I have also wondered about this when boycotting companies for reasons that I suspected were not the most common reasons.

If they sent out a survey about "why you're no longer a customer" I suppose it would provide one channel for explaining one's actions. Oddly, I seem to get those constantly when I am a customer, but essentially never when I'm a former or inactive customer.

On privacy grounds I like the idea that non-customers would be left alone, but on boycott-impact grounds it seems like having some kind of predictable "what are we doing wrong?" channel would be nice too.

> 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?

Leave a bad review where their social marketing team will see it.

> If a company does something you approve of [...] and something else you disapprove of [...], is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?

I'm a fan of writing actual paper letters, which are (marginally) harder to ignore than emails, and (at least I like to think) carry a bit more moral authority, since I'm making the effort to print and (pay to) send them. In my letter I make it clear what I like they're doing, but reserve most of the rest of the letter to express my displeasure at the things I'm most displeased with.

Often these letters disappear into a black hole. Morbid curiosity leads me to wish for a response, but I'm jaded enough to know that even if they respond enthusiastically to my criticism with promises of change, until they actually change, it's just an empty promise. So at the end of the day, often I just want to vent and move on.

I have to believe that if enough people did this, it would move the needle somewhat. If not, well, at least I have the satisfaction of having done something.

My pet peeve with the NY Times online is that there's no escaping the upsell screen after logging on.

Good point. I vote with my dollar and do not support Amazon (directly; AWS is unavoidable). But that's your point!

I deleted linkedin a few years ago because of the ridiculous volume of emails and their dark patterns about cancellation. NYT is just not a hill i'm willing to die on unlike linkedin, for example

It's a core question to public choice theory, and why people are generally very unhappy with politics in general. You end up with aggregations of baskets of goods that aren't just suboptimal for you, but suboptimal for the bast majority of consumers, but where there's no practical opportunity to offer the alternative. The barrier to even begin to compete is so high, so the agents (the owner of the newspaper, the retailer, or the politician) end up twisting the available options in their favor.

This kind of knots get solved automatically in markets that are very easy to enter, or by regulation. That's why for the commercial examples, we can have consumer protection laws that create little distortion and have a better equilibrium. Good luck trying to use that lever to fix politics though.

> 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.

No. at least not as a consumer in the marketplace. That's why people who act like the market creates a good fit for consumer preferences or go on and on about things like "revealed preferences" are just plain wrong.

There’s a form of Gell-Mann amnesia at work here. Why would you expect a company that is unethical in its business practices to be ethical where it counts, in its reporting? The answer is that it isn’t.

Cancelling yhe subscription does both. You can't cancel if you're not subscribed.

>is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?

A good way? No. There's a way, which is to get a person with enough clout to yell at them on social media in the hope that it generates attention and scares them. There used to be a time when companies had customer service and actually listened but apparently the C-Suite at some point had the idea that you can just ignore your customers.