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What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, abs
by 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 agoWe 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 agoPeople 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.
- sakjur 3y agoI basically only ever sign up for subscriptions that I can cancel from either App Store or through the national system where subscriptions are listed and cancelable in my bank statement these days. My idea of doing this would be to force banks, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe et cetera to have easy-to-list-easy-to-cancel subscriptions. Just two buttons, one to turn the subscription into an invoice you manually have to pay to keep going and one that cancels it outright through the payment provider. That should hurt businesses more the more consumer hostile they are.
- taffer 3y agoIn the European Union, you can cancel any subscription by email. There is no need to make a phone call or visit a scummy website.
- dotnet00 3y agoIt's a perfectly reasonable point that the company has all the information necessary and has the ability to automate a system which charges you only when you actually use the service, or hell, even just a system that emails you a reminder for not using the service you're paying for (Amazon kind of does this regarding their Music service as part of Prime, and I love them for it, even though I still don't use it). They don't actually have to burden society with the expectation of monitoring subscriptions. You might as well be saying that people should take personal responsibility and do their taxes manually if they don't want to pay $50/year to use turbotax instead of pushing for a system where the government sends you an estimate that is likely to be correct for most people (since they're already doing that anyway).
- robertlagrant 3y ago> and do their taxes manually This isn't a great comparison. Looking through a bank statement once a month and clicking "end subscription" takes a few minutes for anyone. Doing your taxes manually is much more difficult. This is the easiest economic decision to choose to stop partipating in in the history of the earth.
- themaninthedark 3y agoThe average burden of the 1040 C-EZ is 1 hour 40 minutes. If we take the premise that 10 minutes to review your finances a month and then cancel unused subscriptions is not a burden(and good luck with canceling in 10 minutes) then doing basic taxes takes less time than a full yearly review. There are a great many people here who argue that doing ones taxes are an impossible burden and the government should automate it away since they have the (most of) the data. However here it should fall upon the individual to do all this labor in a case where the business has this information already compiled.
- jjav 3y ago> If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things. Unfortunately people for whom $10/mo hurts are usually working three part time jobs while also trying to get the kids to/from school and take care of them. So I can see why they might not have time.
- dayjaby 3y agoA monthly financial review doesn't take longer than 10 minutes. So you are suggesting that these three part time jobs offer more than $60/h and thus are more valuable than a 10 minute finance review where you identify your misspending of $10/mo?
- eropple 3y agoOf course not. He's saying that the cumulative mental effects of grinding precarity means that beep-boop rational actor theory doesn't survive contact with the pavement.
- beedeebeedee 3y ago> A monthly financial review doesn't take longer than 10 minutes. That is an absurdly short time for a meaningful financial review for anyone- whether they have a lot of financial transactions or if they don't (and may be unfamiliar or have anxiety about their finances). Especially if they have kids and serious responsibilities- these companies bank on you forgetting or being too exhausted to change.
- _gabe_ 3y agoIt’s really not though. Seeing all these comments concerned me a bit. So, I opened up my credit card apps and scrolled through the last six months of transactions to make sure there was nothing unexpected. It took 5 minutes while I was sitting on the toilet. And that 5 minutes normally would’ve been spent browsing instagram or hacker news, so it’s not like it’s 5 minutes that I lost.
- Clamchop 3y agoThese patterns work on adults and are economic inefficiencies whether you subscribe to strict personal accountability or not. Good policy improves individual and social outcomes. Choose to improve things, even if your ideal is that everyone would take care of it themselves.
- wharvle 3y agoWho cares about responsibility? I want more efficient price signaling. Bringing spending more in line with intent improves price signaling, so, gives us more utility from this whole capitalism thing. Doing this also happens to benefit and strengthen the weakest actors in the economy, and to make them more-confident economic actors. It’s all win except for the companies getting free money for no reason. Why not fix this? [edit] put it this way: if easy visibility into subscriptions and standardized, easy cancellation mechanisms were already mandated, would there be a strong case for changing that?
- pixl97 3y agoAbout every week there is an article on HN about dark patterns. It's always fun to say "personal responsibility" but that tends to neglect quite often there is a billion dollar entity spending vast amounts of time and money in finding ways to screw you over. It is not about the $10 per individual, it's the fact they may be spreading that behavior across a million people or more that makes that company a danger to the public.
- ozim 3y agoWhat’s wrong with people who have no legs, can’t they just put their adulting pants and start walking? Cool that you are mentally and physically fit, I am as well. But there are lots of people who struggle with range of mental disorders or disabilities. Some might have depression some might have ADHD, some might just be much more forgetful so they might think it is good to check account balance but 30 mins later they just don’t feel or remember they had to do it.
- robertlagrant 3y agoIf you think that services should start unsubscribing people just in case they have ADHD, that seems a very odd way round to think. They're just businesses. I don't think it's reasonable to assume they can know what you want or intend.
- gmd63 3y agoIt's pretty **** easy to infer that a customer wants to save money when possible That businesses and advocates play dumb when it comes to this basic fact is no longer astonishing to me, sadly
- robertlagrant 3y agoThey're not playing dumb, just as a magazine subscription isn't playing dumb by not phoning you up to see if you want every magazine. If you sign up to a subscription, you are saying you want it until it's cancelled. If you just want them one at a time, go buy each one in a shop.
- gmd63 3y agoA magazine subscription is entirely different. With online services the company can trivially monitor your usage (and likely already do to sell your data / make UX decisions)
- ozim 3y agoThey don’t have to unsubscribe automatically, they could refund the money but keep subscription if someone wasn’t even opening their page in like 3 months. I would say they don’t even have to refund automatically but maybe send an email at least - “Hey are you still with us?” - after they see no activity on account for a month and we also know for sure they track user activity very closely. But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoPersonal responsibility only works if parties are roughly equal in terms if power. This is not the case in corporation-consumer relationships. Corporations can employ hundreds or thousands of people whose sole goal is to employ the forefront of scientific psychological knowledge to design dark patterns to make end users not cancel their subscriptions. I hope you wouldn't ask a person who gets harassed by their boss to take personal responsibility, and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are For these subscriptions, the customer holds not just equal power, but all the power. Clicking unsubscribe really isn't very difficult. If corporations held any power, some of them wouldn't try dark patterns.
- _heimdall 3y agoIf personal responsibility requires a roughly even power balance, does that mean we have almost no personal responsibility today? Between large corporations and large governments, most areas of our daily life are impacted in some way. I prefer to think that I can take personal responsibility in spite of an authority attempting to take that away from me "for my own good."
- skeaker 3y ago> What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service? You can play the blame game all day, but that doesn't actually give us any reason why not. "Cars shouldn't have seatbelts because you can just not crash your car" is a similar line of thinking that also doesn't make very much sense. Why shouldn't the car manufacturer take some level of responsibility?
- bee_rider 3y agoDoes this analogy actually explain or clarify anything, or is it just an attempt to raise the stakes for rhetorical effect? Dying in a car crash is much worse than accidentally paying for Netflix so carmakers have a heightened responsibility to try and prevent it. It doesn’t really map to the scenario at all, “dying in a car crash” isn’t a service people intentionally sign up for and then change their minds about.
- skeaker 3y agoNot my intent to claim equivalence. The comparison just shows that it's possible and in fact very reasonable for a company to take some level of responsibility on behalf of their customers. I guess the difference in stakes do factor in somewhat: If car companies can do it when it's life or death and requires tons of R&D and manufacturing, why can't Netflix do it for something as mundane as charging their users that can be done with only software? Obviously the answer is that they CAN do that, but don't. It's nothing to do with responsibility and everything to do with them making a cheap buck off of human forgetfulness.
- Izkata 3y ago> Why shouldn't the car manufacturer take some level of responsibility? They do, through safety tests and improving it over the decades.
- taffer 3y ago> What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions. Any subscription model works by amortising costs over a large population, which always means that some people will benefit more than others. To prevent businesses from charging for unused subscriptions, the only solution would be to ban subscriptions altogether and have everything on a pay-per-use basis. That would also include internet subscriptions and transit passes.
- MarkSweep 3y agoIt’s asymmetrical. On one side you have the consumer who wants to save $10 by canceling a service they don’t use. On the other side you have highly paid software engineers, data scientists, and product managers who have tens of thousands of dollars riding on meeting their metrics for subscriber retention. For example, Amazon implemented their “Iliad flow” to make it hard to cancel Prime. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-sues-amazon-over-4-page-6-click-15-option-prime-cancellation-process/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-sues-amazon-... I don’t think it is entirely fair to demand personal responsibility when the adversary has so much more resources and incentives for making it hard to cancel. This personally affected my friend. English was not their first language and they were tricked by Amazon into signing up for Prime. The extra charges and difficulty of canceling caused much distress for their limited budget.
- rixed 3y agoIt's also asymmetrical because most often than not, subscribing is one click whereas unsubscribing is an obstacle course.
- PeterisP 3y agoThis is one asymmetry which can and should be corrected by legal means; markets which require unsubscribing to be as easy as subscribing get a bit more 'healthy' for subscriptions than those that don't.
- gmd63 3y agoBecause with great power should come great responsibility, yet for some reason we allow giant companies who literally study your behaviors to exploit them to get away with charging you for services you didn't use, when it's trivially easy for them to know when you didn't use them.
- nytesky 3y agoDo you have a family, with 2-3 adult users of credit cards? We have pages and pages of charges each month, between groceries, camps, classes, school fees, school projects, birthday gifts, and now and then a teen grabbing coffee with friends. I usually looks the bill quickly and see if there are any large purchases unexplained for, and of course credit card descriptions are very opaque sometimes. Noticing that month to month we had a Peacock subscription that someone signed up for as a promo, and never watched again, means I need to notice the one charge on page 3 AND poll all the family that yes no one watches.
- Izkata 3y agoPersonal responsibility. The idea is those 2-3 adult users should all be monitoring their own statements. Not you monitoring everything for them.