7 ms·

The desperation of NYTimes

394 points by rozumem 4mo ago

sschueller 4mo ago
Let's just stop the shenanigans and just already have the CIA finance it directly...
- lostlogin 4mo ago
  What are you referring to?
  - sschueller 4mo ago
    They yet have to formerly or directly call what is happening in Gaza a genocide. This paper is a propaganda and consent manufacturing device of the state voluntarily or not. It is due to many factors but also access journalism.
cess11 4mo ago
Since a few years I find it hard to not associate to Julius Streicher at the mention of NYT.
hparadiz 4mo ago
I just installed Brother's app from the Apple store. Immediately met with 4 popups that you can not close until you press the completely fake "maybe next time" prompt only to find out the program doesn't even support feed scanning on my specific printer. Imagine being a sysadmin that has to install this thing over and over on multiple machines. If you ever wonder why your app has a 1.7 star rating on the app store look no further.
- mbreese 4mo ago
  I don't think I've ever installed a printer's app on my Mac. I have a reflex against it. The Mac has decent support for printers and scanners built-in, so did you need an App at all? That's one thing that bugs me about hardware companies -- they all want you to install their app to monitor/configure/bedazzle their hardware. But really, it probably is just going to work anyway. And a printer or a mouse shouldn't need much. At least on a Mac. On Windows, sometimes the vendor apps are helpful, but usually it's still not absolutely needed (except maybe for GPUs...)
  - dpoloncsak 4mo ago
    I second this...in my experience, just the WebUI the printer spins up, and maybe grabbing drivers from their site has always been enough. I'll do anything in my power to avoid that cursed HP app. Although I'm sure there is good money in increasing app downloads, so maybe things have changed, especially on the consumer-side of things
  - hparadiz 4mo ago
    I also despise these apps but wanted to see if it had the automatic feed feature. This printer it turns out can fax using the automatic feed but can't scan. Which is fine but they had the opportunity to upsell me on a new printer with that feature but instead failed miserably.
epistasis 4mo ago
NYTimes is predatory on subscriptions. Over my long lifetime I've subscribed twice, and regretted it both times with intensity. Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours for cancellation, is a toxic place. I've been told they have stopped this predatory practice due to some newly passed laws or something, but they did not stop their predation due to their own values. I urge everyone reading to unsubscribe instantaneously from the NYTimes for their business practices. Do not do business with unethical companies.
- vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
  I don’t remember how it worked but I did a one year subscription last year because of a discount and had no problems cancelling.
- no_no_no_yes 4mo ago
  You can subscribe with your library card and get access to all NYTimes (games/crosswords too). One caveat is the subscription "rental" is for only a 3 day period, so you have "renew" your subscription every 3 days. This only takes 2 clicks though. For San Francisco public library: https://ezproxy.sfpl.org/login/nyt https://ezproxy.sfpl.org/login/nyt.
  - bakul 4mo ago
    It’s now one day only, at least through my library.
    - ceejayoz 4mo ago
      I just bookmarked the apply-code page. Changes every 6-12 months, but that's easy to update.
    - no_no_no_yes 4mo ago
      It's 3 days through mine. What's your library's page? I have a few library cards so I'm curious as to which ones have better or worse terms.
Georgelemental 4mo ago
> I'm aware media and journalism sites have been getting hit hard over the last few years, but is it this bad? The New York Times is actually doing quite well financially, they are the exception to the trend
ezfe 4mo ago
When I sign in, NYtimes asks me to subscribe to other services, even though my subscription has access to the article I am trying to read.
ryandrake 4mo ago
Corporate desperation seems to be on the rise. So many products try to convince, beg, nudge, trick, and dark-pattern you into buying or even just interacting with them. They're all like clingy puppy dogs, begging for you to notice them, read their spam and be part of their ecosystem. Microsoft is one of the worst--forcing you to do things, begging you to do other things, forgetting that you opted out, and just in general nagging users to death about everything. C'mon developers, stand up to marketing for a change and stop writing these software nags.
- pmdr 4mo ago
  > C'mon developers, stand up to marketing for a change and stop writing these software nags. Only things they ever stood up for were social issues (that's why you see banners with Ukraine and BLM, etc). Google kinda put an end to that when they fired 28 workers protesting Israel. I never saw any banners protesting dark patterns. Now, with (perhaps) most developers in the shadow of the AI-layoffs boot, there's really no hope for change coming from the inside.
mrcwinn 4mo ago
NYTimes is not unique, but yes, they are a for-profit entity focused on audience building and audience retention. Their audience tends to be liberal leaning types, and so their aim is to produce content for that audience. This particular example is disgusting. My suggestion is subscribe to Breaking Points or try them for free on YouTube. You won't get the breadth of content given their scale, but you will get a more honest approach to delivering news.
superxpro12 4mo ago
Im curious what the alternatives are the author considers to be acceptable? From what I understand, the press is under assault from all sides... Internet has killed paper subs, political influence is attacking them... like what do you expect them to do?
- skybrian 4mo ago
  I expect them to treat subscribers well so they will renew.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- snickerbockers 4mo ago
  It's sounds like he wants them to offer paying subscribers the choice to opt out of marketing emails? I'm a bit confused by your implication that journalism is somehow contingent on sending email spam to people who are already paying customers.
  - organsnyder 4mo ago
    This is one of the main reasons that Amazon is my default online merchant, despite all of my reservations with them: a purchase won't increase the amount of marketing email I receive. I don't know how much spam they send to new accounts, but I must have my preferences tweaked to eliminate most of it. Contrast that to every merchant that thinks that since I bought a product from them once, they should spam me multiple times per week, oftentimes even when I've unchecked the "receive marketing emails" box.
- lostlogin 4mo ago
  > like what do you expect them to do? Take my money, show me content. No adverts. No spam. Let me unsubscribe if I want to.
- J_Shelby_J 4mo ago
  NYT is doing great though. It’s actually doing so well it’s in danger of becoming a monopoly.
skybrian 4mo ago
Another example of being user-hostile is that they put videos on the front page that autoplay and can't be paused. I will not renew either.
- notsydonia 4mo ago
  Agree -they all do it. How do they justify the bounce rate? It's never once been shown to my knowledge that viewers love to have their browsing/reading/knowledge gathering interrupted by a volume-up video playing (usually) an ad. Is it just so they can tell advertisers X amount of people "viewed" your ad?
  - skybrian 4mo ago
    The videos I'm complaining about on the NYT aren't ads. They seem to think they're CNN or something. I don't want CNN. I want a newspaper.
devindotcom 4mo ago
It's not just them. Yeah, this is bad, but I get tons of unsolicited messages from any company I establish a basic relationship with. Every interaction I have with a store or site signs me up for some promotional thing, which I unsubscribe from immediately, only to find it's one of 4 different lists I was added to. Then 6 months later I receive some stupid new thing as they try to drum up engagement. One that particularly bugs me is Bank of America, which sends all kinds of promotional stuff with a note at the end saying "You're receiving this servicing email as part of your existing relationship with us." Can't block it without blocking actual important banking emails. Experian was doing the same - promoting services under the guise of offering account updates. It does feel desperate, but one has to imagine that this firehose technique works.
- notsydonia 4mo ago
  It's nuts and I can't believe it works. It's interesting that you're getting bank P.R. fluff with that 'should be illegal' workaround - I've been getting them from my bank in Australia and wondered if we had really slack laws. A mass mail-out solution like - say - Mail Chimp would not let users do this. There has to be an unsubscribe link on mass-mail blasts and you should not be able to pretend P.R. fluff is suddenly "transactional." I also don't want to be lectured about mindfulness by a bank!
  - nickff 4mo ago
    >"It's nuts and I can't believe it works." The success rate is low, but the problem is that it's an arms race, where every competitor is spamming, so each new entrant (or non-spammer) must try to spam even harder to compete. If one elects not to spam, they are at a competitive disadvantage. If there is an anti-spam law or regulation, this just benefits competitors from other jurisdictions, where it is difficult to enforce the rule.
    - saghm 4mo ago
      So then enforce the rule on the receiver side: people in your jurisdiction should have the right to be free from spam, and if you want to serve customers there, you need to comply. I'm pretty sure companies aren't going to opt out of the US market because if they're not allowed to send stupid marketing emails anymore.
jamwise 4mo ago
I only interact with them through their word and logic games. They finally coerced me into subscribing, but to their credit it was a pretty good deal. Now I'm worried.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
failuser 4mo ago
NYT makes more money from their games than actual news, right? Newspapers are dead and there is nothing to replace them. There is no loner money in informing the masses, only is disinformation. The people who can make money from the news and data buy surveillance data that is far more accurate than the government publishes and trade on it. You can’t have anything resembling a liberal democracy when the monetary insensitive are aligned like this and there is no pushback.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- lostlogin 4mo ago
  ChrisArchitect posted this: Whatever they're doing, whether to maintain growth or increase it, it's mostly working. Just today coincidentally: The New York Times Reaches Three Million Digital Subscribers Outside the U.S.. And last month: The New York Times Passes 13 Million Subscribers > For the second quarter of 2026, the company forecast a 14 to 17 percent increase in digital-only subscription revenue.
everdrive 4mo ago
NYTimes was the only subscription in well over a decade that was just sitting there collecting money when we thought we'd canceled it. It was for some crossword type app game, but it was just eating ~$7 monthly without any use. The only reason I noticed was my credit card bill. I really, really hate subscriptions.
heathrow83829 4mo ago
NYTimes and the big media papers in general seem to have this entitled arrogance. Like they feel entitled to have an audience or something. I've noticed similar predatory behavior from car and driver magazine. they would send me a bill marked "overdue" even though I never reknewed my subscription. they would harass me repeatedly over and over saying that I owed them money. It's fraudulent, and I will never subscribe to any print media or media subscriptions again!
- lokar 4mo ago
  How could they have tested them without detection?
ilamont 4mo ago
If you think that's bad, 5 years ago you had to call someone on the phone to cancel NYT subscriptions (the boiler room retention script always gave you an option to extend at the cheaper rate, but it was a pain to have to go through the motions). IIRC new consumer laws at the state or local level ended that practice. I'm still paying the NYT intro rate ($4 a month billed annually) and on day 364 go to the account page to cancel my subscription before it resets to the "official" rate. Sure enough, they let you stay at the cheap rate if you tell them you'll walk. Works for telcos and Adobe, too. As for alerts and notices you can't unsubscribe from: filter or spam.
- lostlogin 4mo ago
  > If you think that's bad, 5 years ago you had to call someone on the phone to cancel NYT subscriptions I was gifted a subscription and clicked cancel on it in January out of concern it would roll over. It still rolled over and the person who gifted it had to call them, repeatedly, from New Zealand and spent ages on the phone (at their cost).
- balozi 4mo ago
  I gave up on and unsubscribed from the Times about 20+ years ago. Even back then the unsubscribe process was painful. I guess nothing has changed.
halapro 4mo ago
This is why I love Apple's Hide My Email. I use it ALL the time and the unsubscribe button is always there. It's not the most polished interface, but it works perfectly. Also, for any subscription for which I don't use HME, I will immediately "mark as spam" any minimally-spammy email I get. The ones described in the article would be insta-marked due to the lack of Unsubscribe button.
- specproc 4mo ago
  Firefox relay also good for this sort of thing.
  - robinhood 4mo ago
    And 1password which works fantastically with Fastmail with their Masked emails feature.
- EA-3167 4mo ago
  It’s fantastic, and also lets you track exactly who leaked your email.
da02 4mo ago
I just gave up on reading respectable news outlet like NY Times. I decided to just get it from "fringe" Youtube channels: Danny Haiphong, Dialogue Works with Nima, The Jimmy Dore Show. Recently, former CIA analyst, Larry Johnson, worked with Pepe Escobar and Zulfiqar Ali to vet a source saying Iran has 1 or 2 nuclear weapons. Let's see how long it will take the NY Times to avoid/deny/confirm that story.
- metalliqaz 4mo ago
  Going all-in on fringe YouTube channels is not a good strategy if you want to be informed. Sounds like you are in the pipeline. Next stop: Ivermectin shampoo.
- ngruhn 4mo ago
  Youtubers are using something as sources. Someone still has to do the journalism. Not sure YouTubers can replace that.
- senderista 4mo ago
  Balancing your news consumption among right and left fringe sources isn't a great way to find the truth "in the middle".
tangotaylor 4mo ago
I wish we could just have microtransactions to buy access to individual articles at a time. Like physical news stands letting you buy a newspaper or magazine. There are so many times where I've bounced away from an interesting article because I didn't want to deal with the subscription paywall. The argument for subscriptions is it helps cultivate a relationship with customers and gives the business recurring revenue. Which is fine if I want the relationship, like with Ars Technica, Wired where I'm usually interested in their reporting. But in most cases the relationship feels awkward and forced, like this linked article mentions. Like I'm not paying $400/year to The Information just to unlock a one-off story.
tptacek 4mo ago
The problem you're going to have in these kinds of analyses is that the New York Times is the most successful news organization basically in all of North America. They're doing these things because they work.
- bluebarbet 4mo ago
  Causative link not established. The NYT is (probably) the world's most successful legacy-newspaper business for many other reasons too. For example, its historic reputation as the paper of record; network effects and digital first-mover advantage; and America's need for a locus of media opposition to a bossy government.
  - tptacek 4mo ago
    The Washington Post is a national paper of record as well and it's in a tailspin; newsletters, games, and recipes are huge business areas of the Times.
    - bluebarbet 4mo ago
      There can only be one newspaper of record, that's the point. In a media landscape where everything became nationalized, the NYT leveraged its status to take the pot. Most of America's serious newspapers (Boston Globe, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, all the rest) are now even more dead than the WaPo. The NYT, with its massive frontrunner advantage, did not need games and crosswords to win this battle.
      - xnyan 4mo ago
        > There can only be one newspaper of record, I'm not sure I've ever heard this before. IIRC the term originates from liberians and can refer to papers of official record and reputational record. The Wall Street Journal is highly profitable, and also definitely a paper of record. https://libguides.mcmaster.ca/news/record https://libguides.mcmaster.ca/news/record
ChrisArchitect 4mo ago
Whatever they're doing, whether to maintain growth or increase it, it's mostly working. Just today coincidentally: The New York Times Reaches Three Million Digital Subscribers Outside the U.S. https://www.nytco.com/press/the-new-york-times-reaches-three-million-international-subscribers/ https://www.nytco.com/press/the-new-york-times-reaches-three... And last month: The New York Times Passes 13 Million Subscribers > For the second quarter of 2026, the company forecast a 14 to 17 percent increase in digital-only subscription revenue https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...
mherkender 4mo ago
If being user-hostile in tech created real consequences, Facebook would've shuttered 15 years ago. Sad to say but I'm guessing this is an effective strategy.
- Terr_ 4mo ago
  > Facebook would've Given how the "hostility" is often more than just ugly-UI, and aspects like monopolies, surveillance, and billing you for services you don't want, I think this is relevant: > I've written before about the futility of "voting with your wallet." [...] Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping. [...] No matter how indie your coffee, books and social media, your consumption choices will not have a material impact on Starbucks, Amazon or Twitter. https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/
  - mherkender 4mo ago
    I think that's true, but I am still frustrated with people who continue to use services that are openly hostile to them.
dangus 4mo ago
Not sure what the author is bitching about. They’re a one-time series of email messages over 14 days. They are transactional emails. Maybe the author doesn’t agree with that but they’re welcome to take NYT to court over it. Is their email provider charging you per email or something?
- havaloc 4mo ago
  And you should have the right to stop them immediately. I don't see how that's controversial.
  - dangus 4mo ago
    The CAN-SPAM Act only covers a specific type of marketing email with a specific set of rules. It doesn't cover emails that fall under the explanation that NYT provided. The author of the blog just didn't accept the explanation. This would be like if I just wrote a blog post and complained that every company sending me an email about updating the terms and conditions and I just called it "marketing" because I didn't know better. Which, again, the author never disclosed the content of the email, only their opinion that they were marketing emails, when NYT's explicit description was spelling out the fact that they were one-time transactional emails that end in 14 days.
    - brandonwindson 4mo ago
      [flagged]
- mynameisvlad 4mo ago
  What is transactional about a daily message for 14 days? Especially when you haven't made a transaction to trigger said message?
  - dangus 4mo ago
    They clearly fit within the definition of transactional. They are part of the transaction and they are not an ongoing marketing mailing list. They end completely after 14 days. The author described them as "marketing" but did not disclose the content in any way.
iscrewyou 4mo ago
I was a subscriber and stopped simply because they have ads in the app. I could look past the slowness of the app than what a webpage could deliver but ads in articles for paid subscribers? Cancelled it.
- js2 4mo ago
  The subscription fee does not and has not covered the full cost of any magazine/newspaper I'm aware as long as magazines/newspapers have existed. They've always had ads. It was just easier to look past them in print.
  - nailer 4mo ago
    They could sell a Premium subscription with access + no ads.
- basisword 4mo ago
  This pissed me off when they bought The Athletic. It was billed from day one as expensive, but ad free. NYT immediately put ads in it regardless of the fact I'd paid $50 on the basis it was ad free.
- mikestew 4mo ago
  The NYT, as well as just about every other newspaper, has always had ads in the print edition whether you subscribed or not. Subscriptions have rarely paid the full cost of producing a newspaper. In the case of magazines, I would argue that the whole point of the magazine is to carry ads that target a specific demographic. The articles are just there to make you buy it.
  - b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
    magazines and newspapers costed money to print and distribute. that cost is now near zero.
  - sandcat_ 4mo ago
    Yeah but they’re different. Print ads don’t grab your attention in the way animated ads mid article do. You can even fold the paper to ignore them if they are. I can read a newspaper with ads no problem, but NYT without an adblocker (or in app) is endlessly distracting to me.
217 4mo ago
Also why do they just keep doxing people left and right? Scott Alexander as the most memorable, and then the backlash after they post the backrooms movie creator's house on twitter recently Just very shortsighted behavior
- nailer 4mo ago
  Bari Weiss' resignation letter is a good indication of what happened to the NYT in the last decade: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
  - Starman_Jones 4mo ago
    > truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else. Given the events of the past week, this letter really comes across as nothing more than public grandstanding.
    - nailer 4mo ago
      What events?
      - Starman_Jones 4mo ago
        Since Bari Weiss took over CBS News, there’s been a number of controversies involving corporate interference to nix or promote politically-charged stories. Most recently, at 60 minutes, a lot of senior journalists were fired. The touchpoint seems to have been that they pushed for journalistic independence and maintaining the long-form “gather all the facts” investigative journalism that the show was known for, while corporate leadership was pushing for them to “get with the new way of doing things.”
ethagnawl 4mo ago
The UX anti-pattern of theirs which really grinds my gears is the "Continue reading in the app -- it's better." modal which appears when reading articles on the web. There does not seem to be a way to permanently opt out of it. I'm sure I could use GreaseMonkey or whatever to dismiss it for me but I mostly read articles on my phone, which makes any of that harder. The larger point, though, is that I shouldn't have to! I'm already paying for your service, please let me use it the way I want to.
- wholinator2 4mo ago
  You probably know but firefox on mobile let's you use extensions, for which i have ublock origin installed and regularly use it to block modals and things that my filter lists (every single one activated) don't cover already.
  - ethagnawl 4mo ago
    I've actually been meaning to move back to Firefox, so this is encouraging. I didn't realize you could do that sort of thing with uBlock, though? I thought it was just for blocking ads, etc.
    - fasterik 4mo ago
      Under the hood, uBlock works by filtering DOM elements. The "ad blocking" part of it is the set of curated filter lists built on top of that. But it also allows you to right-click on any element and create a custom filter, or write your own using DOM queries.
      - barbs 4mo ago
        This is what I use to block the news feed on FB to prevent doomscrolling.
  - 7jjjjjjj 4mo ago
    You can also install Bypass Paywalls Clean on mobile Firefox.
sneva 4mo ago
Slightly off-topic, but if anyone needs to read a NYT article from time to time, check if your public library offers digital access. A lot of them do. For example, the San Francisco Public Library gives you 72 hours of access at a time: https://sfpl.libanswers.com/faq/166904 https://sfpl.libanswers.com/faq/166904.
- sambaumann 4mo ago
  This is what I do every time I want to read an article.
silexia 4mo ago
I used to subscribe, but the quality of the journalism absolutely plummeted around 2020.
- pmdr 4mo ago
  I'd say 2015-2016.
monkaiju 4mo ago
If you needed another reason to unsubscribe, the NYT has been a persistent peddler in American propaganda to the point that they arent willing to issue corrections for even their most falsified pieces. Their behavior since the start of the Gaza genocide has been particularly disgusting. More info: https://writersagainstthewarongaza.com/boycott-nyt https://writersagainstthewarongaza.com/boycott-nyt
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- nailer 4mo ago
  > that they arent willing to issue corrections for even their most falsified pieces. The Intercept article linked to from your piece 'debunking' the piece (https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/ https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schw...) claims: > In a response to The Intercept’s questions about Schwartz’s podcast interview, a spokesperson for the New York Times walked back the blockbuster article’s framing that evidence shows Hamas had weaponized sexual violence to a softer claim that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” That's not much of a 'walking back' much less a 'debunking'. That article is also bizarre - they talk about "October 7 sensationalism" - a murder rampage among families killing 800+ innocent people is pretty sensational. Some quick research gives the following first hand reports of sexual assult: _______________ Publicly identified survivors/victims who claimed personal experiences: - D. (anonymous male survivor, Nova festival): First male survivor to publicly describe being gang-raped by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival. https://www.timesofisrael.com/male-october-7-survivor-recounts-rape-at-hands-of-hamas-terrorists/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/male-october-7-survivor-recoun... - Amit Soussana: Released hostage; first to publicly detail being sexually assaulted by her Hamas captor in Gaza. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/middleeast/hamas-hostage-sexual-assault.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/middleeast/hamas-ho... - Romi Gonen: Released hostage; publicly described repeated sexual assaults during captivity. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/04/middleeast/israeli-hostage-gaza-sexual-assault-intl https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/04/middleeast/israeli-hostage-ga... - Rom Braslavski: Released hostage; described sexual assault and torture by captors. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgkz0yzde80o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgkz0yzde80o - Ilana Gritzewsky: Released hostage; testified to sexual assault and abuse during captivity. https://www.timesofisrael.com/released-hostage-ilana-gritzewsky-says-captors-sexually-assaulted-her/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/released-hostage-ilana-gritzew... - Guy Gilboa-Dalal: Released hostage; detailed sexual abuse by a Hamas captor. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/world/middleeast/hamas-hostage-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/world/middleeast/hamas-ho... - Arbel Yehud: Released hostage; described relentless sexual abuse throughout captivity. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-886646 https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-886646
tedggh 4mo ago
I use virtual credit cards for all subscriptions. If they make unsubscribing difficult, I just kill the card. NYTimes is actually great value for the $4 I pay. I think they have the best photography and infographics of any news site.
arlattimore 4mo ago
The fact they know they are sending marketing emails, not associated to your account itself speaks volumes ;(
laweijfmvo 4mo ago
I'm currently in a battle with LinkedIn's "invitation" e-mail spam (I don't have a LinkedIn account). Someone (probably unintentionally) shared or allowed my e-mail to get imported to LinkedIn and periodically send me "invites" to join. There's an unsubscribe link, but it directs me to login to my account to manage my e-mail preferences -- I don't have an account. They have a separate, hard to find, "remove me from your invitations" form, but they seem to ignore that. I finally sent a CCPA request (very hard to find the link), which went unacknowledged, but the e-mails seemed to stop until recently, when they started again. The kicker is that they think I'm someone else (a relative), so it's all completely ridiculous.
- ngruhn 4mo ago
  maybe mark it as spam? If you don't have an account anyway, you don't miss anything. Also maybe they get punished a bit by being ranked as spam
WarmWash 4mo ago
They are desperate, all of media is desperate. People want news online, and they do not want to see ads, they do not want to pay a subscription. So if you are media company and want to stay afloat, you need to appeal to the people who are either willing (or don't know otherwise) to load ads or willing to pay a subscription. In both cases, it's in large part people on the fringe. Not your average person.
- imoreno 4mo ago
  >they do not want to pay a subscription. This is wrong in 2026. Lots of people want to pay. See: TFA What they don't want is and _still_ see ads, get hassled by needy marketing emails. See: TFA If you're saying "we're gonna show you ads and datamine you because you're getting it free", then when I do pay, you have to take that stuff out. Try to have your cake and eat it too = sub canceled, adblock on, ad nauseam enabled.
  - WarmWash 4mo ago
    Conversion rates from user to subscriber are on the order of 5%. 5 people paying for every 100 people consuming is not sustainable. It's also true that most people are unwilling to fully "buy out" their ad value. For instance Meta makes about $27/mo/user from instagram ads. Would you pay $27/mo for instagram? Maybe people would pay $5, but Meta will still close the gap with $22 of ads...
    - BizarroLand 4mo ago
      Do you know how cheap it is to run a website? NYTimes is probably spending less than $1-2,000,000/m to run their tech systems including the salaries of the tech people that keep it up and running. They made $2.82B in 2025, an increase of OVER 50% since 2020. https://www.tickergate.com/stocks/nyt/revenue https://www.tickergate.com/stocks/nyt/revenue Just shy of $2B of that money came from subscriptions alone, advertising was just over $500m of their income. They're not hurting for money, and they're not bound to their advertisers. I don't know why they can't offer an ad-free tier just for people who want the news and no bullshit.
wnolens 4mo ago
I subscribed 2 years ago and it took over 2 weeks to actually get my first paper at my door. I live in NYC.. Cancellation wasn't difficult though, and didn't require me to call anyone.
angelofthe0dd 4mo ago
I bought into the low-cost subscription offer a few months ago. Since then, I get a huge pop-up ad literally every other article, asking me to upgrade to all-family access. I also receive a similar email every other day. They must be very desperate indeed to have to nag me every other article to upgrade. The irritatingly incessant pop-ups have guaranteed that, not only will I NOT be upgrading, I will be cancelling my subscription at end of the trial rate. :)
- curun1r 4mo ago
  What's interesting is that I can see exactly what is happening behind the scenes at the Times because I've been in so many meetings that resulted in similar data-driven decisions. Both your experience and the article author's experience manifest in the feeling of an antagonistic relationship and frustration on the part of the customer. But what I'd wager is happening is that the analytics teams have looked at subscriber retention and seen patterns. Perhaps subscribers who use 3 of their 5 key features don't cancel nearly as often. Or maybe subscribers who share with family rarely cancel because they either assume their family is getting value from it or they don't want to have the conversation about whether it's worth the price. I have no doubt that a pure-digital product like the Times has tons of data on their users and have determined the key metrics that lead to retention. So their natural tendency is to try to game the metrics by trying to push as many accounts into those high-retention buckets as possible. The behavior you and the article author have experienced is the result of an organization becoming extremely data focused and losing focus on the customer experience. It's something to remember for those of us who ever find ourselves in a meeting where we're dissecting retention metrics and trying to figure out how to make our companies more successful.
- yurodivuie 4mo ago
  I had subscriptions to news, games, and cooking, but they were constantly trying to upsell me while still showing ads on their pages. It was so annoying that I canceled it all, even though I was using all three products regularly. It's so strange. I was a happy customer until they made every interaction a sales push. It's like buying a timeshare.
Gimpei 4mo ago
My gripe is that they constantly spam me with overlays about purchasing a family account. As far as I can tell this is unblockable. So annoying.
doctor_blood 4mo ago
Beneath a veneer of respectability the NYT has always been a rag. In Steven Levy's "Hackers" he mentioned MIT stidents were calling it the New York Slime back in the 70s.
dbg31415 4mo ago
Who still reads emails? Feel powerless? Set up a filter.
chenster 4mo ago
[flagged]
mrngld 4mo ago
I just want WSJ/The Economist/AP-etc tier journalism/news reporting that I can subscribe to and get a simple, full-text no-ads RSS feed in return for that subscription. Apparently that's too much to ask. I think ArsTechnica does that, if that publication is your jam, but I'm not aware of any general news outlet that does. Would love to be proven wrong, though.
- J_Shelby_J 4mo ago
  I don’t think that will ever be possible. Remember that every other news source is mostly just sourcing content from those legacy media outlets stories. So if they offered it as an open API or one that was easy to scrape, they’d be killing their own business. They all have APIs of course, but you have to contact sales for what I’m sure is a very expensive negotiation. I believe that’s what news aggregators like Apple News and ground news does. But yeah, it sucks. AP is outstanding. Their push notifications are all the mainstream news anyone really needs for timely updates. But their App is awful once you click on those notifications.
mmclar 4mo ago
I posted on Bluesky about NYT the other day after getting repeatedly dark-patterned: https://bsky.app/profile/mmclar.bsky.social/post/3mkiznfgvvk2i https://bsky.app/profile/mmclar.bsky.social/post/3mkiznfgvvk...
TheAtomic 4mo ago
The fact that this somewhat banal article has climbed this far on HN tells you that the schadenfreude of seeing the NYT berated is high indeed. ~ just a guy trying to get by on $690,000 a year in Queens
- BizarroLand 4mo ago
  If you're not making it on $690k, being in the 1%, then you're doing something horribly wrong
jwilber 4mo ago
It was almost impossible to unsubscribe a few years ago. Seems like not much has changed.
sandcat_ 4mo ago
I pay the $2/month. They occasionally try and get me to pay more. No chance, I always tell them I’ll cancel (and I would.) I don’t get it. If they cut out all the awful mid-article ads, stopped the page resetting to the top every time you hit the back button, and stopped nagging me to install the app (which I don’t use because of the aforementioned mid-article ads, but would use otherwise), I’d happily pay 5x the subscription. I like the content (mostly) but everything else makes me despise them. I just want to read the news!
jerf 4mo ago
"It's not. It made me feel powerless. It put a sour taste in my mouth. It made them reek of desperation." Relatedly, I've been answering those dumb-ass "How do you feel about our product?" popups that Microsoft Office is so fond of with some variation on the theme of "Be less needy." You feel like the stereotypical clingy girlfriend... "Do you love me? Would you recommend me to your friends? Are you interested in the other services I can provide? Would you still love me if a witch turned me into a frog and I could only communicate in croaking sounds? Are you thinking of leaving me? Would you still be thinking of leaving me if I set all your documents on fire and scattered them across the front lawn and then told you my engineers 'accidentally' lost the backups?" It's not like I have any expectation that anyone, even an AI, is reading these things anyhow. Your KPIs are not my problem.
m4tthumphrey 4mo ago
Semi linked: I, like many others, play Wordle daily. When the page loads, there is a button to play todays challenge. Then, there is a very small delay (like 100ms) and suddenly a button to "View all games" appears, right where you would have tapped/clicked on the button to play the puzzle. To me, viewing all games is a way to "see what you could have" if you subscribed.
- mathw 4mo ago
  Ah the good old "move the thing you're about to click on just before you click it" thing. Soooo many UIs have this problem and it is driving me crazy. I feel like there needs to be a rule that once you've rendered a clickable thing you can't move it until the user does something that might reasonably cause it to move.
queenkjuul 4mo ago
Everybody is obnoxious about emails now. I got "invited to complete a survey about my applicant experience" FROM A COMPANY THAT GHOSTED ME AFTER INTERVIEWS! fuck them! I'm going to a baseball game soon. Naturally, 3 survey links, none with unsubscribe, because naturally i want a relationship with the team, their facilities, and their ticket vendor, naturally. Email was a mistake, frankly.
steveBK123 4mo ago
They've gotten far more aggressive in the last year. I've been subscribed for 15+ years, at one point I added the food subscription because my wife wanted it. First of all they log you out way more often than they ever did, so constantly prompted to log back in. This is of course because after login they try to up-sell you to more packages. I am more likely to exit entirely than add more packages at this point.
ciwchris 4mo ago
I had the same experience and feeling. I've also experienced this elsewhere. TIAA was essentially sending me marketing emails I couldn't unsubscribe from. My financial manager with sympathetic and communicated my frustration to the business, but I don't believe it lead to any changes. As a result I have marked my emails from TIAA as spam, which now means email is not a reliable source of information from them, and so I unsubscribed from all email communication and instead receive paper mail. Sad. I can name others using this pattern. Very frustrating. It's a lot of work to sever these relationships. I guess they know this and so think they can get away with it.
- evanelias 4mo ago
  Same here, I was just about to comment about this exact problem with TIAA specifically, after receiving yet another marketing spam email from them today. For a while they all had a footer like "This service communication provides information about your plan benefits to help you make informed decisions. It is sent as part of our plan services and is not subject to communication preferences. Thank you." But today's spam didn't even bother with that song and dance. It's infuriating.
wetpaws 4mo ago
[dead]
whack 4mo ago
> I earn a small fraction of what NYTimes earns. If I'm not desperate, why are they? With all due respect, you are not responsible for covering every single thing the Trump administration is doing and ensuring they are held accountable. While simultaneously satisfying customers who are used to getting endless content for free, and sniff their noses at paying $2/month. The journalism business is a hard business. I may not agree with everything NYT does, they are most certainly not perfect, but they are operating in good faith and trying their best. Give them a break
- nikisweeting 4mo ago
  Sending 5 marketing emails with no unsubscribe link is not "operating in good faith", that's a blatant CAN-SPAM violation and could be used in a textbook explaining UX dark patterns.
TheJoeMan 4mo ago
I have something similar from AT&T about my fiber internet, they kept sending me "transactional emails" with the last 3/4 of the message body being marketing copy for their phone service etc. I submitted a complaint at the FCC (consumercomplaints.fcc.gov) and got a very fast followup from the "Office of the President of AT&T" putting me on an internal do-not-solicit list and the emails have generally gone away. They even had to write a case resolution letter to the FCC. This "loophole" in the CAN-SPAM seems to be spreading across different industries not just the NYT.
dogmayor 4mo ago
Oh no I got 5 emails I better write a post complaining about this massive inconvenience hmph
- heikkilevanto 4mo ago
  > Oh no I got 5 emails I better write a post complaining about this massive inconvenience hmph ONE unsolicited unlawful (EU) spam mail is quite enough reason to get angry, block mail, and to complain to the relevant authorities. This spamming has to stop!
acomjean 4mo ago
I love the bottom pop up which says “It’s better with the App” The options are “yes” or “Not now” No option for the “No thanks, please don’t bother me about this again for at least 30 days” that I want The times will repeat this about ever 3 articles, which is really fn annoying.
neilv 4mo ago
Ongoing sketchy behavior by NYT's business side seems to be one of the problems eroding the NYT's reputation in recent years. The publisher may be preserving the family business during difficult times, but... in addition to the money and the upper-crust status that business survival confers, doesn't the publisher and everyone else involved with the NYT want to serve society, and to be known for serving society? Not to be known for NYT's various sketchy subscription practices?
- kylehotchkiss 4mo ago
  Maybe they should find a way to keep the news flowing without having to pay for a skyscraper in the middle of NYC.
nixosbestos 4mo ago
Just earlier I opened 404 Media's subscribe page and was going to spend sometime after work subscribing to them, NYTimes, and maybe a couple others. It's past time I pay for some news media. This has guaranteed I will not even consider NYTimes for the foreseeable future. So disrespectful.
gafferongames 4mo ago
[flagged]
aj7 4mo ago
“It made me feel powerless.” Your problem. Read some of Michael Porter’s books on competition. In an economic interaction, all players compete with each other. The Times thinks it’s in its interest to try to brainwash you with some garbage. And you look for Mommy.
ALittleLight 4mo ago
Hmm. I also recently got a subscription to the NYT. I noticed they sent me a lot of email so I just filtered it with the click of a couple buttons. It's obnoxious but in the minor way that having to click a couple buttons one time is.
trollbridge 4mo ago
As an NYT subscriber, I'd like to toss out there that Brave browser (or the ad blocker of your choice) + bypass-paywalls-clean works very well. You can even be signed into your account, and everything works smoothly. I use a throwaway email that's just for NYT for the subscription itself, like I do many other things, and just expect to get the daylights spammed out of it.
nickvec 4mo ago
Yeah, in short, don’t support the NYT. Their business practices are predatory and unethical. Use archive.ph to get by paywalls.
- Ekaros 4mo ago
  Site doesn't work. Can't recommend them either.
the_origami_fox 4mo ago
As an alternative, the Free Press is honestly much better. I joined it because of the NY Times' bitter hit piece on Bari Weiss, who left them to found the Free Press. I wanted something that wasn't woke. I've stayed because of the excellent quality of reporting, varied points of view, and well researched investigations. I was upset when Weiss announced she was leaving the Free Press to head a big American news agency because I was worried it would affect the Free Press. That's how much I like it. Thankfully it hasn't much, just mostly her personal reporting - which was great - isn't there anymore. The Free Press has its own biases. But it's much more varied and inquisitive than other news sites. Sometimes I get to the end of an article and I'm annoyed that the author didn't make more of a stand and then I realise, that's the point. Some articles are just super interesting. Their indepth investigation into the Free Birth Society wasn't a big story, but it made a profound and personal impact on me.
- xnyan 4mo ago
  It was absolutely a hit piece, but what specifically was inaccurate?
  - the_origami_fox 4mo ago
    The article I am referring to is https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/business/media/bari-weiss-free-press.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/business/media/bari-weiss.... I don't have access to this anymore. I remember the tone as bitter. The article argued her success was due to her own style of grievance reporting. At the Free Press she spoke often about values, and you can still see this in her CBS press releases. I believe this contributed more.
- the_origami_fox 4mo ago
  On the technology side, I haven't wanted to unsubscribe from them entirely, but I have found it easy and useful to unsubscribe from specific various columnists and topics, especially as the paper has gotten larger and busier.
ddosmax556 4mo ago
What's with these journals all being so hostile? I remember years ago i tried to delete my Washington Post account - there was no button anywhere in the settings menu though, only: text if you want your data deleted. I texted them, they asked back, do you live in a GDPR region? I said no, they replied well tough luck. Insane
a34729t 4mo ago
In a universe where FT exists, the only reason for NYT to exist is Wordle.
AlexDragusin 4mo ago
Reading this thread I realized something, I am just as annoyed with the upsells but have I e-mailed them and communicated my dissatisfaction with the family plan upsell popup instead of online ranting? No. I am wondering how many others did? I'm gonna write them.
saghm 4mo ago
> Because the messages are about your relationship with The Times, you are receiving them regardless of whether you are opted in to receive marketing emails from The New York Times. I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Companies should never be abusing the fact that some messages are actually essential (e.g. "you requested a password reset") to pretend that random marketing stuff is not marketing when it obviously is.
azangru 4mo ago
> I earn a small fraction of what NYTimes earns. If I'm not desperate, why are they? He is an individual, and they are a company of about 6,000 people?
wombat-man 4mo ago
I cancelled recently because they really started hassling me more about account sharing. My friends, I do not share my NYT account. I have two computers at work, I have a number of personal devices. I don't know what number NYT thinks is normal for a person to have, but because I am over that number they were requiring me to login and enter in an OTP multiple times a day basically. Anyway, it finally got to me. I'll get my news somewhere else I guess. I just don't think they take feedback seriously unless it comes with a cancellation.
- TheTon 4mo ago
  The number is as low as 2. Hell, it may even be 1! I have had a subscription for years, I do not share it, and I read on 2 devices, and they've been hassling me with this nonsense for the past week or so. I'm holding out hope it's just a bug and they'll stop, but if it goes on much longer I will cancel too.
  - wombat-man 4mo ago
    Their AI support bot is insultingly bad, I'd kind of prefer a contact email and an auto response. good grief.
ganzman 4mo ago
I have a similar story with The Guardian. After I subscribed, I got bombarded with emails soliciting for more money. Immediately cancelled my subscription. What’s worse is that this nonsense appears everywhere now. When I started donating blood at a blood bank, I got hammered by SMS and email seeking my attention for all sorts and begging me for more donations, sucking even more blood out of me. This is such a turn off that I stopped donating altogether.
50208 4mo ago
NYT is a cancer on American society. Worst tho, it's described as a "liberal" news source, but over the course of it's long history it's done just about all it can to stab "liberals" in the back. All thinking people should avoid NYT at all costs (which is free to do).
DrNosferatu 4mo ago
I use a rechargeable card for subscriptions - just let it go to zero.
brikym 4mo ago
Subscription management should be a mandatory banking feature. They have the privilege of being a bank or processing company so make them offer a button. The problem was created by institutions and it will take institutions to solve it. People stuck on the phone cancelling subscriptions isn't an efficient economy. Market efficiency only works when it's extracting customer money. It should be as simple as deleting an email.
dare944 4mo ago
> Over the course of the next 5 days, they sent me 5 onboarding marketing emails and I could not opt out of any of them. Such consternation, all for the want of an email filter.
vcryan 4mo ago
There is plenty of biased and misleading information on the Internet, I can't imagine paying the NYT to get it from them.
leephillips 4mo ago
I check the NYT every day. There are occasional articles that are truly great examples of journalism. But I cannot stomach the idea of sending any money their way. Their political and cultural biases infect nearly everything they put out, and I find some of these biases repugnant. They are also underhanded at times. Here’s an example: http://lee-phillips.org/nytIHRA http://lee-phillips.org/nytIHRA
damnitbuilds 4mo ago
Tech means things should get progressively better. Why don't companies see that people will pay a reasonable amount for better things, but making it worse and charging too much means people will go elsewhere ? We have seen through the enshittification, IBM, NYT, HP, Netflix, etc. etc.
CommenterPerson 4mo ago
Another desperate practice. They have the teaser subscription at a very low rate and quietly hike it up after a year.
mikeweiss 4mo ago
It's an 175 year old institution thats trying to survive. Gotta give them a little slack IMO. The public good their journalists and editors do out weight the annoyance of those emails.
rurban 4mo ago
Another poor user who never heard of archive.is
burnt-resistor 4mo ago
Never pay for megacorporate media, especially not the cowardly, "paper of record" garbage NYT.
Friedduck 4mo ago
[dead]
customerservise 4mo ago
There’s a browser extension or mirror site that removes paywalls on news websites but I forgot the name, anybody remembers?

394 points by rozumem 4mo ago

sschueller 4mo ago

Let's just stop the shenanigans and just already have the CIA finance it directly...

lostlogin 4mo ago
What are you referring to?
- sschueller 4mo ago
  They yet have to formerly or directly call what is happening in Gaza a genocide. This paper is a propaganda and consent manufacturing device of the state voluntarily or not. It is due to many factors but also access journalism.

cess11 4mo ago

Since a few years I find it hard to not associate to Julius Streicher at the mention of NYT.

hparadiz 4mo ago

I just installed Brother's app from the Apple store. Immediately met with 4 popups that you can not close until you press the completely fake "maybe next time" prompt only to find out the program doesn't even support feed scanning on my specific printer. Imagine being a sysadmin that has to install this thing over and over on multiple machines. If you ever wonder why your app has a 1.7 star rating on the app store look no further.

mbreese 4mo ago
I don't think I've ever installed a printer's app on my Mac. I have a reflex against it. The Mac has decent support for printers and scanners built-in, so did you need an App at all? That's one thing that bugs me about hardware companies -- they all want you to install their app to monitor/configure/bedazzle their hardware. But really, it probably is just going to work anyway. And a printer or a mouse shouldn't need much. At least on a Mac. On Windows, sometimes the vendor apps are helpful, but usually it's still not absolutely needed (except maybe for GPUs...)
- dpoloncsak 4mo ago
  I second this...in my experience, just the WebUI the printer spins up, and maybe grabbing drivers from their site has always been enough. I'll do anything in my power to avoid that cursed HP app. Although I'm sure there is good money in increasing app downloads, so maybe things have changed, especially on the consumer-side of things
- hparadiz 4mo ago
  I also despise these apps but wanted to see if it had the automatic feed feature. This printer it turns out can fax using the automatic feed but can't scan. Which is fine but they had the opportunity to upsell me on a new printer with that feature but instead failed miserably.

epistasis 4mo ago

NYTimes is predatory on subscriptions. Over my long lifetime I've subscribed twice, and regretted it both times with intensity. Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours for cancellation, is a toxic place. I've been told they have stopped this predatory practice due to some newly passed laws or something, but they did not stop their predation due to their own values. I urge everyone reading to unsubscribe instantaneously from the NYTimes for their business practices. Do not do business with unethical companies.

vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
I don’t remember how it worked but I did a one year subscription last year because of a discount and had no problems cancelling.
no_no_no_yes 4mo ago
You can subscribe with your library card and get access to all NYTimes (games/crosswords too). One caveat is the subscription "rental" is for only a 3 day period, so you have "renew" your subscription every 3 days. This only takes 2 clicks though. For San Francisco public library: https://ezproxy.sfpl.org/login/nyt https://ezproxy.sfpl.org/login/nyt.
- bakul 4mo ago
  It’s now one day only, at least through my library.
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    I just bookmarked the apply-code page. Changes every 6-12 months, but that's easy to update.
  - no_no_no_yes 4mo ago
    It's 3 days through mine. What's your library's page? I have a few library cards so I'm curious as to which ones have better or worse terms.

Georgelemental 4mo ago

> I'm aware media and journalism sites have been getting hit hard over the last few years, but is it this bad? The New York Times is actually doing quite well financially, they are the exception to the trend

ezfe 4mo ago

When I sign in, NYtimes asks me to subscribe to other services, even though my subscription has access to the article I am trying to read.

ryandrake 4mo ago

Corporate desperation seems to be on the rise. So many products try to convince, beg, nudge, trick, and dark-pattern you into buying or even just interacting with them. They're all like clingy puppy dogs, begging for you to notice them, read their spam and be part of their ecosystem. Microsoft is one of the worst--forcing you to do things, begging you to do other things, forgetting that you opted out, and just in general nagging users to death about everything. C'mon developers, stand up to marketing for a change and stop writing these software nags.

pmdr 4mo ago
> C'mon developers, stand up to marketing for a change and stop writing these software nags. Only things they ever stood up for were social issues (that's why you see banners with Ukraine and BLM, etc). Google kinda put an end to that when they fired 28 workers protesting Israel. I never saw any banners protesting dark patterns. Now, with (perhaps) most developers in the shadow of the AI-layoffs boot, there's really no hope for change coming from the inside.

mrcwinn 4mo ago

NYTimes is not unique, but yes, they are a for-profit entity focused on audience building and audience retention. Their audience tends to be liberal leaning types, and so their aim is to produce content for that audience. This particular example is disgusting. My suggestion is subscribe to Breaking Points or try them for free on YouTube. You won't get the breadth of content given their scale, but you will get a more honest approach to delivering news.

superxpro12 4mo ago

Im curious what the alternatives are the author considers to be acceptable? From what I understand, the press is under assault from all sides... Internet has killed paper subs, political influence is attacking them... like what do you expect them to do?

skybrian 4mo ago
I expect them to treat subscribers well so they will renew.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
snickerbockers 4mo ago
It's sounds like he wants them to offer paying subscribers the choice to opt out of marketing emails? I'm a bit confused by your implication that journalism is somehow contingent on sending email spam to people who are already paying customers.
- organsnyder 4mo ago
  This is one of the main reasons that Amazon is my default online merchant, despite all of my reservations with them: a purchase won't increase the amount of marketing email I receive. I don't know how much spam they send to new accounts, but I must have my preferences tweaked to eliminate most of it. Contrast that to every merchant that thinks that since I bought a product from them once, they should spam me multiple times per week, oftentimes even when I've unchecked the "receive marketing emails" box.
lostlogin 4mo ago
> like what do you expect them to do? Take my money, show me content. No adverts. No spam. Let me unsubscribe if I want to.
J_Shelby_J 4mo ago
NYT is doing great though. It’s actually doing so well it’s in danger of becoming a monopoly.

skybrian 4mo ago

Another example of being user-hostile is that they put videos on the front page that autoplay and can't be paused. I will not renew either.

notsydonia 4mo ago
Agree -they all do it. How do they justify the bounce rate? It's never once been shown to my knowledge that viewers love to have their browsing/reading/knowledge gathering interrupted by a volume-up video playing (usually) an ad. Is it just so they can tell advertisers X amount of people "viewed" your ad?
- skybrian 4mo ago
  The videos I'm complaining about on the NYT aren't ads. They seem to think they're CNN or something. I don't want CNN. I want a newspaper.

devindotcom 4mo ago

It's not just them. Yeah, this is bad, but I get tons of unsolicited messages from any company I establish a basic relationship with. Every interaction I have with a store or site signs me up for some promotional thing, which I unsubscribe from immediately, only to find it's one of 4 different lists I was added to. Then 6 months later I receive some stupid new thing as they try to drum up engagement. One that particularly bugs me is Bank of America, which sends all kinds of promotional stuff with a note at the end saying "You're receiving this servicing email as part of your existing relationship with us." Can't block it without blocking actual important banking emails. Experian was doing the same - promoting services under the guise of offering account updates. It does feel desperate, but one has to imagine that this firehose technique works.

notsydonia 4mo ago
It's nuts and I can't believe it works. It's interesting that you're getting bank P.R. fluff with that 'should be illegal' workaround - I've been getting them from my bank in Australia and wondered if we had really slack laws. A mass mail-out solution like - say - Mail Chimp would not let users do this. There has to be an unsubscribe link on mass-mail blasts and you should not be able to pretend P.R. fluff is suddenly "transactional." I also don't want to be lectured about mindfulness by a bank!
- nickff 4mo ago
  >"It's nuts and I can't believe it works." The success rate is low, but the problem is that it's an arms race, where every competitor is spamming, so each new entrant (or non-spammer) must try to spam even harder to compete. If one elects not to spam, they are at a competitive disadvantage. If there is an anti-spam law or regulation, this just benefits competitors from other jurisdictions, where it is difficult to enforce the rule.
  - saghm 4mo ago
    So then enforce the rule on the receiver side: people in your jurisdiction should have the right to be free from spam, and if you want to serve customers there, you need to comply. I'm pretty sure companies aren't going to opt out of the US market because if they're not allowed to send stupid marketing emails anymore.

jamwise 4mo ago

I only interact with them through their word and logic games. They finally coerced me into subscribing, but to their credit it was a pretty good deal. Now I'm worried.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

failuser 4mo ago

NYT makes more money from their games than actual news, right? Newspapers are dead and there is nothing to replace them. There is no loner money in informing the masses, only is disinformation. The people who can make money from the news and data buy surveillance data that is far more accurate than the government publishes and trade on it. You can’t have anything resembling a liberal democracy when the monetary insensitive are aligned like this and there is no pushback.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
lostlogin 4mo ago
ChrisArchitect posted this: Whatever they're doing, whether to maintain growth or increase it, it's mostly working. Just today coincidentally: The New York Times Reaches Three Million Digital Subscribers Outside the U.S.. And last month: The New York Times Passes 13 Million Subscribers > For the second quarter of 2026, the company forecast a 14 to 17 percent increase in digital-only subscription revenue.

everdrive 4mo ago

NYTimes was the only subscription in well over a decade that was just sitting there collecting money when we thought we'd canceled it. It was for some crossword type app game, but it was just eating ~$7 monthly without any use. The only reason I noticed was my credit card bill. I really, really hate subscriptions.

heathrow83829 4mo ago

NYTimes and the big media papers in general seem to have this entitled arrogance. Like they feel entitled to have an audience or something. I've noticed similar predatory behavior from car and driver magazine. they would send me a bill marked "overdue" even though I never reknewed my subscription. they would harass me repeatedly over and over saying that I owed them money. It's fraudulent, and I will never subscribe to any print media or media subscriptions again!

lokar 4mo ago
How could they have tested them without detection?

ilamont 4mo ago

If you think that's bad, 5 years ago you had to call someone on the phone to cancel NYT subscriptions (the boiler room retention script always gave you an option to extend at the cheaper rate, but it was a pain to have to go through the motions). IIRC new consumer laws at the state or local level ended that practice. I'm still paying the NYT intro rate ($4 a month billed annually) and on day 364 go to the account page to cancel my subscription before it resets to the "official" rate. Sure enough, they let you stay at the cheap rate if you tell them you'll walk. Works for telcos and Adobe, too. As for alerts and notices you can't unsubscribe from: filter or spam.

lostlogin 4mo ago
> If you think that's bad, 5 years ago you had to call someone on the phone to cancel NYT subscriptions I was gifted a subscription and clicked cancel on it in January out of concern it would roll over. It still rolled over and the person who gifted it had to call them, repeatedly, from New Zealand and spent ages on the phone (at their cost).
balozi 4mo ago
I gave up on and unsubscribed from the Times about 20+ years ago. Even back then the unsubscribe process was painful. I guess nothing has changed.

halapro 4mo ago

This is why I love Apple's Hide My Email. I use it ALL the time and the unsubscribe button is always there. It's not the most polished interface, but it works perfectly. Also, for any subscription for which I don't use HME, I will immediately "mark as spam" any minimally-spammy email I get. The ones described in the article would be insta-marked due to the lack of Unsubscribe button.

specproc 4mo ago
Firefox relay also good for this sort of thing.
- robinhood 4mo ago
  And 1password which works fantastically with Fastmail with their Masked emails feature.
EA-3167 4mo ago
It’s fantastic, and also lets you track exactly who leaked your email.

da02 4mo ago

I just gave up on reading respectable news outlet like NY Times. I decided to just get it from "fringe" Youtube channels: Danny Haiphong, Dialogue Works with Nima, The Jimmy Dore Show. Recently, former CIA analyst, Larry Johnson, worked with Pepe Escobar and Zulfiqar Ali to vet a source saying Iran has 1 or 2 nuclear weapons. Let's see how long it will take the NY Times to avoid/deny/confirm that story.

metalliqaz 4mo ago
Going all-in on fringe YouTube channels is not a good strategy if you want to be informed. Sounds like you are in the pipeline. Next stop: Ivermectin shampoo.
ngruhn 4mo ago
Youtubers are using something as sources. Someone still has to do the journalism. Not sure YouTubers can replace that.
senderista 4mo ago
Balancing your news consumption among right and left fringe sources isn't a great way to find the truth "in the middle".

tangotaylor 4mo ago

I wish we could just have microtransactions to buy access to individual articles at a time. Like physical news stands letting you buy a newspaper or magazine. There are so many times where I've bounced away from an interesting article because I didn't want to deal with the subscription paywall. The argument for subscriptions is it helps cultivate a relationship with customers and gives the business recurring revenue. Which is fine if I want the relationship, like with Ars Technica, Wired where I'm usually interested in their reporting. But in most cases the relationship feels awkward and forced, like this linked article mentions. Like I'm not paying $400/year to The Information just to unlock a one-off story.

tptacek 4mo ago

The problem you're going to have in these kinds of analyses is that the New York Times is the most successful news organization basically in all of North America. They're doing these things because they work.

bluebarbet 4mo ago
Causative link not established. The NYT is (probably) the world's most successful legacy-newspaper business for many other reasons too. For example, its historic reputation as the paper of record; network effects and digital first-mover advantage; and America's need for a locus of media opposition to a bossy government.
- tptacek 4mo ago
  The Washington Post is a national paper of record as well and it's in a tailspin; newsletters, games, and recipes are huge business areas of the Times.
  - bluebarbet 4mo ago
    There can only be one newspaper of record, that's the point. In a media landscape where everything became nationalized, the NYT leveraged its status to take the pot. Most of America's serious newspapers (Boston Globe, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, all the rest) are now even more dead than the WaPo. The NYT, with its massive frontrunner advantage, did not need games and crosswords to win this battle.
    - xnyan 4mo ago
      > There can only be one newspaper of record, I'm not sure I've ever heard this before. IIRC the term originates from liberians and can refer to papers of official record and reputational record. The Wall Street Journal is highly profitable, and also definitely a paper of record. https://libguides.mcmaster.ca/news/record https://libguides.mcmaster.ca/news/record

ChrisArchitect 4mo ago

Whatever they're doing, whether to maintain growth or increase it, it's mostly working. Just today coincidentally: The New York Times Reaches Three Million Digital Subscribers Outside the U.S. https://www.nytco.com/press/the-new-york-times-reaches-three-million-international-subscribers/ https://www.nytco.com/press/the-new-york-times-reaches-three... And last month: The New York Times Passes 13 Million Subscribers > For the second quarter of 2026, the company forecast a 14 to 17 percent increase in digital-only subscription revenue https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...

mherkender 4mo ago

If being user-hostile in tech created real consequences, Facebook would've shuttered 15 years ago. Sad to say but I'm guessing this is an effective strategy.

Terr_ 4mo ago
> Facebook would've Given how the "hostility" is often more than just ugly-UI, and aspects like monopolies, surveillance, and billing you for services you don't want, I think this is relevant: > I've written before about the futility of "voting with your wallet." [...] Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping. [...] No matter how indie your coffee, books and social media, your consumption choices will not have a material impact on Starbucks, Amazon or Twitter. https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/
- mherkender 4mo ago
  I think that's true, but I am still frustrated with people who continue to use services that are openly hostile to them.

dangus 4mo ago

Not sure what the author is bitching about. They’re a one-time series of email messages over 14 days. They are transactional emails. Maybe the author doesn’t agree with that but they’re welcome to take NYT to court over it. Is their email provider charging you per email or something?

havaloc 4mo ago
And you should have the right to stop them immediately. I don't see how that's controversial.
- dangus 4mo ago
  The CAN-SPAM Act only covers a specific type of marketing email with a specific set of rules. It doesn't cover emails that fall under the explanation that NYT provided. The author of the blog just didn't accept the explanation. This would be like if I just wrote a blog post and complained that every company sending me an email about updating the terms and conditions and I just called it "marketing" because I didn't know better. Which, again, the author never disclosed the content of the email, only their opinion that they were marketing emails, when NYT's explicit description was spelling out the fact that they were one-time transactional emails that end in 14 days.
  - brandonwindson 4mo ago
    [flagged]
mynameisvlad 4mo ago
What is transactional about a daily message for 14 days? Especially when you haven't made a transaction to trigger said message?
- dangus 4mo ago
  They clearly fit within the definition of transactional. They are part of the transaction and they are not an ongoing marketing mailing list. They end completely after 14 days. The author described them as "marketing" but did not disclose the content in any way.

iscrewyou 4mo ago

I was a subscriber and stopped simply because they have ads in the app. I could look past the slowness of the app than what a webpage could deliver but ads in articles for paid subscribers? Cancelled it.

js2 4mo ago
The subscription fee does not and has not covered the full cost of any magazine/newspaper I'm aware as long as magazines/newspapers have existed. They've always had ads. It was just easier to look past them in print.
- nailer 4mo ago
  They could sell a Premium subscription with access + no ads.
basisword 4mo ago
This pissed me off when they bought The Athletic. It was billed from day one as expensive, but ad free. NYT immediately put ads in it regardless of the fact I'd paid $50 on the basis it was ad free.
mikestew 4mo ago
The NYT, as well as just about every other newspaper, has always had ads in the print edition whether you subscribed or not. Subscriptions have rarely paid the full cost of producing a newspaper. In the case of magazines, I would argue that the whole point of the magazine is to carry ads that target a specific demographic. The articles are just there to make you buy it.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
  magazines and newspapers costed money to print and distribute. that cost is now near zero.
- sandcat_ 4mo ago
  Yeah but they’re different. Print ads don’t grab your attention in the way animated ads mid article do. You can even fold the paper to ignore them if they are. I can read a newspaper with ads no problem, but NYT without an adblocker (or in app) is endlessly distracting to me.

217 4mo ago

Also why do they just keep doxing people left and right? Scott Alexander as the most memorable, and then the backlash after they post the backrooms movie creator's house on twitter recently Just very shortsighted behavior

nailer 4mo ago
Bari Weiss' resignation letter is a good indication of what happened to the NYT in the last decade: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
- Starman_Jones 4mo ago
  > truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else. Given the events of the past week, this letter really comes across as nothing more than public grandstanding.
  - nailer 4mo ago
    What events?
    - Starman_Jones 4mo ago
      Since Bari Weiss took over CBS News, there’s been a number of controversies involving corporate interference to nix or promote politically-charged stories. Most recently, at 60 minutes, a lot of senior journalists were fired. The touchpoint seems to have been that they pushed for journalistic independence and maintaining the long-form “gather all the facts” investigative journalism that the show was known for, while corporate leadership was pushing for them to “get with the new way of doing things.”

ethagnawl 4mo ago

The UX anti-pattern of theirs which really grinds my gears is the "Continue reading in the app -- it's better." modal which appears when reading articles on the web. There does not seem to be a way to permanently opt out of it. I'm sure I could use GreaseMonkey or whatever to dismiss it for me but I mostly read articles on my phone, which makes any of that harder. The larger point, though, is that I shouldn't have to! I'm already paying for your service, please let me use it the way I want to.

wholinator2 4mo ago
You probably know but firefox on mobile let's you use extensions, for which i have ublock origin installed and regularly use it to block modals and things that my filter lists (every single one activated) don't cover already.
- ethagnawl 4mo ago
  I've actually been meaning to move back to Firefox, so this is encouraging. I didn't realize you could do that sort of thing with uBlock, though? I thought it was just for blocking ads, etc.
  - fasterik 4mo ago
    Under the hood, uBlock works by filtering DOM elements. The "ad blocking" part of it is the set of curated filter lists built on top of that. But it also allows you to right-click on any element and create a custom filter, or write your own using DOM queries.
    - barbs 4mo ago
      This is what I use to block the news feed on FB to prevent doomscrolling.
- 7jjjjjjj 4mo ago
  You can also install Bypass Paywalls Clean on mobile Firefox.

sneva 4mo ago

Slightly off-topic, but if anyone needs to read a NYT article from time to time, check if your public library offers digital access. A lot of them do. For example, the San Francisco Public Library gives you 72 hours of access at a time: https://sfpl.libanswers.com/faq/166904 https://sfpl.libanswers.com/faq/166904.

sambaumann 4mo ago
This is what I do every time I want to read an article.

silexia 4mo ago

I used to subscribe, but the quality of the journalism absolutely plummeted around 2020.

pmdr 4mo ago
I'd say 2015-2016.

monkaiju 4mo ago

If you needed another reason to unsubscribe, the NYT has been a persistent peddler in American propaganda to the point that they arent willing to issue corrections for even their most falsified pieces. Their behavior since the start of the Gaza genocide has been particularly disgusting. More info: https://writersagainstthewarongaza.com/boycott-nyt https://writersagainstthewarongaza.com/boycott-nyt

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
nailer 4mo ago
> that they arent willing to issue corrections for even their most falsified pieces. The Intercept article linked to from your piece 'debunking' the piece (https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/ https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schw...) claims: > In a response to The Intercept’s questions about Schwartz’s podcast interview, a spokesperson for the New York Times walked back the blockbuster article’s framing that evidence shows Hamas had weaponized sexual violence to a softer claim that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” That's not much of a 'walking back' much less a 'debunking'. That article is also bizarre - they talk about "October 7 sensationalism" - a murder rampage among families killing 800+ innocent people is pretty sensational. Some quick research gives the following first hand reports of sexual assult: _______________ Publicly identified survivors/victims who claimed personal experiences: - D. (anonymous male survivor, Nova festival): First male survivor to publicly describe being gang-raped by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival. https://www.timesofisrael.com/male-october-7-survivor-recounts-rape-at-hands-of-hamas-terrorists/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/male-october-7-survivor-recoun... - Amit Soussana: Released hostage; first to publicly detail being sexually assaulted by her Hamas captor in Gaza. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/middleeast/hamas-hostage-sexual-assault.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/middleeast/hamas-ho... - Romi Gonen: Released hostage; publicly described repeated sexual assaults during captivity. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/04/middleeast/israeli-hostage-gaza-sexual-assault-intl https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/04/middleeast/israeli-hostage-ga... - Rom Braslavski: Released hostage; described sexual assault and torture by captors. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgkz0yzde80o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgkz0yzde80o - Ilana Gritzewsky: Released hostage; testified to sexual assault and abuse during captivity. https://www.timesofisrael.com/released-hostage-ilana-gritzewsky-says-captors-sexually-assaulted-her/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/released-hostage-ilana-gritzew... - Guy Gilboa-Dalal: Released hostage; detailed sexual abuse by a Hamas captor. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/world/middleeast/hamas-hostage-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/world/middleeast/hamas-ho... - Arbel Yehud: Released hostage; described relentless sexual abuse throughout captivity. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-886646 https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-886646

tedggh 4mo ago

I use virtual credit cards for all subscriptions. If they make unsubscribing difficult, I just kill the card. NYTimes is actually great value for the $4 I pay. I think they have the best photography and infographics of any news site.

arlattimore 4mo ago

The fact they know they are sending marketing emails, not associated to your account itself speaks volumes ;(

laweijfmvo 4mo ago

I'm currently in a battle with LinkedIn's "invitation" e-mail spam (I don't have a LinkedIn account). Someone (probably unintentionally) shared or allowed my e-mail to get imported to LinkedIn and periodically send me "invites" to join. There's an unsubscribe link, but it directs me to login to my account to manage my e-mail preferences -- I don't have an account. They have a separate, hard to find, "remove me from your invitations" form, but they seem to ignore that. I finally sent a CCPA request (very hard to find the link), which went unacknowledged, but the e-mails seemed to stop until recently, when they started again. The kicker is that they think I'm someone else (a relative), so it's all completely ridiculous.

ngruhn 4mo ago
maybe mark it as spam? If you don't have an account anyway, you don't miss anything. Also maybe they get punished a bit by being ranked as spam

WarmWash 4mo ago

They are desperate, all of media is desperate. People want news online, and they do not want to see ads, they do not want to pay a subscription. So if you are media company and want to stay afloat, you need to appeal to the people who are either willing (or don't know otherwise) to load ads or willing to pay a subscription. In both cases, it's in large part people on the fringe. Not your average person.

imoreno 4mo ago
>they do not want to pay a subscription. This is wrong in 2026. Lots of people want to pay. See: TFA What they don't want is and _still_ see ads, get hassled by needy marketing emails. See: TFA If you're saying "we're gonna show you ads and datamine you because you're getting it free", then when I do pay, you have to take that stuff out. Try to have your cake and eat it too = sub canceled, adblock on, ad nauseam enabled.
- WarmWash 4mo ago
  Conversion rates from user to subscriber are on the order of 5%. 5 people paying for every 100 people consuming is not sustainable. It's also true that most people are unwilling to fully "buy out" their ad value. For instance Meta makes about $27/mo/user from instagram ads. Would you pay $27/mo for instagram? Maybe people would pay $5, but Meta will still close the gap with $22 of ads...
  - BizarroLand 4mo ago
    Do you know how cheap it is to run a website? NYTimes is probably spending less than $1-2,000,000/m to run their tech systems including the salaries of the tech people that keep it up and running. They made $2.82B in 2025, an increase of OVER 50% since 2020. https://www.tickergate.com/stocks/nyt/revenue https://www.tickergate.com/stocks/nyt/revenue Just shy of $2B of that money came from subscriptions alone, advertising was just over $500m of their income. They're not hurting for money, and they're not bound to their advertisers. I don't know why they can't offer an ad-free tier just for people who want the news and no bullshit.

wnolens 4mo ago

I subscribed 2 years ago and it took over 2 weeks to actually get my first paper at my door. I live in NYC.. Cancellation wasn't difficult though, and didn't require me to call anyone.

angelofthe0dd 4mo ago

I bought into the low-cost subscription offer a few months ago. Since then, I get a huge pop-up ad literally every other article, asking me to upgrade to all-family access. I also receive a similar email every other day. They must be very desperate indeed to have to nag me every other article to upgrade. The irritatingly incessant pop-ups have guaranteed that, not only will I NOT be upgrading, I will be cancelling my subscription at end of the trial rate. :)

curun1r 4mo ago
What's interesting is that I can see exactly what is happening behind the scenes at the Times because I've been in so many meetings that resulted in similar data-driven decisions. Both your experience and the article author's experience manifest in the feeling of an antagonistic relationship and frustration on the part of the customer. But what I'd wager is happening is that the analytics teams have looked at subscriber retention and seen patterns. Perhaps subscribers who use 3 of their 5 key features don't cancel nearly as often. Or maybe subscribers who share with family rarely cancel because they either assume their family is getting value from it or they don't want to have the conversation about whether it's worth the price. I have no doubt that a pure-digital product like the Times has tons of data on their users and have determined the key metrics that lead to retention. So their natural tendency is to try to game the metrics by trying to push as many accounts into those high-retention buckets as possible. The behavior you and the article author have experienced is the result of an organization becoming extremely data focused and losing focus on the customer experience. It's something to remember for those of us who ever find ourselves in a meeting where we're dissecting retention metrics and trying to figure out how to make our companies more successful.
yurodivuie 4mo ago
I had subscriptions to news, games, and cooking, but they were constantly trying to upsell me while still showing ads on their pages. It was so annoying that I canceled it all, even though I was using all three products regularly. It's so strange. I was a happy customer until they made every interaction a sales push. It's like buying a timeshare.

Gimpei 4mo ago

My gripe is that they constantly spam me with overlays about purchasing a family account. As far as I can tell this is unblockable. So annoying.

doctor_blood 4mo ago

Beneath a veneer of respectability the NYT has always been a rag. In Steven Levy's "Hackers" he mentioned MIT stidents were calling it the New York Slime back in the 70s.

dbg31415 4mo ago

Who still reads emails? Feel powerless? Set up a filter.

chenster 4mo ago

[flagged]

mrngld 4mo ago

I just want WSJ/The Economist/AP-etc tier journalism/news reporting that I can subscribe to and get a simple, full-text no-ads RSS feed in return for that subscription. Apparently that's too much to ask. I think ArsTechnica does that, if that publication is your jam, but I'm not aware of any general news outlet that does. Would love to be proven wrong, though.

J_Shelby_J 4mo ago
I don’t think that will ever be possible. Remember that every other news source is mostly just sourcing content from those legacy media outlets stories. So if they offered it as an open API or one that was easy to scrape, they’d be killing their own business. They all have APIs of course, but you have to contact sales for what I’m sure is a very expensive negotiation. I believe that’s what news aggregators like Apple News and ground news does. But yeah, it sucks. AP is outstanding. Their push notifications are all the mainstream news anyone really needs for timely updates. But their App is awful once you click on those notifications.

mmclar 4mo ago

I posted on Bluesky about NYT the other day after getting repeatedly dark-patterned: https://bsky.app/profile/mmclar.bsky.social/post/3mkiznfgvvk2i https://bsky.app/profile/mmclar.bsky.social/post/3mkiznfgvvk...

TheAtomic 4mo ago

The fact that this somewhat banal article has climbed this far on HN tells you that the schadenfreude of seeing the NYT berated is high indeed. ~ just a guy trying to get by on $690,000 a year in Queens

BizarroLand 4mo ago
If you're not making it on $690k, being in the 1%, then you're doing something horribly wrong

jwilber 4mo ago

It was almost impossible to unsubscribe a few years ago. Seems like not much has changed.

sandcat_ 4mo ago

I pay the $2/month. They occasionally try and get me to pay more. No chance, I always tell them I’ll cancel (and I would.) I don’t get it. If they cut out all the awful mid-article ads, stopped the page resetting to the top every time you hit the back button, and stopped nagging me to install the app (which I don’t use because of the aforementioned mid-article ads, but would use otherwise), I’d happily pay 5x the subscription. I like the content (mostly) but everything else makes me despise them. I just want to read the news!

jerf 4mo ago

"It's not. It made me feel powerless. It put a sour taste in my mouth. It made them reek of desperation." Relatedly, I've been answering those dumb-ass "How do you feel about our product?" popups that Microsoft Office is so fond of with some variation on the theme of "Be less needy." You feel like the stereotypical clingy girlfriend... "Do you love me? Would you recommend me to your friends? Are you interested in the other services I can provide? Would you still love me if a witch turned me into a frog and I could only communicate in croaking sounds? Are you thinking of leaving me? Would you still be thinking of leaving me if I set all your documents on fire and scattered them across the front lawn and then told you my engineers 'accidentally' lost the backups?" It's not like I have any expectation that anyone, even an AI, is reading these things anyhow. Your KPIs are not my problem.

m4tthumphrey 4mo ago

Semi linked: I, like many others, play Wordle daily. When the page loads, there is a button to play todays challenge. Then, there is a very small delay (like 100ms) and suddenly a button to "View all games" appears, right where you would have tapped/clicked on the button to play the puzzle. To me, viewing all games is a way to "see what you could have" if you subscribed.

mathw 4mo ago
Ah the good old "move the thing you're about to click on just before you click it" thing. Soooo many UIs have this problem and it is driving me crazy. I feel like there needs to be a rule that once you've rendered a clickable thing you can't move it until the user does something that might reasonably cause it to move.

queenkjuul 4mo ago

Everybody is obnoxious about emails now. I got "invited to complete a survey about my applicant experience" FROM A COMPANY THAT GHOSTED ME AFTER INTERVIEWS! fuck them! I'm going to a baseball game soon. Naturally, 3 survey links, none with unsubscribe, because naturally i want a relationship with the team, their facilities, and their ticket vendor, naturally. Email was a mistake, frankly.

steveBK123 4mo ago

They've gotten far more aggressive in the last year. I've been subscribed for 15+ years, at one point I added the food subscription because my wife wanted it. First of all they log you out way more often than they ever did, so constantly prompted to log back in. This is of course because after login they try to up-sell you to more packages. I am more likely to exit entirely than add more packages at this point.

ciwchris 4mo ago

I had the same experience and feeling. I've also experienced this elsewhere. TIAA was essentially sending me marketing emails I couldn't unsubscribe from. My financial manager with sympathetic and communicated my frustration to the business, but I don't believe it lead to any changes. As a result I have marked my emails from TIAA as spam, which now means email is not a reliable source of information from them, and so I unsubscribed from all email communication and instead receive paper mail. Sad. I can name others using this pattern. Very frustrating. It's a lot of work to sever these relationships. I guess they know this and so think they can get away with it.

evanelias 4mo ago
Same here, I was just about to comment about this exact problem with TIAA specifically, after receiving yet another marketing spam email from them today. For a while they all had a footer like "This service communication provides information about your plan benefits to help you make informed decisions. It is sent as part of our plan services and is not subject to communication preferences. Thank you." But today's spam didn't even bother with that song and dance. It's infuriating.

wetpaws 4mo ago

[dead]

whack 4mo ago

> I earn a small fraction of what NYTimes earns. If I'm not desperate, why are they? With all due respect, you are not responsible for covering every single thing the Trump administration is doing and ensuring they are held accountable. While simultaneously satisfying customers who are used to getting endless content for free, and sniff their noses at paying $2/month. The journalism business is a hard business. I may not agree with everything NYT does, they are most certainly not perfect, but they are operating in good faith and trying their best. Give them a break

nikisweeting 4mo ago
Sending 5 marketing emails with no unsubscribe link is not "operating in good faith", that's a blatant CAN-SPAM violation and could be used in a textbook explaining UX dark patterns.

TheJoeMan 4mo ago

I have something similar from AT&T about my fiber internet, they kept sending me "transactional emails" with the last 3/4 of the message body being marketing copy for their phone service etc. I submitted a complaint at the FCC (consumercomplaints.fcc.gov) and got a very fast followup from the "Office of the President of AT&T" putting me on an internal do-not-solicit list and the emails have generally gone away. They even had to write a case resolution letter to the FCC. This "loophole" in the CAN-SPAM seems to be spreading across different industries not just the NYT.

dogmayor 4mo ago

Oh no I got 5 emails I better write a post complaining about this massive inconvenience hmph

heikkilevanto 4mo ago
> Oh no I got 5 emails I better write a post complaining about this massive inconvenience hmph ONE unsolicited unlawful (EU) spam mail is quite enough reason to get angry, block mail, and to complain to the relevant authorities. This spamming has to stop!

acomjean 4mo ago

I love the bottom pop up which says “It’s better with the App” The options are “yes” or “Not now” No option for the “No thanks, please don’t bother me about this again for at least 30 days” that I want The times will repeat this about ever 3 articles, which is really fn annoying.

neilv 4mo ago

Ongoing sketchy behavior by NYT's business side seems to be one of the problems eroding the NYT's reputation in recent years. The publisher may be preserving the family business during difficult times, but... in addition to the money and the upper-crust status that business survival confers, doesn't the publisher and everyone else involved with the NYT want to serve society, and to be known for serving society? Not to be known for NYT's various sketchy subscription practices?

kylehotchkiss 4mo ago
Maybe they should find a way to keep the news flowing without having to pay for a skyscraper in the middle of NYC.

nixosbestos 4mo ago

Just earlier I opened 404 Media's subscribe page and was going to spend sometime after work subscribing to them, NYTimes, and maybe a couple others. It's past time I pay for some news media. This has guaranteed I will not even consider NYTimes for the foreseeable future. So disrespectful.

gafferongames 4mo ago

[flagged]

aj7 4mo ago

“It made me feel powerless.” Your problem. Read some of Michael Porter’s books on competition. In an economic interaction, all players compete with each other. The Times thinks it’s in its interest to try to brainwash you with some garbage. And you look for Mommy.

ALittleLight 4mo ago

Hmm. I also recently got a subscription to the NYT. I noticed they sent me a lot of email so I just filtered it with the click of a couple buttons. It's obnoxious but in the minor way that having to click a couple buttons one time is.

trollbridge 4mo ago

As an NYT subscriber, I'd like to toss out there that Brave browser (or the ad blocker of your choice) + bypass-paywalls-clean works very well. You can even be signed into your account, and everything works smoothly. I use a throwaway email that's just for NYT for the subscription itself, like I do many other things, and just expect to get the daylights spammed out of it.

nickvec 4mo ago

Yeah, in short, don’t support the NYT. Their business practices are predatory and unethical. Use archive.ph to get by paywalls.

Ekaros 4mo ago
Site doesn't work. Can't recommend them either.

the_origami_fox 4mo ago

As an alternative, the Free Press is honestly much better. I joined it because of the NY Times' bitter hit piece on Bari Weiss, who left them to found the Free Press. I wanted something that wasn't woke. I've stayed because of the excellent quality of reporting, varied points of view, and well researched investigations. I was upset when Weiss announced she was leaving the Free Press to head a big American news agency because I was worried it would affect the Free Press. That's how much I like it. Thankfully it hasn't much, just mostly her personal reporting - which was great - isn't there anymore. The Free Press has its own biases. But it's much more varied and inquisitive than other news sites. Sometimes I get to the end of an article and I'm annoyed that the author didn't make more of a stand and then I realise, that's the point. Some articles are just super interesting. Their indepth investigation into the Free Birth Society wasn't a big story, but it made a profound and personal impact on me.

xnyan 4mo ago
It was absolutely a hit piece, but what specifically was inaccurate?
- the_origami_fox 4mo ago
  The article I am referring to is https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/business/media/bari-weiss-free-press.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/business/media/bari-weiss.... I don't have access to this anymore. I remember the tone as bitter. The article argued her success was due to her own style of grievance reporting. At the Free Press she spoke often about values, and you can still see this in her CBS press releases. I believe this contributed more.
the_origami_fox 4mo ago
On the technology side, I haven't wanted to unsubscribe from them entirely, but I have found it easy and useful to unsubscribe from specific various columnists and topics, especially as the paper has gotten larger and busier.

ddosmax556 4mo ago

What's with these journals all being so hostile? I remember years ago i tried to delete my Washington Post account - there was no button anywhere in the settings menu though, only: text if you want your data deleted. I texted them, they asked back, do you live in a GDPR region? I said no, they replied well tough luck. Insane

a34729t 4mo ago

In a universe where FT exists, the only reason for NYT to exist is Wordle.

AlexDragusin 4mo ago

Reading this thread I realized something, I am just as annoyed with the upsells but have I e-mailed them and communicated my dissatisfaction with the family plan upsell popup instead of online ranting? No. I am wondering how many others did? I'm gonna write them.

saghm 4mo ago

> Because the messages are about your relationship with The Times, you are receiving them regardless of whether you are opted in to receive marketing emails from The New York Times. I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Companies should never be abusing the fact that some messages are actually essential (e.g. "you requested a password reset") to pretend that random marketing stuff is not marketing when it obviously is.

azangru 4mo ago

> I earn a small fraction of what NYTimes earns. If I'm not desperate, why are they? He is an individual, and they are a company of about 6,000 people?

wombat-man 4mo ago

I cancelled recently because they really started hassling me more about account sharing. My friends, I do not share my NYT account. I have two computers at work, I have a number of personal devices. I don't know what number NYT thinks is normal for a person to have, but because I am over that number they were requiring me to login and enter in an OTP multiple times a day basically. Anyway, it finally got to me. I'll get my news somewhere else I guess. I just don't think they take feedback seriously unless it comes with a cancellation.

TheTon 4mo ago
The number is as low as 2. Hell, it may even be 1! I have had a subscription for years, I do not share it, and I read on 2 devices, and they've been hassling me with this nonsense for the past week or so. I'm holding out hope it's just a bug and they'll stop, but if it goes on much longer I will cancel too.
- wombat-man 4mo ago
  Their AI support bot is insultingly bad, I'd kind of prefer a contact email and an auto response. good grief.

ganzman 4mo ago

I have a similar story with The Guardian. After I subscribed, I got bombarded with emails soliciting for more money. Immediately cancelled my subscription. What’s worse is that this nonsense appears everywhere now. When I started donating blood at a blood bank, I got hammered by SMS and email seeking my attention for all sorts and begging me for more donations, sucking even more blood out of me. This is such a turn off that I stopped donating altogether.

50208 4mo ago

NYT is a cancer on American society. Worst tho, it's described as a "liberal" news source, but over the course of it's long history it's done just about all it can to stab "liberals" in the back. All thinking people should avoid NYT at all costs (which is free to do).

DrNosferatu 4mo ago

I use a rechargeable card for subscriptions - just let it go to zero.

brikym 4mo ago

Subscription management should be a mandatory banking feature. They have the privilege of being a bank or processing company so make them offer a button. The problem was created by institutions and it will take institutions to solve it. People stuck on the phone cancelling subscriptions isn't an efficient economy. Market efficiency only works when it's extracting customer money. It should be as simple as deleting an email.

dare944 4mo ago

> Over the course of the next 5 days, they sent me 5 onboarding marketing emails and I could not opt out of any of them. Such consternation, all for the want of an email filter.

vcryan 4mo ago

There is plenty of biased and misleading information on the Internet, I can't imagine paying the NYT to get it from them.

leephillips 4mo ago

I check the NYT every day. There are occasional articles that are truly great examples of journalism. But I cannot stomach the idea of sending any money their way. Their political and cultural biases infect nearly everything they put out, and I find some of these biases repugnant. They are also underhanded at times. Here’s an example: http://lee-phillips.org/nytIHRA http://lee-phillips.org/nytIHRA

damnitbuilds 4mo ago

Tech means things should get progressively better. Why don't companies see that people will pay a reasonable amount for better things, but making it worse and charging too much means people will go elsewhere ? We have seen through the enshittification, IBM, NYT, HP, Netflix, etc. etc.

CommenterPerson 4mo ago

Another desperate practice. They have the teaser subscription at a very low rate and quietly hike it up after a year.

mikeweiss 4mo ago

It's an 175 year old institution thats trying to survive. Gotta give them a little slack IMO. The public good their journalists and editors do out weight the annoyance of those emails.

rurban 4mo ago

Another poor user who never heard of archive.is

burnt-resistor 4mo ago

Never pay for megacorporate media, especially not the cowardly, "paper of record" garbage NYT.

Friedduck 4mo ago

[dead]

customerservise 4mo ago

There’s a browser extension or mirror site that removes paywalls on news websites but I forgot the name, anybody remembers?