alt Hacker NewsThe desperation of NYTimes
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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
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
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another desperate practice. They have the teaser subscription at a very low rate and quietly hike it up after a year.
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.
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.
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.
I use a rechargeable card for subscriptions - just let it go to zero.
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.
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.
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:
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.
In a universe where FT exists, the only reason for NYT to exist is Wordle.
The fact they know they are sending marketing emails, not associated to your account itself speaks volumes ;(
Oh no I got 5 emails I better write a post complaining about this massive inconvenience hmph
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.
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.
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!
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.