The problem is with staff turnover etc it's not always easy to keep track of these kind of gimmicks, and often the person you are contacting has also left so you are dealing with national sales departments. Apple get's crapped on a lot but despite the claims they screw folks over compared to a lot of internet stuff (ads for tech support have bitten my parents, the car warranty deals etc) I have more trust in them then the areas of the internet the FTC etc are managing.
chrisjj 3y ago
> anti-human design practices. Thing is, if it was really anti-human, it would not exist. What it is, is anti-consumer and pro-supplier. Which, note, does not in itself make a dark pattern.
deleted 3y ago
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milliams 3y ago
This is why I pay by Direct Debit wherever possible (in the UK). The Direct Debit Guarantee (https://www.directdebit.co.uk/direct-debit-explained/direct-debit-guarantee/ https://www.directdebit.co.uk/direct-debit-explained/direct-...) says: You can cancel a Direct Debit at any time by simply contacting your bank or building society. meaning the outgoing payments from my bank account are under my control.
- benoliver999 3y ago
  Yeah most banks let you do this online too, so it's really simple. I have lots of magazine subscriptions and it's one-click to cancel.
- tomduncalf 3y ago
  In the UK you can also use eg Revolut to create a temporary card number which you can then cancel
  - LaundroMat 3y ago
    More and more services are refusing to let you use a single-use Revolut credit card ("This card cannot be used for recurrent payments"). You could of course just create and cancel a regular credit card, but that's an extra step.
    - tomduncalf 3y ago
      Ahh interesting. I hadn’t come across this yet so I assumed they were not detectable!
dtjohnnymonkey 3y ago
I fell for the same bait at MuseScore and ended up paying for the entire year. Now I try to use Privacy.com for subscriptions like these since you can create a temporary card and then disable it.
Pulz 3y ago
I had a similar experience. I purchased 1 year of MuseScore PRO+, March 2022 and stopped using it a few months later, but forgot to unsubscribe. I'd get an email or two from MuseScore every few months, but usually just marked read and forgot about it. MuseScore hid the upcoming renewal reminder at the bottom of a newsletter styled email, two months early and then essentially said 'we reminded you about this change' later on. An email titled "Your new year of MuseScore PRO+" arrived Jan 29th 2023 - quite a length email with lots of blue buttons telling me to read more about customer success, values of the products, how they've added x amount of new music scores to my subscription yadda yadda. Then it goes on to fill up the screen with 'top scores' with images, more buttons to explore - where to go for help, discover new music........ blah blah, typical new year new company email. Except the very, very bottom of this email stated 'Oh yeah we're going to be renewing in March'. I had no emails from MuseScore between this newsletter and the renewal. So it fell completely off my radar until I had a 'Payment Received' email. I then tried to refund, knowing that you have 14 days from subscription - and was offered a discount. The same style as the article, except the offer was 45% not 35% - heavily pushing how this was the best they could do in my really unfortunate circumstance. I thought, that doesn't sound right - and stumbled across lots of articles on Reddit about just quoting their own terms. I emailed back, quoting the TOS and then received a very robotic 'prorated refund of the amount.. has been issued to you" email. Since unsubscribing I have started to receive sales emails - that I could block but find it amusing to see how long it goes on. I count, between March 2023 to today: 12 'Spring Sale' emails, ranging from 65%, 70%, 83% off annual plans 4 '[Last Chance] emails, same discount range 1 'For your eyes only' 70% off 11 'Summer Sale' emails, some of them 'special summer sale' 1 'BLACK FRIDAY SALE' 1 '[Last Chance] Summer Sale' Promotional emails 2023 by month: March - 1 April - 2 May - 7 June - 9 July - 8 August (to date) - 3 I'm just interested to see if the rate of emails continues to grow or will hover around 1-2 per week. Has also become ritualistic to clear MuseScore emails from my mailbox - which is quite therapeutic.
chefandy 3y ago
Stuff like this always blows my mind. I saw a Fortune article written by some B-school researcher claiming 12% of corporate leaders were psychopaths... but who would even want to work for a business that conducted themselves like that? Is it staffed by psychopaths, too?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Sharlin 3y ago
  Were all the people who worked for the Nazi government psychopaths? Of course not, they were normal people who were "just doing their jobs" and feeding their families. Indeed large corporations are good examples of the evolution of organizations toward compartmentalization such that almost every individual human in the machinery can tell themselves that they're not doing anything too evil, maybe just on the order of a small sin like speeding and everybody does that sometimes.
gorkish 3y ago
MuseScore = Fantastic market leading open source music notation package. MuseScore.com = Stage 4 cancer. It gives me some solace that the application will outlive the company. Perhaps if they themselves realized this, they would do a better job of stewardship for their community.
- ravetcofx 3y ago
  Has anyone attempted to fork the project?
  - reikonomusha 3y ago
    MuseScore (the program) is well maintained and under the design helm of Martin Keary, who has absolutely turned the program around in the last few years. It's also an extraordinarily complex program requiring pretty elaborate means for helping its users, of which there's a huge variety. (Musicians, much like software engineers, make use of many different practices when it comes to writhing/transcribing/composing music.) It's not clear what benefits forking would accomplish, other than vague ideological ones from dissociating the software from its incumbent brand.
  - gorkish 3y ago
    IMO the application itself is a tour de force of open source. I don't think anyone really wants to fork it. It's the ecosystem around the app that is awful. But yes, there are various projects to 'libre'-ate these portions of the community, though I don't personally have any experience with them. My own personal beef with them comes from when my middle school child wanted to learn some specific piece, and I thought "Oh I can probably get that done through this great OSS project I have been hearing a lot about the past couple of years. I should support them." Dear Reader, I made a terrible mistake.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  MuseScore is trash. You can't even reorder notes or rests by dragging them (and you'll get attacked if you ask about this in the forum): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJdKP5SvAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJdKP5SvAc We're talking about simply swapping the order of notes or rests in a measure, which doesn't change the number of beats or otherwise invalidate it. Keep downvoting, apologists.
junon 3y ago
Audacity is headed down this road, headed by the same seedy YouTube creator. They tried to weasel Google Analytics into audacity under peoples' noses, and then insulted the community when there was an uproar.
- nomadpenguin 3y ago
  Why do you think Tantacrul is seedy? I've watched a couple of his videos and thought they were entertaining; does he have a history of doing shady things?
  - junon 3y ago
    After taking over MuseScore and introducing most, if not all, of the dark patterns mentioned by the article, he took over Audacity and tried to spy on users, berating and banning people on the PR and followup discussions for expressing anger.
    - Tantacrul 3y ago
      Tantacrul here. I have had absolutely nothing to do with the design of MuseScore.com. I was hired to work on the open source notation app, which is free - meaning users can't subscribe to anything, so it isn't possible for me to have instituted anything like these patterns. We also never put anything in Audacity to 'spy' on users. That's verifiably untrue because the app is open source and anyone can check the code to verify it. The actual thing people were irritated by was our attempt to include opt-in telemetry, which is a pretty significantly different thing to spyware. Users rebelled against the idea, so we didn't include it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Tokkemon 3y ago
  Got a link?
garbanz0 3y ago
They got me with this too. Roped into a year long subscription.
Clamchop 3y ago
Tangential, but the "setting up your account" shenanigans reminds me of one of the more amusing patterns, not necessarily always so dark: the "doing important things" delay. Usually a website that makes you wait a while with a progress bar and status messages in the vein of "reticulating splines", as if Hard Work is happening when the operation is almost certainly done in a near instant. If you've ever searched for someone on the web and found yourself on one of those websites that launders public records as some sort of sophisticated and proprietary PI service, you've probably seen one of these. I say not so dark because it's just theatrics a lot of the time, with no real stakes for the user, but it is funny. Less experienced users might view the appearance of Hard Work as justifying payment, though, so it's still a tad shady.
- schnable 3y ago
  Long ago, I was working on a small Windows desktop app. It was a companion app to a much larger app that took tens of seconds to load. The companion app had a requirement to show a splash screen while loading, but the app was so simple and loaded so quickly that it just flashed on the screen for a split second. PM asked me to put in a delay of a few seconds so the splash screen was readable.
- schnable 3y ago
  Also, fake progress bars that are really just spinners with the illusion of showing percentage complete. These are pretty obvious when you see them move smoothly to 90% or so then stall out.
Traubenfuchs 3y ago
iOS to the rescue! On iOS subscriptions are managed through the system subscription management UI. This can be reliably used to get and cancel "first week is free" offers. This includes musescore.
halo13245 3y ago
I recommend always using a virtual card from a site like privacy.com where you can set the spend limit on the card if you do not intended to necessarily convert a free trial to a paid subscription.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  Can recommend. I made a mistake of once -- once -- using my card in PSN store. It was saved without my say so. As I later learned, I could only remove it by logging into my PSN account from a computer. CC managed to expire there, but when my toddler pressed a bunch of buttons to purchase a subscription, Discover happily obliged. Long story short, that was one of the few disputes I ever lost and I won one against an airline for a ticket purchase. My PSN is no longer accessible, but any subscription charges are blocked by CC. There is a lesson here and it is: don't use real cc.
tagyro 3y ago
All these "features" were implemented by engineers. Without trying to dox anyone, who are these engineers? And why did they accept to implement these user-hostile features? This is not a faceless company, but actual people that thought long and hard about how to trick other people into falling in this trap.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Every dark pattern everywhere was dreamed up by someone with few if any scruples and implemented by someone just following orders, because if they don't collect the paycheck someone else will.
  - tagyro 3y ago
    I'm sorry, but "just following orders" is not a valid excuse. Millions have died because people were "just following orders". I admit that I'm privileged and that my perspective is not subjective, but I - as an engineer - would never build something that I know it's immoral. Yes, there are people that can't afford this choice, but I seriously doubt that FAANG engineers are in this group, or, for that matter, dare I say it, most engineers. We come here to complain about these user-hostile features, then turn around and build some more.
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      Well, I was using that phrase ironically. In much the same way about paying people to not understand, anyone who works at a FAANG will take criticism of a company as a personal attack. But if one attaches so much of their sense of self to these behemoths, their time would be better spent asking what it says about them that they'd take on "unpaid astroturfing" as part of their job description. "Bootlicker" comes to mind.
Humlipplr 3y ago
PSA: These are the same people who took over development of Audacity an added telemetry to a previously FOSS workhorse. Should be a special level of hell for folks who mess with the kindness of FOSS, in my opinion. Real vampire shit.
pythonguython 3y ago
Does anyone know if the FTC or another regulatory agency is able to address these dark patterns? I’m sure we’ve all come across these before, but I’ve not seen them named before like in the article. It’s good to see the specific practices taxonomized and called out
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  The FTC should be able to. They could label it an unfair/deceptive practice, to do so they'd have to go through the rule making process which takes time.
jancsika 3y ago
Generally, I have little tolerance for people who would sign up for a free trial and then complain that it was difficult to freeload off the service. Then I kept reading this article, and I am now forced to agree with the author. These are nasty, nasty dark patterns. You really have to read it to get a sense of how bad they are. What is the relationship between this service and Musescore the software?
juris 3y ago
Yii, yep, this checks out. Recently I needed to transpose a few pieces, so I opened a trial with the intention of just using their app software to transpose a contributor's piece down a few keys so I can manually tabulate it for the lute. The website claims that you require the closed source mobile app and a pro account for the transposition feature (and makes no mention that the open source software natively supports this). Argh! Stupid, stupid, stupid. I decided not to go for the (partial) refund, and have half a mind to go in there and just grab all their midis for some generative AI come-uppance (not that you really can... you are limited to 300 scores per month), but the only people that hurts are those poor kids who were conned into submitting their arrangements to that platform. Bad feelings all around.

The article is from 2021, can we add “(2021)” to the title?

MuseScore is one of those services that can benefit from the fact that a really good subscription service to the main publishers legit catalogues of sheet music simply doesn't exist. Instrumental sheet music subscription service seems like an industry ripe for disruption.

bluGill 3y ago
I wouldn't mind subscriptions to copyright music, but I mostly play classical which means it hasn't been in copyright for hundreds of years (if the idea even existed when it was composed)
powersnail 3y ago
Henle has their own app and subscription, which is said to be pretty decent by some of my friends who subscribe. But its catalogue is basically within classical music, so not that much overlap with MuseScore, which has a large number of transcriptions of film/game/pop music. For many pieces of film/game/pop music, you can't even find a place to buy the original sheet music. There might not be an original sheet music in the first place; let alone a fitting transcription for the instrument you are looking to play. What musescore.com offers, is largely built upon hobbyists' transcription efforts.
- ycan 3y ago
  > is largely built upon hobbyists' transcription efforts. Which is the same model as one of the other holdings of Muse Group, Ultimate Guitar. It has a wide database for user-created guitar tablatures for most popular songs. Starting from 10 or so years ago, the experience has deteriorated rapidly; they - push their "Pro" versions at the top of each search result, - overlay a bullshit video on the actual tablatures which is easily mistaken for a video tutorial for the song you are looking at, - user created GuitarPro tabs require an account to download, - there is an ever-present countdown until their 80% runs out, which resets every two days or so. When I first heard of MuseScore and the fact that Tantacrul worked on it, I was quite excited about an open source notation app but I want nothing to do with it because of their parent company.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Tantacrul himself has questionable ethics at best. He posted a long video ripping on Dorico, got hired by MuseScore, and then stole many of the design elements he'd just been ranting about.
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    I subscribe to ultimate guitar. The "official" tabs are worth it. Even though I'm subscribed I get sales emails about their courses or something and I could not unsubscribe because whatever they use for newsletters is adblock blacklisted. So eventually I just marked it as spam, which means account related emails from them will also go to spam.
microtherion 3y ago
sheetmusicdirect.com has a fairly large catalog available for unlimited online access at $99/year.
- maxehmookau 3y ago
  Thanks, I'll check it out.
- Tokkemon 3y ago
  Right, Hal Leonard's digital outfit.
Tokkemon 3y ago
musicnotes.com has a subscription at this point. Not a "traditional" publisher in that way, but it's a huge player for PVG (piano, vocal, guitar) scores that isn't Hal Leonard.

deepspace 3y ago

The article is from a couple of years ago, but their bad practices continue. I subscribed to their PRO offering, but due to some kind of glitch on their side, I am unable to actually download any scores listed under PRO. When I try to download, the site just says "PRO subscription required"; when I go to my account, it says "PRO subscription active". The thing is, downloading scores is not something I do every day. So, I would run into the problem, submit a support request and forget about it for a while. Next time I want to download a score, I run into the same issue again, and realize that their support never even bothered to reply to my previous request. Rinse, repeat. What a terrible company to do business with.

raincole 3y ago
It makes me sad because MuseScore is actually a good software (at least for learning music notation). I was tempted to pay them but I read horror stories here and there.
sammorrowdrums 3y ago
That’s not a glitch. You cannot download all PRO scores. With PRO you can: - download regular scores - access PRO scores but only download ones that are not “official HQ” with copyright restrictions. > The new category of scores called official HQ scores is not allowed to be downloaded or printed according to the copyright owners' requirements. However, these scores can be viewed, played, and used in Practise mode. https://help.musescore.com/hc/en-us/articles/209542669-Download https://help.musescore.com/hc/en-us/articles/209542669-Downl... This bit me recently as I was confounded trying to download a PRO score myself.
- graypegg 3y ago
  If it says “pro subscription required” though like the GP mentioned, that sounds like it is still possible to download the score they’re trying to download. Unless maybe this is just how the site tells the user this is a HQ score… as cryptically as possible.
- deepspace 3y ago
  I was using "download" in a very broad sense. I wanted to view them on my iPad. Is that what you mean by 'access'? In any case, the site is stupidly bad ad describing what exactly you get for your PRO subscription.

Bud 3y ago

Just use forScore, which is what every single professional musician I know uses. It's vastly better software, it's been around a lot longer, and the company isn't evil.

101008 3y ago

I know Paypal receives a lot of hate but for these type of things is great. You can start a suscription with Paypal and then disable it from Paypal very easily.

thousand_nights 3y ago
this is one place where middlemen actually shine imho, like apple managing your app subscriptions for you all in once place making them easy to cancel
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Yep, but the middlemen that is on the correct position and should do that is your card operator, not the merchant's payment processor. You should be able to do it on your bank's site. And the fact that you can't is symptom of a really large problem.
  - thousand_nights 3y ago
    i'd love to learn more about this but i think banks don't actually know you have a subscription or how long is it, they just let the vendor charge you repeatedly and you have the option to revoke this permission through your bank (so the result would be a transaction failed upon next renewal, which not exactly the same as cancelling your subscription through the vendor)
    - wizofaus 3y ago
      I'm not aware of being able to revoke permission to charge a card for a particular merchant with banks - at any rate these days the "merchant" from the banks' POV is often a processor like PayPal or Square etc. But you're right that banks themselves don't have direct visibility into subscriptions - there might at best be a flag to indicate that a particular transaction should be authorised as part of a recurring payment.
      - 3y ago

ztgasdf 3y ago

Obligatory: https://github.com/LibreScore/dl-librescore https://github.com/LibreScore/dl-librescore

drukqs 3y ago
It's a cat and mouse game, and currently the ball is in LibreScore's court. This message is dated Aug 8. https://discord.com/channels/774491656643674122/776384156602335254/1138594006176120923 https://discord.com/channels/774491656643674122/776384156602... > MuseScore has patched the LibreScore App. The server will be down for the foreseeable future until I find a solution (possibly by the end of August). In the meantime you can download MIDI, MP3, and PDF using the browser extension.

bluGill 3y ago

This is why I rarely sign up for the X day free trials, and never if I need to enter payment information. I don't trust myself to cancel in time. Either I know I'm willing to pay and don't need the trial, or I'm not sure and don't want to risk it. The 90days no interest deals everyone offers on the credit cards counts as they type of scam. I don't trust myself to remember so I refuse to sign up even if there are other bonuses.

seanw444 3y ago
For potentially shady services, I use privacy.com to generate a card to use. You can limit the amount it can spend to a total amount, monthly amount, yearly amount, or one-time use. Really handy if you want to be sure that you won't forget to cancel your trial.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Maybe, but if they push, technically you did sign an agreement to pay whatever dollars and they may win in court against you and then you owe not just the fees, but court costs and interest (depending on what they ask for in court). While odds are against this, it is still a risk that I'm not willing to take)
tzs 3y ago
I just add a "cancel X trial" event to my calendar and then don't have to worry about forgetting it.
tempnow987 3y ago
With Apple Store subscriptions I've had good experiences with clarity of the terms which they put in literally the same font as the teaser free trial deal. You can cancel immediately and use out the free trial in most cases. Apple also seems to remind me to cancel subscriptions when I delete an app I'm not using that has a small subscription associated I forgot about. They also turn off subscriptions it seems when apps become unavailable. They also seem to send a notice about a month in advance of any auto renewals, but that may be something I turned on. They also let me cancel subscriptions without going through the developers own flow / retention game and this is the SINGLE biggest win for me having had to threaten to sue folks both at work (were subscriptions are much higher) and personally. On non apple products I especially hate the "must cancel at least 60 but no more than 90 days in advance of renewal" terms of service games non-apple subscriptions play, or ones where you have to call in (yes, the same newspapers complaining about apple can make it hell to cancel). This used to be common in copier sales where you'd auto renew for another year after FIVE years unless you carefully calendared and remember to cancel service in time. The problem is with staff turnover etc it's not always easy to keep track of these kind of gimmicks, and often the person you are contacting has also left so you are dealing with national sales departments. Apple get's crapped on a lot but despite the claims they screw folks over compared to a lot of internet stuff (ads for tech support have bitten my parents, the car warranty deals etc) I have more trust in them then the areas of the internet the FTC etc are managing.

chrisjj 3y ago

> anti-human design practices. Thing is, if it was really anti-human, it would not exist. What it is, is anti-consumer and pro-supplier. Which, note, does not in itself make a dark pattern.

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milliams 3y ago

This is why I pay by Direct Debit wherever possible (in the UK). The Direct Debit Guarantee (https://www.directdebit.co.uk/direct-debit-explained/direct-debit-guarantee/ https://www.directdebit.co.uk/direct-debit-explained/direct-...) says: You can cancel a Direct Debit at any time by simply contacting your bank or building society. meaning the outgoing payments from my bank account are under my control.

benoliver999 3y ago
Yeah most banks let you do this online too, so it's really simple. I have lots of magazine subscriptions and it's one-click to cancel.
tomduncalf 3y ago
In the UK you can also use eg Revolut to create a temporary card number which you can then cancel
- LaundroMat 3y ago
  More and more services are refusing to let you use a single-use Revolut credit card ("This card cannot be used for recurrent payments"). You could of course just create and cancel a regular credit card, but that's an extra step.
  - tomduncalf 3y ago
    Ahh interesting. I hadn’t come across this yet so I assumed they were not detectable!

dtjohnnymonkey 3y ago

I fell for the same bait at MuseScore and ended up paying for the entire year. Now I try to use Privacy.com for subscriptions like these since you can create a temporary card and then disable it.

Pulz 3y ago

I had a similar experience. I purchased 1 year of MuseScore PRO+, March 2022 and stopped using it a few months later, but forgot to unsubscribe. I'd get an email or two from MuseScore every few months, but usually just marked read and forgot about it. MuseScore hid the upcoming renewal reminder at the bottom of a newsletter styled email, two months early and then essentially said 'we reminded you about this change' later on. An email titled "Your new year of MuseScore PRO+" arrived Jan 29th 2023 - quite a length email with lots of blue buttons telling me to read more about customer success, values of the products, how they've added x amount of new music scores to my subscription yadda yadda. Then it goes on to fill up the screen with 'top scores' with images, more buttons to explore - where to go for help, discover new music........ blah blah, typical new year new company email. Except the very, very bottom of this email stated 'Oh yeah we're going to be renewing in March'. I had no emails from MuseScore between this newsletter and the renewal. So it fell completely off my radar until I had a 'Payment Received' email. I then tried to refund, knowing that you have 14 days from subscription - and was offered a discount. The same style as the article, except the offer was 45% not 35% - heavily pushing how this was the best they could do in my really unfortunate circumstance. I thought, that doesn't sound right - and stumbled across lots of articles on Reddit about just quoting their own terms. I emailed back, quoting the TOS and then received a very robotic 'prorated refund of the amount.. has been issued to you" email. Since unsubscribing I have started to receive sales emails - that I could block but find it amusing to see how long it goes on. I count, between March 2023 to today: 12 'Spring Sale' emails, ranging from 65%, 70%, 83% off annual plans 4 '[Last Chance] emails, same discount range 1 'For your eyes only' 70% off 11 'Summer Sale' emails, some of them 'special summer sale' 1 'BLACK FRIDAY SALE' 1 '[Last Chance] Summer Sale' Promotional emails 2023 by month: March - 1 April - 2 May - 7 June - 9 July - 8 August (to date) - 3 I'm just interested to see if the rate of emails continues to grow or will hover around 1-2 per week. Has also become ritualistic to clear MuseScore emails from my mailbox - which is quite therapeutic.

chefandy 3y ago

Stuff like this always blows my mind. I saw a Fortune article written by some B-school researcher claiming 12% of corporate leaders were psychopaths... but who would even want to work for a business that conducted themselves like that? Is it staffed by psychopaths, too?

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Sharlin 3y ago
Were all the people who worked for the Nazi government psychopaths? Of course not, they were normal people who were "just doing their jobs" and feeding their families. Indeed large corporations are good examples of the evolution of organizations toward compartmentalization such that almost every individual human in the machinery can tell themselves that they're not doing anything too evil, maybe just on the order of a small sin like speeding and everybody does that sometimes.

gorkish 3y ago

MuseScore = Fantastic market leading open source music notation package. MuseScore.com = Stage 4 cancer. It gives me some solace that the application will outlive the company. Perhaps if they themselves realized this, they would do a better job of stewardship for their community.

ravetcofx 3y ago
Has anyone attempted to fork the project?
- reikonomusha 3y ago
  MuseScore (the program) is well maintained and under the design helm of Martin Keary, who has absolutely turned the program around in the last few years. It's also an extraordinarily complex program requiring pretty elaborate means for helping its users, of which there's a huge variety. (Musicians, much like software engineers, make use of many different practices when it comes to writhing/transcribing/composing music.) It's not clear what benefits forking would accomplish, other than vague ideological ones from dissociating the software from its incumbent brand.
- gorkish 3y ago
  IMO the application itself is a tour de force of open source. I don't think anyone really wants to fork it. It's the ecosystem around the app that is awful. But yes, there are various projects to 'libre'-ate these portions of the community, though I don't personally have any experience with them. My own personal beef with them comes from when my middle school child wanted to learn some specific piece, and I thought "Oh I can probably get that done through this great OSS project I have been hearing a lot about the past couple of years. I should support them." Dear Reader, I made a terrible mistake.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
MuseScore is trash. You can't even reorder notes or rests by dragging them (and you'll get attacked if you ask about this in the forum): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJdKP5SvAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJdKP5SvAc We're talking about simply swapping the order of notes or rests in a measure, which doesn't change the number of beats or otherwise invalidate it. Keep downvoting, apologists.

junon 3y ago

Audacity is headed down this road, headed by the same seedy YouTube creator. They tried to weasel Google Analytics into audacity under peoples' noses, and then insulted the community when there was an uproar.

nomadpenguin 3y ago
Why do you think Tantacrul is seedy? I've watched a couple of his videos and thought they were entertaining; does he have a history of doing shady things?
- junon 3y ago
  After taking over MuseScore and introducing most, if not all, of the dark patterns mentioned by the article, he took over Audacity and tried to spy on users, berating and banning people on the PR and followup discussions for expressing anger.
  - Tantacrul 3y ago
    Tantacrul here. I have had absolutely nothing to do with the design of MuseScore.com. I was hired to work on the open source notation app, which is free - meaning users can't subscribe to anything, so it isn't possible for me to have instituted anything like these patterns. We also never put anything in Audacity to 'spy' on users. That's verifiably untrue because the app is open source and anyone can check the code to verify it. The actual thing people were irritated by was our attempt to include opt-in telemetry, which is a pretty significantly different thing to spyware. Users rebelled against the idea, so we didn't include it.
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Tokkemon 3y ago
Got a link?

garbanz0 3y ago

They got me with this too. Roped into a year long subscription.

Clamchop 3y ago

Tangential, but the "setting up your account" shenanigans reminds me of one of the more amusing patterns, not necessarily always so dark: the "doing important things" delay. Usually a website that makes you wait a while with a progress bar and status messages in the vein of "reticulating splines", as if Hard Work is happening when the operation is almost certainly done in a near instant. If you've ever searched for someone on the web and found yourself on one of those websites that launders public records as some sort of sophisticated and proprietary PI service, you've probably seen one of these. I say not so dark because it's just theatrics a lot of the time, with no real stakes for the user, but it is funny. Less experienced users might view the appearance of Hard Work as justifying payment, though, so it's still a tad shady.

schnable 3y ago
Long ago, I was working on a small Windows desktop app. It was a companion app to a much larger app that took tens of seconds to load. The companion app had a requirement to show a splash screen while loading, but the app was so simple and loaded so quickly that it just flashed on the screen for a split second. PM asked me to put in a delay of a few seconds so the splash screen was readable.
schnable 3y ago
Also, fake progress bars that are really just spinners with the illusion of showing percentage complete. These are pretty obvious when you see them move smoothly to 90% or so then stall out.

Traubenfuchs 3y ago

iOS to the rescue! On iOS subscriptions are managed through the system subscription management UI. This can be reliably used to get and cancel "first week is free" offers. This includes musescore.

halo13245 3y ago

I recommend always using a virtual card from a site like privacy.com where you can set the spend limit on the card if you do not intended to necessarily convert a free trial to a paid subscription.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
Can recommend. I made a mistake of once -- once -- using my card in PSN store. It was saved without my say so. As I later learned, I could only remove it by logging into my PSN account from a computer. CC managed to expire there, but when my toddler pressed a bunch of buttons to purchase a subscription, Discover happily obliged. Long story short, that was one of the few disputes I ever lost and I won one against an airline for a ticket purchase. My PSN is no longer accessible, but any subscription charges are blocked by CC. There is a lesson here and it is: don't use real cc.

tagyro 3y ago

All these "features" were implemented by engineers. Without trying to dox anyone, who are these engineers? And why did they accept to implement these user-hostile features? This is not a faceless company, but actual people that thought long and hard about how to trick other people into falling in this trap.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Every dark pattern everywhere was dreamed up by someone with few if any scruples and implemented by someone just following orders, because if they don't collect the paycheck someone else will.
- tagyro 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but "just following orders" is not a valid excuse. Millions have died because people were "just following orders". I admit that I'm privileged and that my perspective is not subjective, but I - as an engineer - would never build something that I know it's immoral. Yes, there are people that can't afford this choice, but I seriously doubt that FAANG engineers are in this group, or, for that matter, dare I say it, most engineers. We come here to complain about these user-hostile features, then turn around and build some more.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Well, I was using that phrase ironically. In much the same way about paying people to not understand, anyone who works at a FAANG will take criticism of a company as a personal attack. But if one attaches so much of their sense of self to these behemoths, their time would be better spent asking what it says about them that they'd take on "unpaid astroturfing" as part of their job description. "Bootlicker" comes to mind.

Humlipplr 3y ago

PSA: These are the same people who took over development of Audacity an added telemetry to a previously FOSS workhorse. Should be a special level of hell for folks who mess with the kindness of FOSS, in my opinion. Real vampire shit.

pythonguython 3y ago

Does anyone know if the FTC or another regulatory agency is able to address these dark patterns? I’m sure we’ve all come across these before, but I’ve not seen them named before like in the article. It’s good to see the specific practices taxonomized and called out

patmorgan23 3y ago
The FTC should be able to. They could label it an unfair/deceptive practice, to do so they'd have to go through the rule making process which takes time.

jancsika 3y ago

Generally, I have little tolerance for people who would sign up for a free trial and then complain that it was difficult to freeload off the service. Then I kept reading this article, and I am now forced to agree with the author. These are nasty, nasty dark patterns. You really have to read it to get a sense of how bad they are. What is the relationship between this service and Musescore the software?

juris 3y ago

Yii, yep, this checks out. Recently I needed to transpose a few pieces, so I opened a trial with the intention of just using their app software to transpose a contributor's piece down a few keys so I can manually tabulate it for the lute. The website claims that you require the closed source mobile app and a pro account for the transposition feature (and makes no mention that the open source software natively supports this). Argh! Stupid, stupid, stupid. I decided not to go for the (partial) refund, and have half a mind to go in there and just grab all their midis for some generative AI come-uppance (not that you really can... you are limited to 300 scores per month), but the only people that hurts are those poor kids who were conned into submitting their arrangements to that platform. Bad feelings all around.