9 ms·

> The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not

by Alupis 3y ago

> The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. I disagree. I routinely go months in between using some of my various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I would be very upset if they cancelled on me... I maintain the subscriptions because I can afford to do so and because I enjoy the convenience of having it available when I want it without having to go through some sort of account activation ritual. People need to have personal responsibility. Review your bank/credit accounts and cancel subscriptions if you want - it's your money so take responsibility. This line of reasoning reminds me of the petulant discussion revolving around overdraft fees... as-if it's difficult to spend 3 seconds tapping a button in your banking app.

eropple 3y ago
I don't really see how this follows. A perfectly reasonable option that doesn't affect your use case at all would be "don't charge a customer who didn't use the service during that period." AWS doesn't charge me for an empty S3 bucket, Netflix shouldn't charge for zero minutes of video watched that month. Simple as! The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and look down at a generally frazzled and overloaded population, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to have you make.
- Alupis 3y ago
  What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd. "Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible. If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    > What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd. This is a poor perspective to have, and the purpose of government is to protect its citizens from predatory behavior. You're entitled to the opinion, but I vote for people who protect citizens, because that is where the greatest value is in aggregate improvement (vs "personal responsibility"). Existing is different levels of difficulty for everyone, and personal responsibility projection is of little value. But it is great if you're crushing it taking care of yourself. (very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)
    - Alupis 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        We have different mental models, that's all. Is that incredible? No, we just have different life experiences that have led us to this point and how we think.
        Alupis 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    People don't cancel shit because they don't know it's charging, they don't cancel shit because businesses make it artificially hard to do so, oftentimes requiring you to connect with a representative over chat or phone and having them argue with you and try to re-sell you the product. Almost every subscription I have right now was started with a free trial with a few buttons, but canceling? Canceling is usually a 20+ minute task of sitting somewhere on a computer or on a phone (or worse, both) when it could be EXACTLY as many buttons. And we know that, because Apple basically mandated it with App Store subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions there takes seconds. And we also know that the various subscription companies absolutely hate it. The one that specifically burns me to no end is I recall hearing from a friend that they were on the phone with a representative from one of those meditation apps trying to cancel their subscription, and just, your product literally is made for people who struggle with mental health issues and especially anxiety, and making that base of customers jump through social hoops of fire, and argue with another person and make them stand their ground on wanting to cancel, is a SUPREMELY CLASSLESS MOVE.
- jjeaff 3y ago
  this is exactly what Slack does (or did, I don't know if they still do). they only charge you for employees that have used slack during the month. though I don't know what "use" entails.
  - bongodongobob 3y ago
    Use means account is in an "active" state, so no, not really what parent is talking about.
  - wrs 3y ago
    Yeah, that was great, wasn’t it? Slack was bought by Salesforce so they now do the standard enterprise pricing, annual contracts with user counts and “true-ups” (never “true-downs”).
- themacguffinman 3y ago
  It screws over other use cases because it changes the economics of these streaming services. Monthly subscriptions for media, especially ones like Netflix, account for bingeing followed by dead periods amortized into the monthly price. Only counting active periods will break that amortization and the monthly price increases as a result. If someone doesn't binge and their lifestyle includes watching things more consistently, they will pay a higher price to subsidize people who don't manage their own money. It is of course possible to accommodate everything by adding all kinds of choices but it costs time and effort and complexity to setup those systems, and those costs are always passed down to the consumer. As someone who manages my own financial life, I'd prefer not to pay those costs for people who don't. I doubt the ability to look down will go away either, people who lack even this minimal amount of personal responsibility have endless ways of losing money and falling behind those who strive for personal responsibility. It's very costly and difficult for third parties to fix this kind of financial apathy.
  - eropple 3y ago
    You know, you're right, it would affect that use case. On the other hand, "I would have to pay a higher amount of money for my teevee if they stopped bleeding people for no services rendered" is a really funny thing to get on the the Personal Responsibility bicycle about. Like, you could've just said "I don't want to pay more" and I guess that'd be mildly unfortunate for you, maybe I could've found some sympathy for that viewpoint. Instead you got on that bicycle, just like the other person, and doubled down on the Fun At Parties thing. "I don't want to pay more because I practice Personal Responsibility, please bask in my my perceived moral value." And that makes me think a little more. So after doing that thinking, here's what I realized. It can still be about Personal Responsibility for you and the other person if you have to pay your own freight about it. In fact--it's more! You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't being subsidized by other people, even. When you are standing on your own two feet in such a Personally Responsible manner. Isn't that nice?
    - themacguffinman 3y ago
      It appears like rationalization to you (edit for context: the parent comment said it was rationalizing before it was edited) because you've already made up your mind about the malicious intent of companies who use this model. The reality is that companies can't know if they're "bleeding people for no services rendered" because of bingeing behavior. Someone watching a lot then staying off for a few months is difficult to distinguish from someone who has forgotten about their subscription for a few months. The easiest and most efficient way for a company to know that you're not providing value to them is by cancelling your subscription. I agree that companies making this difficult is bad, but many services don't make this difficult. Instead, you're asking them to read the mind of their customers which is not easy. Netflix does treat extreme periods of inactivity (IIRC more than a year I think?) as a reasonable signal that you've forgotten about it. > You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't free-riding off other people, even. I don't think you're really understanding the point. People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you. Edit: I'm not sure there's anything I can say to sway your mind about this since you've really honed in on the emotional angle to this but I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't really a moralizing thing to me, I have been and know many people who fall short, I don't treat it morally. It's largely about resource allocation and behavioral incentives. Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly, it's overall much more efficient to ask consumers to signal their desires themselves, it's why markets tend to be more efficient. Making consumers pay the cost of mismanaging their finances also discourages them from doing it, increasing efficiency.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  The deal they offer is basically unmetered use for subscribers. Why arbitrarily pick 0 for the metering unit? If I watch half as much TV as the average user, why don’t I get a discount?
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  If you use 480 hours of Netflix per month it costs the same as 10 minutes per month. S3 does not allow you to multiply your usage by 3000x with the same charge. Gym memberships operate the same way. Planet fitness could not operate if all paying members showed up at once. This freeloading behavior that is built into the pricing model is very similar to advertising, philosophically speaking.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  This would invariably be followed up with a price increase if any meaningful number of customers have months with no use. The company would have to cover the costs, likely split between some expected decrease in churn and the rest in a price increase. If the service is willing to afford eating that cost today, why wouldn't they do a price decrease across the board? Surely they'd rather help those who most use their service rather than the minority that pays but doesn't use it.
slaymaker1907 3y ago
As someone with ADHD, that's a lot to ask. However, in my opinion what we really need is a common standard for banks to handle recurring payments for subscriptions. Asking me to review every single thing on every account is a ton to ask, but it would be a lot more manageable if recurring stuff had its own section and that I could cancel stuff from my bank app directly. Sure there are a lot of complexities, but it's not that horrendous as someone who literally worked on recurring payments for a bank. You just simplify things by making it a pull system. A recurring payment is just authorization from the bank to withdraw up to X dollars every Y days/months/year (you want a design like this to avoid dealing with holidays and weekends on the bank side which vary for every country).
- Alupis 3y ago
  Go into your banking/credit card app and enable purchase notifications. Now, every time your card is charged, you get a notification directly on your phone. Don't recognize the charge? Deal with it immediately. Get a charge for something you need to cancel? Deal with it immediately. ADHD is not an excuse to hold zero personal responsibility. Find a way to manage your life that works for you. You're not the only person with ADHD... don't let it be a crutch for mismanaging/neglecting your life.
madars 3y ago
>This line of reasoning reminds me of the petulant discussion revolving around overdraft fees... as-if it's difficult to spend 3 seconds tapping a button in your banking app. Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who lack liquidity. (Simple example: if you have $500 in your account, and the following transactions happen in sequence in a day: a +$200 deposit and a -$600 rent deduction, some banks will specifically override chronological order and process -$600 first so that you get an overdraft charge, despite having positive balance all the way when processing chronologically.) This is might not be a common problem for a lot of users of this website (though see a sibling comment re: ADHD), but the problem is real, not "petulance". https://www.nber.org/digest/202103/bank-ordering-debit-charges-and-use-payday-lenders https://www.nber.org/digest/202103/bank-ordering-debit-charg... Of course this only happens to you and me, whereas banks can and do use daylight overdraft and can easily go billions in overdraft: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_dlod.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_dlod.htm (There is a 50 basis points charge for uncollateralized overdrafts (and none for collaterized) but that is less meaningful in relative terms than $30 charge for people in above scenarios.)
- jjav 3y ago
  > Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who lack liquidity. Indeed, and as the article also mentions, banks will intentionally maximize the number of overdraft fees by reordering transactions in a way that causes most pain. This should not be legal.
  - didgetmaster 3y ago
    I have heard of this, but was always unsure if it happened in real life. An account with $100 in it has 7 checks against it come in the same day (six for $15 each, and one for $90). If they processed all the smaller ones first only the larger check would incur the overdraft fee. But if they processed the largest one first, all the smaller ones would trigger a separate fee.
wolverine876 3y ago
> People need to have personal responsibility. Do people need to have personal responsibility when they operate a business? Why is responsibility any less there? I think it's irresponsible to exploit other people's mistakes (unless they are a competing business, and not always then either). It happens incidentally sometimes at minimal cost, but at high cost or when it can be avoided, it's the businessperson's responsibility to not do it. Every one makes mistakes; you too. Forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who tresspass ...
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Why is responsibility any less there? It's not. They should be ensuring the service being paid for is available. That's their responsibility.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    You really think it's responsible to knowingly take people's money for nothing? I think that's textbook irresponsibility - it's an assertion of irresponsibility as ok.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Well, you'd have to put work in to know. If I get a physical magazine subscription, the magazine doesn't know if I read it, unless they put in the work to phone me and ask. They aren't being irresponsible at all.
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
        That's a strawman. It is indeed hard for a magazine to know. It's trivial for someone like Netflix to know, and they probably already track it.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        The responsibility shouldn't change just because it's easier. Should businesses track you (whether that's easy or difficult) and auto-unsubscribe you, or should you decide when to cancel?
Rayhem 3y ago
You can advocate for more personal responsibility and also advocate for businesses to behave in the interests of individual human beings. They're not mutually exclusive. Just because I don't want a business to extort every last cent from me they can doesn't mean I want to absolve myself of all responsibility to everything ever. > Review your bank/credit accounts I mean, shouldn't it be your responsibility to know exactly how much money you've made and spent? Why should a bank provide this information for you? Does this not serve as yet another lessening of personal accountability (pun *absolutely* intended)?
omginternets 3y ago
Surely it's unethical to take advantage of people, even the irresponsible ones? There's a significant minority of people out there who struggle with this kind of thing because of circumstances beyond their control. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were saying "they deserve it". It's not "personal responsibility" or "ethical business". It's both.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  But charging a subscription you signed up for isn't taking advantage of you. Are there really people who struggle with not canceling subscriptions? It's genuinely hard for me to see how that's not a choice. I could understand if we're talking about something like gambling addiction, where there's a compulsion. But there's no addiction here. There's no scam. There's no taking advantage of children. There's literally nothing but asking adults to be aware of their finances and to cancel subscriptions they don't want to pay for any longer. It's the absolute lowest bar I can possibly think of in terms of basic financial skills.
  - omginternets 3y ago
    Knowingly optimizing your business to maximize my chances of forgetting, or making it difficult to unsubscribe, is absolutely unethical.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      Difficulty in unsubscribing sure, but that's a totally separate issue. That has nothing to do with not being aware of your subscriptions. But otherwise, what are businesses doing to "maximize your chance of forgetting"? That's not a thing. That's not something they have control over or can maximize. For monthly subscriptions, you see it every month on your credit card. For yearly subscriptions, companies generally send a notice a ~week before, reminding you that you'll be charged, and then you get a receipt emailed. That seems entirely reasonable to me. The rest is called personal responsibility. When you sign up for a subscription, you know full well what you're doing. You know it will continue until you cancel. There's absolutely nothing unethical about it being your responsibility to cancel.
clouddrover 3y ago
> I enjoy the convenience of having it available when I want it So why not also enjoy the convenience of only paying for what you actually use?
babyshake 3y ago
It should be reasonable to give customers the choice to opt into a setting that auto-cancels if they do not use the service.
andrecarini 3y ago
I believe your use case is not impacted by the changes proposed in this thread. Additionally, hard disagree on your conclusions since it's not about being responsible or not; it's about the process of cancelling subscriptions being convoluted, unfriendly and filled with dark patterns. Here's an alternate proposition: what if you could quickly and easily cancel any unwanted subscriptions directly through your banking app? Right there next to your expenses statements? What if we took it even further such that you could not only cancel right there but even request a refund for unused billing periods? And taking it to an absurd extreme: what if you suddenly went into a coma and woke up 50 years later to a large bill from a subscription service you didn't use all this time? Was it a lack of personal responsibility?
gmd63 3y ago
I expect you to take personal responsibility for your belongings while you're at the office and someone wants to rob your house Don't expect the police to track the guy down
latentcall 3y ago
>I routinely go months in between using some of my various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I would be very upset if they cancelled on me... I maintain the subscriptions because I can afford to do so. I also can afford to do that but if that isn’t throwing money away I don’t know what is. I only consistently pay subscriptions that I consistently use. I feel like resubscribing is pretty easy and painless also, so not sure why you’d pay for something you know you don’t use consistently?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by Alupis 3y ago

eropple 3y ago

I don't really see how this follows. A perfectly reasonable option that doesn't affect your use case at all would be "don't charge a customer who didn't use the service during that period." AWS doesn't charge me for an empty S3 bucket, Netflix shouldn't charge for zero minutes of video watched that month. Simple as! The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and look down at a generally frazzled and overloaded population, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to have you make.

Alupis 3y ago
What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd. "Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible. If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  > What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd. This is a poor perspective to have, and the purpose of government is to protect its citizens from predatory behavior. You're entitled to the opinion, but I vote for people who protect citizens, because that is where the greatest value is in aggregate improvement (vs "personal responsibility"). Existing is different levels of difficulty for everyone, and personal responsibility projection is of little value. But it is great if you're crushing it taking care of yourself. (very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)
  - Alupis 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      We have different mental models, that's all. Is that incredible? No, we just have different life experiences that have led us to this point and how we think.
      - Alupis 3y ago
        [flagged]
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  People don't cancel shit because they don't know it's charging, they don't cancel shit because businesses make it artificially hard to do so, oftentimes requiring you to connect with a representative over chat or phone and having them argue with you and try to re-sell you the product. Almost every subscription I have right now was started with a free trial with a few buttons, but canceling? Canceling is usually a 20+ minute task of sitting somewhere on a computer or on a phone (or worse, both) when it could be EXACTLY as many buttons. And we know that, because Apple basically mandated it with App Store subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions there takes seconds. And we also know that the various subscription companies absolutely hate it. The one that specifically burns me to no end is I recall hearing from a friend that they were on the phone with a representative from one of those meditation apps trying to cancel their subscription, and just, your product literally is made for people who struggle with mental health issues and especially anxiety, and making that base of customers jump through social hoops of fire, and argue with another person and make them stand their ground on wanting to cancel, is a SUPREMELY CLASSLESS MOVE.
jjeaff 3y ago
this is exactly what Slack does (or did, I don't know if they still do). they only charge you for employees that have used slack during the month. though I don't know what "use" entails.
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  Use means account is in an "active" state, so no, not really what parent is talking about.
- wrs 3y ago
  Yeah, that was great, wasn’t it? Slack was bought by Salesforce so they now do the standard enterprise pricing, annual contracts with user counts and “true-ups” (never “true-downs”).
themacguffinman 3y ago
It screws over other use cases because it changes the economics of these streaming services. Monthly subscriptions for media, especially ones like Netflix, account for bingeing followed by dead periods amortized into the monthly price. Only counting active periods will break that amortization and the monthly price increases as a result. If someone doesn't binge and their lifestyle includes watching things more consistently, they will pay a higher price to subsidize people who don't manage their own money. It is of course possible to accommodate everything by adding all kinds of choices but it costs time and effort and complexity to setup those systems, and those costs are always passed down to the consumer. As someone who manages my own financial life, I'd prefer not to pay those costs for people who don't. I doubt the ability to look down will go away either, people who lack even this minimal amount of personal responsibility have endless ways of losing money and falling behind those who strive for personal responsibility. It's very costly and difficult for third parties to fix this kind of financial apathy.
- eropple 3y ago
  You know, you're right, it would affect that use case. On the other hand, "I would have to pay a higher amount of money for my teevee if they stopped bleeding people for no services rendered" is a really funny thing to get on the the Personal Responsibility bicycle about. Like, you could've just said "I don't want to pay more" and I guess that'd be mildly unfortunate for you, maybe I could've found some sympathy for that viewpoint. Instead you got on that bicycle, just like the other person, and doubled down on the Fun At Parties thing. "I don't want to pay more because I practice Personal Responsibility, please bask in my my perceived moral value." And that makes me think a little more. So after doing that thinking, here's what I realized. It can still be about Personal Responsibility for you and the other person if you have to pay your own freight about it. In fact--it's more! You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't being subsidized by other people, even. When you are standing on your own two feet in such a Personally Responsible manner. Isn't that nice?
  - themacguffinman 3y ago
    It appears like rationalization to you (edit for context: the parent comment said it was rationalizing before it was edited) because you've already made up your mind about the malicious intent of companies who use this model. The reality is that companies can't know if they're "bleeding people for no services rendered" because of bingeing behavior. Someone watching a lot then staying off for a few months is difficult to distinguish from someone who has forgotten about their subscription for a few months. The easiest and most efficient way for a company to know that you're not providing value to them is by cancelling your subscription. I agree that companies making this difficult is bad, but many services don't make this difficult. Instead, you're asking them to read the mind of their customers which is not easy. Netflix does treat extreme periods of inactivity (IIRC more than a year I think?) as a reasonable signal that you've forgotten about it. > You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't free-riding off other people, even. I don't think you're really understanding the point. People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you. Edit: I'm not sure there's anything I can say to sway your mind about this since you've really honed in on the emotional angle to this but I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't really a moralizing thing to me, I have been and know many people who fall short, I don't treat it morally. It's largely about resource allocation and behavioral incentives. Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly, it's overall much more efficient to ask consumers to signal their desires themselves, it's why markets tend to be more efficient. Making consumers pay the cost of mismanaging their finances also discourages them from doing it, increasing efficiency.
bee_rider 3y ago
The deal they offer is basically unmetered use for subscribers. Why arbitrarily pick 0 for the metering unit? If I watch half as much TV as the average user, why don’t I get a discount?
l33t7332273 3y ago
If you use 480 hours of Netflix per month it costs the same as 10 minutes per month. S3 does not allow you to multiply your usage by 3000x with the same charge. Gym memberships operate the same way. Planet fitness could not operate if all paying members showed up at once. This freeloading behavior that is built into the pricing model is very similar to advertising, philosophically speaking.
_heimdall 3y ago
This would invariably be followed up with a price increase if any meaningful number of customers have months with no use. The company would have to cover the costs, likely split between some expected decrease in churn and the rest in a price increase. If the service is willing to afford eating that cost today, why wouldn't they do a price decrease across the board? Surely they'd rather help those who most use their service rather than the minority that pays but doesn't use it.

slaymaker1907 3y ago

As someone with ADHD, that's a lot to ask. However, in my opinion what we really need is a common standard for banks to handle recurring payments for subscriptions. Asking me to review every single thing on every account is a ton to ask, but it would be a lot more manageable if recurring stuff had its own section and that I could cancel stuff from my bank app directly. Sure there are a lot of complexities, but it's not that horrendous as someone who literally worked on recurring payments for a bank. You just simplify things by making it a pull system. A recurring payment is just authorization from the bank to withdraw up to X dollars every Y days/months/year (you want a design like this to avoid dealing with holidays and weekends on the bank side which vary for every country).

Alupis 3y ago
Go into your banking/credit card app and enable purchase notifications. Now, every time your card is charged, you get a notification directly on your phone. Don't recognize the charge? Deal with it immediately. Get a charge for something you need to cancel? Deal with it immediately. ADHD is not an excuse to hold zero personal responsibility. Find a way to manage your life that works for you. You're not the only person with ADHD... don't let it be a crutch for mismanaging/neglecting your life.

madars 3y ago

>This line of reasoning reminds me of the petulant discussion revolving around overdraft fees... as-if it's difficult to spend 3 seconds tapping a button in your banking app. Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who lack liquidity. (Simple example: if you have $500 in your account, and the following transactions happen in sequence in a day: a +$200 deposit and a -$600 rent deduction, some banks will specifically override chronological order and process -$600 first so that you get an overdraft charge, despite having positive balance all the way when processing chronologically.) This is might not be a common problem for a lot of users of this website (though see a sibling comment re: ADHD), but the problem is real, not "petulance". https://www.nber.org/digest/202103/bank-ordering-debit-charges-and-use-payday-lenders https://www.nber.org/digest/202103/bank-ordering-debit-charg... Of course this only happens to you and me, whereas banks can and do use daylight overdraft and can easily go billions in overdraft: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_dlod.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_dlod.htm (There is a 50 basis points charge for uncollateralized overdrafts (and none for collaterized) but that is less meaningful in relative terms than $30 charge for people in above scenarios.)

jjav 3y ago
> Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who lack liquidity. Indeed, and as the article also mentions, banks will intentionally maximize the number of overdraft fees by reordering transactions in a way that causes most pain. This should not be legal.
- didgetmaster 3y ago
  I have heard of this, but was always unsure if it happened in real life. An account with $100 in it has 7 checks against it come in the same day (six for $15 each, and one for $90). If they processed all the smaller ones first only the larger check would incur the overdraft fee. But if they processed the largest one first, all the smaller ones would trigger a separate fee.

wolverine876 3y ago

> People need to have personal responsibility. Do people need to have personal responsibility when they operate a business? Why is responsibility any less there? I think it's irresponsible to exploit other people's mistakes (unless they are a competing business, and not always then either). It happens incidentally sometimes at minimal cost, but at high cost or when it can be avoided, it's the businessperson's responsibility to not do it. Every one makes mistakes; you too. Forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who tresspass ...

robertlagrant 3y ago
> Why is responsibility any less there? It's not. They should be ensuring the service being paid for is available. That's their responsibility.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  You really think it's responsible to knowingly take people's money for nothing? I think that's textbook irresponsibility - it's an assertion of irresponsibility as ok.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Well, you'd have to put work in to know. If I get a physical magazine subscription, the magazine doesn't know if I read it, unless they put in the work to phone me and ask. They aren't being irresponsible at all.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
      That's a strawman. It is indeed hard for a magazine to know. It's trivial for someone like Netflix to know, and they probably already track it.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        The responsibility shouldn't change just because it's easier. Should businesses track you (whether that's easy or difficult) and auto-unsubscribe you, or should you decide when to cancel?

Rayhem 3y ago

You can advocate for more personal responsibility and also advocate for businesses to behave in the interests of individual human beings. They're not mutually exclusive. Just because I don't want a business to extort every last cent from me they can doesn't mean I want to absolve myself of all responsibility to everything ever. > Review your bank/credit accounts I mean, shouldn't it be your responsibility to know exactly how much money you've made and spent? Why should a bank provide this information for you? Does this not serve as yet another lessening of personal accountability (pun *absolutely* intended)?

omginternets 3y ago

Surely it's unethical to take advantage of people, even the irresponsible ones? There's a significant minority of people out there who struggle with this kind of thing because of circumstances beyond their control. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were saying "they deserve it". It's not "personal responsibility" or "ethical business". It's both.

crazygringo 3y ago
But charging a subscription you signed up for isn't taking advantage of you. Are there really people who struggle with not canceling subscriptions? It's genuinely hard for me to see how that's not a choice. I could understand if we're talking about something like gambling addiction, where there's a compulsion. But there's no addiction here. There's no scam. There's no taking advantage of children. There's literally nothing but asking adults to be aware of their finances and to cancel subscriptions they don't want to pay for any longer. It's the absolute lowest bar I can possibly think of in terms of basic financial skills.
- omginternets 3y ago
  Knowingly optimizing your business to maximize my chances of forgetting, or making it difficult to unsubscribe, is absolutely unethical.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Difficulty in unsubscribing sure, but that's a totally separate issue. That has nothing to do with not being aware of your subscriptions. But otherwise, what are businesses doing to "maximize your chance of forgetting"? That's not a thing. That's not something they have control over or can maximize. For monthly subscriptions, you see it every month on your credit card. For yearly subscriptions, companies generally send a notice a ~week before, reminding you that you'll be charged, and then you get a receipt emailed. That seems entirely reasonable to me. The rest is called personal responsibility. When you sign up for a subscription, you know full well what you're doing. You know it will continue until you cancel. There's absolutely nothing unethical about it being your responsibility to cancel.

clouddrover 3y ago

> I enjoy the convenience of having it available when I want it So why not also enjoy the convenience of only paying for what you actually use?

babyshake 3y ago

It should be reasonable to give customers the choice to opt into a setting that auto-cancels if they do not use the service.

andrecarini 3y ago

I believe your use case is not impacted by the changes proposed in this thread. Additionally, hard disagree on your conclusions since it's not about being responsible or not; it's about the process of cancelling subscriptions being convoluted, unfriendly and filled with dark patterns. Here's an alternate proposition: what if you could quickly and easily cancel any unwanted subscriptions directly through your banking app? Right there next to your expenses statements? What if we took it even further such that you could not only cancel right there but even request a refund for unused billing periods? And taking it to an absurd extreme: what if you suddenly went into a coma and woke up 50 years later to a large bill from a subscription service you didn't use all this time? Was it a lack of personal responsibility?

gmd63 3y ago

I expect you to take personal responsibility for your belongings while you're at the office and someone wants to rob your house Don't expect the police to track the guy down

latentcall 3y ago

>I routinely go months in between using some of my various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I would be very upset if they cancelled on me... I maintain the subscriptions because I can afford to do so. I also can afford to do that but if that isn’t throwing money away I don’t know what is. I only consistently pay subscriptions that I consistently use. I feel like resubscribing is pretty easy and painless also, so not sure why you’d pay for something you know you don’t use consistently?

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