alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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FYI you can get Money Stuff delivered by email without a Bloomberg subscription.
The quality of the New York Times as a product is irrelevant to them being predatory about subscriptions.
I've read NYT regularly over the past 30+ years, and roughly fit in this boat. They have become monetizing addicts like everyone else. They keep showing pop-ups about "family subscriptions". I've written about their desperate seeming practices in comments on appropriate articles.
On their reporting, they want to appear to be objective but their biases are clear. For example, their campaign against Mamdani at all stages (it continues). They always have a couple of crazy "conservative" columnists. And so on.
I send all their emails to spam, and X out of the pop-ups. For now.
If my polite neighbour smiles, holds the door, but also pisses on my doormat every few days, I call him LOUD a jerk and tell him to stop. I never approve the piss because he said good morning.
If the NYT subscription indeed has a tremendous value, surely it can attract and retain the subscribers without resorting to dark patterns in their products.
I've used this pattern for ~10 years now:
1 Subscribe at some very reasonable intro rate: $4 a month for 6 months
2 The intro rate expires and goes to $25 a month.
3 I call the number to cancel, say I am canceling because expense
4 They offer the intro-rate again to keep me, I accept
5 goto 2
Lately, however, I haven't even had to call someone. I just go through their webapp and it automatically offers the intro rate again. I suppose that if I decline that, I would have to talk to someone, but I really like the NYTimes and $4.24/month is reasonable to me.
And yes, I think they do have some sense of desperation chasing them. It costs money to do what they do and newspapers are a hard business.
By the way... if the OP really doesn't want to bother with a subscription, many public libraries offer digital access in the form of 72 hour passes to the NYTimes, the passes are unlimited. I realize that public libraries aren't cool for the libertarian set, but it is a viable option. There are tons of other newspapers and magazines available to read online for free too through your public library (needs a library card though).
When you say you’re sharing with a SO, do you mean you’re doing the dance of re-authenticating with their two factor code every few days now that they clamped down on sharing a subscription even within the same household?
This new change has really disappointed me.
Re: Matt Levine. You can sign up for his 4x-per-week email for free, and he doesn't spam you.
I like their content. I would subscribe, but knowing how their unsubscription process is deliberately broken, I never will.
For some balance, add the WSJ.
Bloomberg is crazy expensive. They used to have citylab articles without a paywall, but looks like they've fixed that.
So subscribing to NYT somehow changed your stance on online privacy? Color me confused...
I won't even read the NYT lol let alone pay for it.
Iraq war: not even once.
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gp's comment had nothing to do with value of the publication. are you implying it ok for them to do that because value?
And making it hard to cancel is not just "marketing" . There are even laws to prevent that sort of thing.
This is an interesting topic. If a company does something you approve of (e.g. do journalism) and something else you disapprove of (e.g. make canceling hard), is there a good way to signal both as a consumer? This is also relevant in the context of companies like Target, which has been boycotted by both sides of the US political spectrum for various reasons.