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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

But charging a subscription you signed up for isn't taking advantage of you.

Are there really people who struggle with not canceling subscriptions? It's genuinely hard for me to see how that's not a choice.

I could understand if we're talking about something like gambling addiction, where there's a compulsion.

But there's no addiction here. There's no scam. There's no taking advantage of children.

There's literally nothing but asking adults to be aware of their finances and to cancel subscriptions they don't want to pay for any longer. It's the absolute lowest bar I can possibly think of in terms of basic financial skills.

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Knowingly optimizing your business to maximize my chances of forgetting, or making it difficult to unsubscribe, is absolutely unethical.

Difficulty in unsubscribing sure, but that's a totally separate issue. That has nothing to do with not being aware of your subscriptions.

But otherwise, what are businesses doing to "maximize your chance of forgetting"? That's not a thing. That's not something they have control over or can maximize. For monthly subscriptions, you see it every month on your credit card. For yearly subscriptions, companies generally send a notice a ~week before, reminding you that you'll be charged, and then you get a receipt emailed.

That seems entirely reasonable to me. The rest is called personal responsibility. When you sign up for a subscription, you know full well what you're doing. You know it will continue until you cancel. There's absolutely nothing unethical about it being your responsibility to cancel.

The premise of this discussion is that another HN user has observed that companies routinely rely on people forgetting to unsubscribe. Again, the idea is that this is part of the core business model.

As I've already mentioned, we agree that personal responsibility is important. I believe we can also agree that some people are unable to be fully responsible for reasons that escape them (depression, severe ADHD, other more pressing responsibilities like children who aren't doing well, etc.)

I think it takes a special kind of misanthropy to suggest that it's fine for companies to base their business model on the fact that such people will pay for a service they aren't using. I am not arguing for legislature or anything of the sort, but I still think it's unambiguously unethical.

It is, in the most literal sense, exploitative.

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