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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> Easy solution: impose crippling fines or maybe a little prison sentence here and there for extortion. Why not? That's what it is.

How is it extortion? Who is being coerced and how?

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Pretty sure they directly stated it—the consumer is being coerced. Deceptive tactics to make it hard to stop paying for something you don't want is coercive and deceptive behavior.

Yes, but that isn't extortion. Making something overly difficult is different than threatening or using force.

Ah, I see you've never been sent to a collections agency for charges you didn't make.

You are correct on the pedantic point of whether or not it is “extortion” under existing laws. Laws can be changed and definitions changed. Or use a different term. The essence of the point is clear. Why nitpick on whether or not “extortion” is the correct word?

Because this is HN and it's more important to launch definition critiques than to discuss substance ever. I think half of HN came from the horrible world of high school policy debate

Yeah like the thread yesterday about the teenager that was detained by the airlines -- only legally he was likely never "detained" but we have no good word for the not-legally-detained-but-taken-to-a-room-and-interrogated action that actually happened to him. Since we have no good word for that it becomes trivial for pedants to think they've won an argument while they piss everyone else off arguing over definitions.

I wasted too much of my time arguing that crap. This site is full of book-smart people that are not as smart as they think they are. They just happen to find a bunch of neckbeards who also haven't touched grass in the last week.

Remember, you're talking about a community composed largely of software developers, whose livelihoods are built on their ability to find a missing negative sign in 100,000 lines of code. When faced with a large paragraph of text full of complexity and nuance, they're naturally going to find that one word that's wrong and pedantically nit-pick it to death, ignoring the overall point and substance being conveyed.

Thank you for this. I got a laugh out of it. I particularly liked the 100,000 lines of code line.

Lol this even fits with how they do PR reviews and code critiques. When I submit a long PR for review, I know that none of the comments will be substantive or useful. They'll just be meta-critiques about how the headers aren't alphabetized or private members need to come after public. Not about the actual content.

if you can't even clean the basic stuff up to whatever formal or informal coding standard there is, then why should anyone look deeper?

yes, that stuff is unimportant to function. however, if you are getting such comments it means that there is an established standard, and willfully (or sloppily) ignoring it is the problem.

there's also the problem of bike-shedding. but then again if you take the time to be meticulous, there won't be nits to pick and your "helpful" colleagues will have to find something more substantive to pick at.

> You are correct on the pedantic point of whether or not it is “extortion” under existing laws.

Extortion seems like hyperbole to me. Canceling on Disney+, Netflix, etc. is extremely easy. In fact I cancelled my D+ subscription juts the other day and even though they prompted me whether I’m sure I want to cancel, never did I feel they were trying to trick me with dark UX patterns or making it overly difficult.

So on a spectrum of easy -> misleading -> coerced -> extorted, I am happy to report it was easy.

The post you responded to was about situations in which companies make it hard to cancel. Clearly the person was expressing frustration that for many companies signing up is easy and canceling is hard. They want this situation to be rectified.

No one cares that you had an easy time cancelling a service. You telling us that cancelling D+ was easy is only meaningful if you think this is the case in all situations for all companies and you argue that this is so. As it stand it’s a pointless anecdote.

> You telling us that cancelling D+ was easy is only meaningful if you think this is the case in all situations for all companies and you argue that this is so.

Look, I understand that not all companies are customer centric and I can see you and others feel that you’ve been extorted by some conapnies.

I argued in good faith given the article is literally about D+ and Netflix and the person I responded to said “The companies claim that it would impose heavy costs on them.”

Why would I think they’re not referring to the companies in the article?

The article is about the FTC requiring companies to make it easy to cancel. The article specifically stated that Disney and Netflix are in opposition to this. A person wrote a comment stating that they think companies should face legal consequences for not making cancelling easy. You write that “extort” is the wrong word. Then you say that cancelling D+ was easy for you. None of your posts on this topic are relevant.

They are multinational companies. The fact that one of them behaved correctly in your country does not say anything about how it or the others behave in other countries.

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