The rapacious corporations agree with you — no matter how deceptive or even illegal their practices are, no matter how much R&D money is brought to bear in designing innovative user interfaces and bureaucratic frameworks which systematically exploit human weaknesses (particularly those of vulnerable populations such as less-tech-savvy elders) to bleed the populace dry... it's all the fault of the individual victims who are "allowing" themselves to be ripped off, one-by-one.
These comments are so blatantly absurd considering in all the cases we're talking about, the user signed up for the service initially. Even if it's a trial, the user is forced to make it abundantly recognized that they will be charged money when the trial is over because they are forced to input credit card information or authorize use of Apple Pay or some other similar service to enter the trial.
I can understand suggesting that services like this, especially when using tech like Apple Pay, have made it too easy to 'check out' through a trial process, but the language is still over-the-top since the user is still clearly considering the product as potentially useful to go through the effort of signing up for a trial or an actual sub. (And on the flipside, Apple Pay, e.g., makes it easy to see all subs in one place and cancel them in one place, so it has that going for it.)
And of course, what illegal practices are you talking about? I'm going to guess most people here aren't blaming the victim if a practice is actually illegal. But I see you're being hyperbolic so maybe I shouldn't bother.
The big change between the subscriptions of yore, e.g. magazine subscriptions in the days before the internet, and the subscriptions of today, is that payments used to be push and now they are pull. The magazine used to have to beg and plead with you to send them a check, but now vendors can set up an automatic debit continuing into perpetuity.
The regulatory environment has not caught up (although the article explains how it's starting to). It turns out that recurring pull payments tend not to be cancelled, resulting in a system where massive overpayments for actual services consumed are the norm. This is not economic efficiency leading to useful consumer innovation, it's rewarding the players who lodge the darkest dark patterns. Occasionally that includes, as described elsethread, the illegal practice of "just straight-up not honoring the 300 page contracts that they had written" — although unethical practices such as making it deceptively difficult to cancel are presumably more common than outright lawbreaking.
I think you are misrepresenting OPs point. We all know many people who are extremely sloppy with their personal finances, and sign up for things they can't afford, debt they are unlikely to pay back, etc.
Am I sad for companies who take in these people as customers? No, but let's not canonize people who are reckless with their spending, even when warned.
Of course in any population there will be a long tail of people who are bad at finances, for example leasing cars they can’t afford or using buy now pay later plans for clothes they don’t need.
That's not what this is about though. In those situations, the person is consciously choosing a bad option. However this is materially different, because with auto-pay people are being charged without their knowledge. The first situation involves making a bad choice, but this is being unaware of a bad thing, which companies are exploiting.
My rule of thumb looking at any problem has evolved to: it it's one person, blame them. If it's happening to swaths of the population, scrutinize the system they operate in. Mistakes can only be treated entirely as such if most other people don't fall for them. Otherwise it's a systemic issue.
> We all know many people who are extremely sloppy with their personal finances, and sign up for things they can't afford, debt they are unlikely to pay back, etc.
You know I have heard this my entire life, and I have yet to actually meet any of these people. The people I have met though fall into one or more of a number of categories:
- People uneducated in finance, usually lower class: You can say things like "well of course credit cards charge interest" but I was never taught that in school. I learned it from my mother, who is an accountant. She also taught me how to do things like a proper budget, balance a checkbook, diligent record-keeping on expenditures, and how to file my taxes. I was never offered this knowledge in schooling. The gap between how many, I believe well intention-ed and well educated people have between what is "common sense" financial knowledge and what is known by common people, can be the grand fucking canyon.
- Despite the above, I have also never in my life met a person who believed a credit card was free money. Everyone knew they had to pay it back, even if they didn't understand interest and why interest was about to ruin their credit score.
- Additionally, I have never met a person who signed up for things they couldn't afford for the hell of it. I met a few people who were sold mortgages they couldn't afford, by representatives of financial institutions. I've also met people who borrowed money from Payday loan stores because their cars were broken and they could not earn money until that was solved, and they lacked the money to accomplish that.
- I've also met people who, before they were legally allowed to DRINK, were allowed to sign on the dotted line for six figures of educational funding, with no demonstration of understanding how the critical above concepts worked, so they could know what they would eventually pay, nor any demonstration of how they would earn enough of a living afterwards to pay it off, which is just odd to me? Like, a bank won't loan you $500k to buy a house that's only worth $100k, so why will they loan you $150k to get a degree in underwater basket weaving?
- Lastly, I've also met people who struggle with things like depression, addiction, attention issues, all manner of ailments that either stem from or are made worse by a lack of dopamine in their brains, which makes them impulsive and possibly reckless depending on the day, and I have seen them interacting with products that are clearly, blatantly, preying on their inability to say no effectively so that they will say yes. And once they say yes enough times, their credit cards are maxed out, and they're in the poorhouse for no other reason than being vulnerable to manipulation.
And like, all of that aside, even if you meet NONE of those categories, I still, frankly, believe it's not only possible but the only ethical response to all of this is: we should have a society that leaves enough room for people to fuck up occasionally without ruining their goddamn lives. I don't know exactly how we go about that, in finance especially this is a tricky thing, but at the same time, I simply don't believe that a lifetime of wage-slave-serfdom, or perhaps worse, freezing to death on the street, is an acceptable punishment for you making a bad financial decision at some point in your life. That does not make sense to me.
> And like, all of that aside, even if you meet NONE of those categories, I still, frankly, believe it's not only possible but the only ethical response to all of this is: we should have a society that leaves enough room for people to fuck up occasionally without ruining their goddamn lives.
At this point, I don't understand what the fuck you people are talking about. This is an article about people paying for subscriptions they don't use, not people ruining their goddamn lives. The hyperbole is extensive, is this article posted to some Socialist Discord so everyone can raid the comments? Why is this level of bad faith discussion occurring?
The topic of the original post is an article about that. The GP comment we're all replying to took that as a direction to discuss how many people do not take care of their finances, and how you, as an individual, are on your own. Several comments in reply to that person went on to discuss how "take care of your financial health" is only really an applicable statement when the person in question is at least somewhat educated in finance: that tons of people reach adulthood without that knowledge or those skills. And, that situation is complicated still more by the fact that many businesses, quite intentionally, are preying on both that lack of knowledge in general, and on people at large using dark patterns to obfuscate or make canceling subscriptions difficult. Then, off of that, someone else commented saying that they felt a reply was misrepresenting what was said by another, stating that "we all know people who are sloppy with their finances", which is, IMO, a clear and standard example of the appeal to common belief fallacy. To which I challenged, citing numerous experiences to the contrary I have had, and my utter lack of experiences to this common knowledge I have been told is common knowledge: that people, by and large are poor because they fail at money management, and not, which is my contention, that the majority of that time they are not poor because of bad money management, but they are poor because they are poor and are being taken advantage of. This is not hyperbole, this is just an evolving discussion. If you don't like the direction it's taking, you're free to not participate.
