I respect your opinion but am grateful for and find tremendous value in my NYT subscription. I share it with my SO and read their articles constantly. Prior to getting a subscription I was a "turn js off" kind of person - which is fine I suppose and still do it for other sites. I do not maintain any streaming or other subscriptions outside of Deezer (and a Garmin GPS FWIW). I would like a Bloomberg subscription but to only read Matt Levine cannot justify the cost.

To supplement other news sources am always reading Apnews, Reuters, Al Jazeera and The Stranger (local to Seattle).

NYT is just not a hill I'm willing to die on re: marketing etc.

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.

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

That hasn't been true for, what, almost ten years? When I cancelled three months ago, it was about three or four clicks through the beg screens, and done. No, I don't live in CA.

> I urge everyone reading to unsubscribe instantaneously from the NYTimes for their business practices.

If people stopped buying from unethical businesses it would be practically impossible to function in the modern day. Not only is it extremely difficult to know what businesses are “ethical”, but it’s becoming increasingly easy to assume no business is truly ethical. e.g. Environmentally friendly clothing brand Everlane just sold to SHEIN of all places.

Unsubscribe? And then miss out on all that excellent "There is another thing you should be worried about" content?

When I moved to the US, one surprising thing was the "telemarketing" and, at that time, half of the spam calls I've got were selling NYT subs. I had no idea what kind of newspaper it was at the time but I figured it's not very good if someone is paid to call random people at home to move those subs.

The people working in (traditional) media are lagging behind the online world.

Twenty years ago - back in 2005–2006, when the world was just going massive online - they had to explain to newspaper owners what the internet was… and some of them simply fell behind.

In general, we should value all “traditional” media, because what passes for news today are flash-in-the-pans that may not be here in 10–20 years - it has generally been found that links have an average lifespan of 10 years, which means that “today’s new, great, free, independent” news may not be here with us in 10–15 years.

(I’ve been doing really small b2b media for 25 years, so I know how it hurts when a PR agency comes to me - having been paid by a client - and “begs” me to publish their article for free.)

I've been close to subscribing to The Economist a couple of times, but when I do a web search I find a lot of people complaining about their similar practice of making it difficult to unsubscribe, so I've refrained.

I guess there are more people who give up on unsubscribing than who refrain from subscribing?

Agreed, I made the same mistake once by subbing on their website. Dealing with the eventual cancelation was an absolute pain.

Years later, I wanted to sub again, and this time I did it through the iOS app. Best decision ever, as now it just sits alongside my other App Store subscriptions and is easily cancelable in a single click.

“unsubscribe instantaneously”

Oh the irony of telling somebody to instantaneously unsubscribe from something notoriously hard to unsubscribe from.

Me personally, I just go on the web chat every once in a while and say I want to cancel, and they give me a nice discount.

And it’s not just them, many businesses force you to call to unsubscribe, this should be illegal. I managed to unsubscribe via their chatbot. Maybe because I’m in California where it’s actually illegal.

> Do not do business with unethical companies.

If they got what I want, I don't care about ethics, I care about value. I've just never seen value in NYT.

Using services that will let you generate single use credit card numbers for subscriptions are great for this type of thing. You just disable the card number.

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, is a toxic place.

Happily, this practice is illegal in California. Sometimes consumer-protection laws work ... and are necessary.

(As a hackaround, try using a VPN to make it appear as if you are connecting from California...)

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.

> 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

I moved into a new home. I kept the old one for a few weeks extra. Needed time to move out.

I signed up for CenturyLink at my new home.

After six weeks, I tried to turn off internet at my old house.

* I can’t.

* CenturyLink wouldn’t let me cancel, without waiting on hold for an hour or more

* I work overnight

* CenturyLink is open when I’m asleep

So I’m paying for two plans with the same company. Thanks CenturyLink.

.I urge everyone reading to unsubscribe instantaneously from the NYTimes for their business practices. Do not do business with unethical companies.

You are not wrong for thinking that, but I encourage people to consider that generally the business and editorial areas are largely independent of each other because of the value of editorial independence in case they think that the lack of ethics applies to their journalism too.

That's why it's best not to give companies your credit card number. If you subscribe through PayPal, you can cancel through PayPal.

Respectfully disagree that it's toxic or predatory. Very easy to cancel via chat as well. New York times is an incredible jewel of a company. I am fine with some marketing tactics that aren't incredibly heavy handed. They are far far far from unethical.

I had the same experience after subscribing for crosswords around 10 years ago, but I think at that time they did let you ask nicely for cancellation via a support chat bot. I think they might have only supported this in California due to California state law.

> makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours

I unsubscribed a couple years ago. It was a click on the website. (Just checked. Cancelling online without talking to anyone is still an option.)

The FTC did away with the "call to cancel" after subscribing online, fortunately. You have to allow cancellation using the same method as subscription. So they can no longer do this.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...

> Do not do business with unethical companies.

Sure name one who is ethical and successful.

The fact that they have an online unsubscribe option that's only available for California users is seriously scummy.

What a fascinating hill to (with some assumptions about your political leanings) choose to die on. Does the logic go something like "the country may be dying while owing over $100,000 of debt on my behalf, but I'm not gonna let scummy newspapers get in the way with O($100) from my wallet?

I like the system. Every single time I talked to the human, and explained that the Times wasn’t worth the “regular” price, back came a much lower one.

I heard this, but I cancelled without fuss during the worst of cancel culture.

A couple of years later resubscribed. I also subscribe to the WSJ to make sure I receive a more balanced viewpoint.

You can usually get a web cancel option by changing your address, because some states, including California[1], have laws requiring it be as easy to cancel as it was to sign up.

WSJ offered me an online cancel option after I moved (cough) to California.

It was a digital subscription by the way - usually they have your address on file anyway because you used it to verify your credit card.

[1]https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...

lets not throw out the baby with the bathwater

What a load of crap. You can just cancel your subscription from the app or on your account on the desktop.

I jumped into a NY Times games sub for a year; couldn’t find the cancel button after a couple minutes of fiddling and ended up doing a CC chargeback in 60 seconds.