NYTimes is predatory on subscriptions. Over my long lifetime I've subscribed twice, and regretted it both times with intensity.
Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours for cancellation, is a toxic place. I've been told they have stopped this predatory practice due to some newly passed laws or something, but they did not stop their predation due to their own values.
I urge everyone reading to unsubscribe instantaneously from the NYTimes for their business practices. Do not do business with unethical companies.
I 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.
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.
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.
Thus the thing to do, for funsies, is to subscribe, and then cancel, and give the poor customer service person on the other end of the line, a piece of your mind, every time you cancel. Boycotts generally don't work. But the goal is to make a signal that gets noticed by the C-suite. Unfortunately, the routes I see are in the pocketbook, the customer service department, and via Twitter, if they do actually happen to be there. A sustained prolonged boycott would work, but most people don't care. Screaming at the customer support person is just shitty to a low level employee that doesn't have the ability to affect change so empathetically thats horrible to do to them, so that's a no go as well. But that is by design. Thus, one way is to overcome that and be horrible to the CSR. But that sucks.
Being horrible to the CSR will never be noticed by the C-suite.
If you think they give one flying fuck about what customers think I have news for you: the only thing that matters is what the board thinks and if revenue is rising but everyone hates the product/company they won’t even blink.
> 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.
You know I spent a lot of my professional work life on the receiving end of these messages and if I had even one ounce of power to change anything for the better I would have.
In the beginning I would still compile user complaints into write ups for my managers à la “hey these 50 people hate that we do X, maybe we could do Y and win back their gratitude/trust” - but I soon realised that’s just a waste of my lifetime, because PM don’t give a fuck.
And why should they? Even if you improve the thing it won’t matter - the majority of people just want to vent like you;
they don’t care anymore if the product improves, even if you would give them the perfect product of their dreams it wouldn’t change their minds.
This might sound jaded but there is a reason why the market is dominated by god-awful products - those that gave too much of a shit were sorted out early enough and only those that focus ruthlessly on the money and only the money survive.
There are a few exceptions of course but those just prove the rule to me.
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.
Thanks for that! I have been on Levine's website recently and for some reason thought they may deviate in content or something. But will try it out. It's a daily newsletter which is kind of high volume for me (which is why I hadn't subscribed prior) but will check it out.
I actually may have been sub'd previously and had to check out because the push-model was slightly too much; would kind of prefer a pull model.
Great idea and just a note to anyone doing this (as I just did) - Bloomberg will send a confirmation code to the email which you have to get out of the feed. Took a few minutes, but it worked!
I deeply respect NYT journalism and I hate with every fiber of my being their revenue-generation / subscription management tactics.
And for me, the second half is a stronger emotional reaction. So NYT can kindly fuck off and die because of their absolutely
batshit terrible insane dickover tactics.
If anyone works at NYT who is responsible for the subscription stuff reads this: fuck you, you're actively contributing to the global downfall of democracy and I fucking hate you.
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?
At least a couple years ago we created a new email for shared online accounts, which is only NYT. It hasn't come up yet and I wasn't aware of their changes; we do not have 2-factor configured and SO says they do not read NYT much...
Good to have a heads up for this though.
You can subscribe with your library card and get access to all NYTimes (games/crosswords too).
One caveat is the subscription "rental" is for only a 3 day period, so you have "renew" your subscription every 3 days. This only takes 2 clicks though. For San Francisco public library: https://ezproxy.sfpl.org/login/nyt.
Assuming you have a public library that offers these things, of course. Much like people talking about how great Libby is; you can get it through my library, but the selection is extremely limited. And very few libraries offer a good set of options, even for a substantial fee, to non-locals.
I can’t promise I would pay $300/yr to access a great public library, but I would like the option to try it.
My in-laws have a decent (not great, but decent) one in their city, and for sure they will never use it, but they aren’t going to drag the documentation up there and get cards just for me.
if (and a BIG if) you are california, you can get a library card to any in state library, regardless of where in the state you live. Between San Francisco, LA, and San Diego, I think I have pretty much the full suite of anything I can borrow from the eLibrary system.
Aren't the games free? I hear that people pay for the games, but I've done Wordle daily since before NYT bought it, Connections whenever I've watched enough Hank Green videos to forget how much I hate it, and Tiles when I remember it exists, and I've never needed to pay for any of them.
Only the free ones are free. Crossword, even mini crossword now I think, are paid. And some features like playing archived days are also only available with a paid subscription
Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours
That hasn't been true for, what, almost ten years? When I cancelled three months ago, it was about three or four clicks through the beg screens, and done. No, I don't live in CA.
I live in California, cancelled about five years ago, and they forced me to talk to a person who demanded a reason for my cancellation, and then argued with me about wanting to cancel.
Do not subscribe to the NYTimes. Use your library card, if one must read it, and unfortunately as the undeserved "paper of record" one must often read it to be kept aware of what others are being fed. There's no baby here to throw out with the bath water, I find other places have far better coverage for all the topics I care intensely about. For example, their Ukraine coverage is basically Russia-lite, and extremely anti-Ukrainian, I haven't seen such biased coverage anywhere else except for far-right rags.
> their Ukraine coverage is basically Russia-lite, and extremely anti-Ukrainian
This is very surprising to me, I thought they were kind of pro Ukraine biased.
I asked an AI and it came back with this:
> The New York Times' coverage of the war is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine in its framing, tone, and attribution of responsibility, though critics argue this manifests as omission of context regarding NATO expansion and US intelligence involvement rather than direct support for Russia.
Of course it is and always has been. However, since 2023 with the failure of the overhyped summer counteroffensive, the mainstream narrative has shifted in a slightly more realist direction, which infuriates a lot of people.
> I live in California, cancelled about five years ago, and they forced me to talk to a person who demanded a reason for my cancellation, and then argued with me about wanting to cancel.
That was 5 years ago. California's "click-to-cancel" law was amended in 2024, effective July 1, 2025.
I bet if you read actual Ukrainian Telegram channels that openly discuss military setbacks and government corruption you would conclude they are "anti-Ukrainian".
Agreed, I made the same mistake once by subbing on their website. Dealing with the eventual cancelation was an absolute pain.
Years later, I wanted to sub again, and this time I did it through the iOS app. Best decision ever, as now it just sits alongside my other App Store subscriptions and is easily cancelable in a single click.
The NYT frequently offer price deals which make it cheaper to directly subscribe. But unsubscribe hell remains (or did in January this year). I’m not in the US.
> I urge everyone reading to unsubscribe instantaneously from the NYTimes for their business practices.
If people stopped buying from unethical businesses it would be practically impossible to function in the modern day. Not only is it extremely difficult to know what businesses are “ethical”, but it’s becoming increasingly easy to assume no business is truly ethical. e.g. Environmentally friendly clothing brand Everlane just sold to SHEIN of all places.
And it’s not just them, many businesses force you to call to unsubscribe, this should be illegal.
I managed to unsubscribe via their chatbot. Maybe because I’m in California where it’s actually illegal.
Using services that will let you generate single use credit card numbers for subscriptions are great for this type of thing. You just disable the card number.
Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours, is a toxic place.
Happily, this practice is illegal in California. Sometimes consumer-protection laws work ... and are necessary.
(As a hackaround, try using a VPN to make it appear as if you are connecting from California...)
> Happily, this practice is illegal in California.
that's totally irrelevant: Conde Nast for Wired is a shameless offender, for example. took me hours to cancel some autorenewing subscription i never subscribed for, perhaps enabled years ago through some dark pattern in iOS, but i genuinely don't know, and am not easily tricked.
I've been close to subscribing to The Economist a couple of times, but when I do a web search I find a lot of people complaining about their similar practice of making it difficult to unsubscribe, so I've refrained.
I guess there are more people who give up on unsubscribing than who refrain from subscribing?
Unsubscribing from The Economist was one of the most frustrating corporate interactions I've ever had.
Honestly if it was easier to unsubscribe I'd probably have an on and off again subscription, but I'll never subscribe again because I don't want to jump through those hoops to unsubscribe.
It's hard to calculate the number of people who don't subscribe at all, but you can calculate the number of recovered subscriptions from a retention process.
FWIW, as a subscriber to both, I have more often found myself manually renewing lapsed subscriptions than going through painful cancellation processes to get out of them. I get the Economist through DiscountMags.com where it is often available with a discount.
.I urge everyone reading to unsubscribe instantaneously from the NYTimes for their business practices. Do not do business with unethical companies.
You are not wrong for thinking that, but I encourage people to consider that generally the business and editorial areas are largely independent of each other because of the value of editorial independence in case they think that the lack of ethics applies to their journalism too.
I suspect this has something to do with a middle eastern conflict of which I don't know the details. That said I know from other stories that this isn't impossible
They have predilection for defense of elites, including Trump, and have not challenged his corruption to the degree that they have challenged, say Clinton's accusations of corruption. Their defense of the elite in their coverage that launched the war in Iraq, the outright corruption of their own reporters and editors, is not reflected in the overall reputation of the NYTimes. Holding them up as the beacon of good journalism results in poor judgements on what's happening with current affairs, because they are often quite biased in very disastrous ways that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and trillions of wasted defense spending.
More recently, the circling of the wagons of those considered "in-group" like Olivia Nuzzi has also been despicable, but definitely descriptive of the general editorial choices at the NYTimes.
However I don't expect as many people to agree with me that the NYTimes has an undeserved reputation for journalistic excellence, so I focus mostly on their bad business practices.
I unsubscribed ~7 years ago and was forced to call a person. It depends on where you live, I remember reading at the time that California residents could unsubscribe online, but everyone else was forced to call. They then forced you to convince a phone operator that you really wanted to cancel. They may have changed it due to changing legislation, or maybe you live in an area with better laws.
> I've been told they have stopped this predatory practice due to some newly passed laws or something, but they did not stop their predation due to their own values.
The FTC did away with the "call to cancel" after subscribing online, fortunately. You have to allow cancellation using the same method as subscription. So they can no longer do this.
What a fascinating hill to (with some assumptions about your political leanings) choose to die on. Does the logic go something like "the country may be dying while owing over $100,000 of debt on my behalf, but I'm not gonna let scummy newspapers get in the way with O($100) from my wallet?
I think we need more babies. I would be ecstatic to pay for an alternative source of national US journalism that actually has some analysis and decent writing. NYT is a shadow of its former self, apnews reads to me like USnews. international helps round it out, but it's not super in depth for the US.
You can usually get a web cancel option by changing your address, because some states, including California[1], have laws requiring it be as easy to cancel as it was to sign up.
WSJ offered me an online cancel option after I moved (cough) to California.
It was a digital subscription by the way - usually they have your address on file anyway because you used it to verify your credit card.
I jumped into a NY Times games sub for a year; couldn’t find the cancel button after a couple minutes of fiddling and ended up doing a CC chargeback in 60 seconds.
It's not just them. Yeah, this is bad, but I get tons of unsolicited messages from any company I establish a basic relationship with. Every interaction I have with a store or site signs me up for some promotional thing, which I unsubscribe from immediately, only to find it's one of 4 different lists I was added to. Then 6 months later I receive some stupid new thing as they try to drum up engagement.
One that particularly bugs me is Bank of America, which sends all kinds of promotional stuff with a note at the end saying "You're receiving this servicing email as part of your existing relationship with us." Can't block it without blocking actual important banking emails. Experian was doing the same - promoting services under the guise of offering account updates. It does feel desperate, but one has to imagine that this firehose technique works.
Just don't check the box with "I do want promotions". It sometimes is a little hard to find but I don't think I have encountered a service where this does not exist.
> Every interaction I have with a store or site signs me up for some promotional thing, which I unsubscribe from immediately, only to find it's one of 4 different lists I was added to.
Luckily this kind of thing is very much illegal here in the EU. If they send me marketing shit without my explicit active consent, they are in violation of the law, and I can at least report them. As I do. It is still not perfect, but the amount of spam I get from previous business relations has declined a lot in the past years. Other spam is still rampant, and I can only block any such sender until they find a new way to push their shit.
It's nuts and I can't believe it works. It's interesting that you're getting bank P.R. fluff with that 'should be illegal' workaround - I've been getting them from my bank in Australia and wondered if we had really slack laws. A mass mail-out solution like - say - Mail Chimp would not let users do this. There has to be an unsubscribe link on mass-mail blasts and you should not be able to pretend P.R. fluff is suddenly "transactional." I also don't want to be lectured about mindfulness by a bank!
> I get tons of unsolicited messages from any company I establish a basic relationship with
Give them a masked email (if you get a custom domain, you can make it so any random string of characters is a new masked email). Block all calls and texts except from contacts
> Bank of America, which sends all kinds of promotional stuff
Use a different bank (for more reasons than avoiding spam)
An appliance repair company I used exactly once maybe 5 or 6 years ago recently started spamming me with texts and emails trying to get me to refer friends to use them or use them again. Never hit the "report spam" button faster.
I'd kinda understand it if they had sent me a polite text or email shortly after our initial engagement saying "hey, if you had a good experience please review us/recommend us" but coming in literal years late with a blast of multiple messages screams "we hired some sort of marketing firm and fed them our customer database".
Having worked in donor dependent nonprofit, this kind of stuff just unfortunately works way too well. You'd be surprised what generates the most revenue. Despite having a large digital audience, we had the highest conversion rate on paper mailers. All the popups and email begs just worked way more often than they pissed anybody off. The economics demand it.
And it stands to reason NYT do this so aggressively since they also have by far the most successful subscription business in the entire world of journalism.
The UX anti-pattern of theirs which really grinds my gears is the "Continue reading in the app -- it's better." modal which appears when reading articles on the web. There does not seem to be a way to permanently opt out of it. I'm sure I could use GreaseMonkey or whatever to dismiss it for me but I mostly read articles on my phone, which makes any of that harder. The larger point, though, is that I shouldn't have to! I'm already paying for your service, please let me use it the way I want to.
You probably know but firefox on mobile let's you use extensions, for which i have ublock origin installed and regularly use it to block modals and things that my filter lists (every single one activated) don't cover already.
I've actually been meaning to move back to Firefox, so this is encouraging. I didn't realize you could do that sort of thing with uBlock, though? I thought it was just for blocking ads, etc.
Under the hood, uBlock works by filtering DOM elements. The "ad blocking" part of it is the set of curated filter lists built on top of that. But it also allows you to right-click on any element and create a custom filter, or write your own using DOM queries.
If you think that's bad, 5 years ago you had to call someone on the phone to cancel NYT subscriptions (the boiler room retention script always gave you an option to extend at the cheaper rate, but it was a pain to have to go through the motions). IIRC new consumer laws at the state or local level ended that practice.
I'm still paying the NYT intro rate ($4 a month billed annually) and on day 364 go to the account page to cancel my subscription before it resets to the "official" rate. Sure enough, they let you stay at the cheap rate if you tell them you'll walk.
Works for telcos and Adobe, too.
As for alerts and notices you can't unsubscribe from: filter or spam.
This is why I love Apple's Hide My Email. I use it ALL the time and the unsubscribe button is always there. It's not the most polished interface, but it works perfectly.
Also, for any subscription for which I don't use HME, I will immediately "mark as spam" any minimally-spammy email I get. The ones described in the article would be insta-marked due to the lack of Unsubscribe button.
I just installed Brother's app from the Apple store.
Immediately met with 4 popups that you can not close until you press the completely fake "maybe next time" prompt only to find out the program doesn't even support feed scanning on my specific printer.
Imagine being a sysadmin that has to install this thing over and over on multiple machines.
If you ever wonder why your app has a 1.7 star rating on the app store look no further.
I don't think I've ever installed a printer's app on my Mac. I have a reflex against it. The Mac has decent support for printers and scanners built-in, so did you need an App at all?
That's one thing that bugs me about hardware companies -- they all want you to install their app to monitor/configure/bedazzle their hardware. But really, it probably is just going to work anyway. And a printer or a mouse shouldn't need much.
At least on a Mac. On Windows, sometimes the vendor apps are helpful, but usually it's still not absolutely needed (except maybe for GPUs...)
I second this...in my experience, just the WebUI the printer spins up, and maybe grabbing drivers from their site has always been enough. I'll do anything in my power to avoid that cursed HP app. Although I'm sure there is good money in increasing app downloads, so maybe things have changed, especially on the consumer-side of things
I also despise these apps but wanted to see if it had the automatic feed feature. This printer it turns out can fax using the automatic feed but can't scan. Which is fine but they had the opportunity to upsell me on a new printer with that feature but instead failed miserably.
I was a subscriber and stopped simply because they have ads in the app. I could look past the slowness of the app than what a webpage could deliver but ads in articles for paid subscribers? Cancelled it.
The NYT, as well as just about every other newspaper, has always had ads in the print edition whether you subscribed or not. Subscriptions have rarely paid the full cost of producing a newspaper. In the case of magazines, I would argue that the whole point of the magazine is to carry ads that target a specific demographic. The articles are just there to make you buy it.
Yeah but they’re different. Print ads don’t grab your attention in the way animated ads mid article do. You can even fold the paper to ignore them if they are. I can read a newspaper with ads no problem, but NYT without an adblocker (or in app) is endlessly distracting to me.
The subscription fee does not and has not covered the full cost of any magazine/newspaper I'm aware as long as magazines/newspapers have existed. They've always had ads. It was just easier to look past them in print.
This pissed me off when they bought The Athletic. It was billed from day one as expensive, but ad free. NYT immediately put ads in it regardless of the fact I'd paid $50 on the basis it was ad free.
I, like many others, play Wordle daily. When the page loads, there is a button to play todays challenge. Then, there is a very small delay (like 100ms) and suddenly a button to "View all games" appears, right where you would have tapped/clicked on the button to play the puzzle. To me, viewing all games is a way to "see what you could have" if you subscribed.
I bought into the low-cost subscription offer a few months ago. Since then, I get a huge pop-up ad literally every other article, asking me to upgrade to all-family access. I also receive a similar email every other day. They must be very desperate indeed to have to nag me every other article to upgrade. The irritatingly incessant pop-ups have guaranteed that, not only will I NOT be upgrading, I will be cancelling my subscription at end of the trial rate. :)
What's interesting is that I can see exactly what is happening behind the scenes at the Times because I've been in so many meetings that resulted in similar data-driven decisions.
Both your experience and the article author's experience manifest in the feeling of an antagonistic relationship and frustration on the part of the customer. But what I'd wager is happening is that the analytics teams have looked at subscriber retention and seen patterns. Perhaps subscribers who use 3 of their 5 key features don't cancel nearly as often. Or maybe subscribers who share with family rarely cancel because they either assume their family is getting value from it or they don't want to have the conversation about whether it's worth the price.
I have no doubt that a pure-digital product like the Times has tons of data on their users and have determined the key metrics that lead to retention. So their natural tendency is to try to game the metrics by trying to push as many accounts into those high-retention buckets as possible. The behavior you and the article author have experienced is the result of an organization becoming extremely data focused and losing focus on the customer experience. It's something to remember for those of us who ever find ourselves in a meeting where we're dissecting retention metrics and trying to figure out how to make our companies more successful.
They've gotten far more aggressive in the last year.
I've been subscribed for 15+ years, at one point I added the food subscription because my wife wanted it.
First of all they log you out way more often than they ever did, so constantly prompted to log back in. This is of course because after login they try to up-sell you to more packages.
I am more likely to exit entirely than add more packages at this point.
I'm currently in a battle with LinkedIn's "invitation" e-mail spam (I don't have a LinkedIn account). Someone (probably unintentionally) shared or allowed my e-mail to get imported to LinkedIn and periodically send me "invites" to join.
There's an unsubscribe link, but it directs me to login to my account to manage my e-mail preferences -- I don't have an account. They have a separate, hard to find, "remove me from your invitations" form, but they seem to ignore that. I finally sent a CCPA request (very hard to find the link), which went unacknowledged, but the e-mails seemed to stop until recently, when they started again.
The kicker is that they think I'm someone else (a relative), so it's all completely ridiculous.
Ongoing sketchy behavior by NYT's business side seems to be one of the problems eroding the NYT's reputation in recent years.
The publisher may be preserving the family business during difficult times, but... in addition to the money and the upper-crust status that business survival confers, doesn't the publisher and everyone else involved with the NYT want to serve society, and to be known for serving society?
Not to be known for NYT's various sketchy subscription practices?
I have something similar from AT&T about my fiber internet, they kept sending me "transactional emails" with the last 3/4 of the message body being marketing copy for their phone service etc. I submitted a complaint at the FCC (consumercomplaints.fcc.gov) and got a very fast followup from the "Office of the President of AT&T" putting me on an internal do-not-solicit list and the emails have generally gone away. They even had to write a case resolution letter to the FCC. This "loophole" in the CAN-SPAM seems to be spreading across different industries not just the NYT.
I've also experienced this elsewhere. TIAA was essentially sending me marketing emails I couldn't unsubscribe from. My financial manager with sympathetic and communicated my frustration to the business, but I don't believe it lead to any changes. As a result I have marked my emails from TIAA as spam, which now means email is not a reliable source of information from them, and so I unsubscribed from all email communication and instead receive paper mail. Sad.
I can name others using this pattern. Very frustrating. It's a lot of work to sever these relationships. I guess they know this and so think they can get away with it.
Same here, I was just about to comment about this exact problem with TIAA specifically, after receiving yet another marketing spam email from them today.
For a while they all had a footer like "This service communication provides information about your plan benefits to help you make informed decisions. It is sent as part of our plan services and is not subject to communication preferences. Thank you." But today's spam didn't even bother with that song and dance.
NYTimes and the big media papers in general seem to have this entitled arrogance. Like they feel entitled to have an audience or something.
I've noticed similar predatory behavior from car and driver magazine. they would send me a bill marked "overdue" even though I never reknewed my subscription. they would harass me repeatedly over and over saying that I owed them money. It's fraudulent, and I will never subscribe to any print media or media subscriptions again!
As an NYT subscriber, I'd like to toss out there that Brave browser (or the ad blocker of your choice) + bypass-paywalls-clean works very well. You can even be signed into your account, and everything works smoothly.
I use a throwaway email that's just for NYT for the subscription itself, like I do many other things, and just expect to get the daylights spammed out of it.
I wish we could just have microtransactions to buy access to individual articles at a time. Like physical news stands letting you buy a newspaper or magazine.
There are so many times where I've bounced away from an interesting article because I didn't want to deal with the subscription paywall.
The argument for subscriptions is it helps cultivate a relationship with customers and gives the business recurring revenue. Which is fine if I want the relationship, like with Ars Technica, Wired where I'm usually interested in their reporting. But in most cases the relationship feels awkward and forced, like this linked article mentions.
Like I'm not paying $400/year to The Information just to unlock a one-off story.
Im curious what the alternatives are the author considers to be acceptable?
From what I understand, the press is under assault from all sides... Internet has killed paper subs, political influence is attacking them... like what do you expect them to do?
It's sounds like he wants them to offer paying subscribers the choice to opt out of marketing emails? I'm a bit confused by your implication that journalism is somehow contingent on sending email spam to people who are already paying customers.
People want news online, and they do not want to see ads, they do not want to pay a subscription.
So if you are media company and want to stay afloat, you need to appeal to the people who are either willing (or don't know otherwise) to load ads or willing to pay a subscription. In both cases, it's in large part people on the fringe. Not your average person.
This is wrong in 2026. Lots of people want to pay. See: TFA
What they don't want is and _still_ see ads, get hassled by needy marketing emails. See: TFA
If you're saying "we're gonna show you ads and datamine you because you're getting it free", then when I do pay, you have to take that stuff out. Try to have your cake and eat it too = sub canceled, adblock on, ad nauseam enabled.
"It's not. It made me feel powerless. It put a sour taste in my mouth. It made them reek of desperation."
Relatedly, I've been answering those dumb-ass "How do you feel about our product?" popups that Microsoft Office is so fond of with some variation on the theme of "Be less needy."
You feel like the stereotypical clingy girlfriend... "Do you love me? Would you recommend me to your friends? Are you interested in the other services I can provide? Would you still love me if a witch turned me into a frog and I could only communicate in croaking sounds? Are you thinking of leaving me? Would you still be thinking of leaving me if I set all your documents on fire and scattered them across the front lawn and then told you my engineers 'accidentally' lost the backups?"
It's not like I have any expectation that anyone, even an AI, is reading these things anyhow.
Slightly off-topic, but if anyone needs to read a NYT article from time to time, check if your public library offers digital access. A lot of them do. For example, the San Francisco Public Library gives you 72 hours of access at a time: https://sfpl.libanswers.com/faq/166904.
Given how the "hostility" is often more than just ugly-UI, and aspects like monopolies, surveillance, and billing you for services you don't want, I think this is relevant:
> I've written before about the futility of "voting with your wallet." [...] Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping. [...] No matter how indie your coffee, books and social media, your consumption choices will not have a material impact on Starbucks, Amazon or Twitter.
> I earn a small fraction of what NYTimes earns. If I'm not desperate, why are they?
With all due respect, you are not responsible for covering every single thing the Trump administration is doing and ensuring they are held accountable. While simultaneously satisfying customers who are used to getting endless content for free, and sniff their noses at paying $2/month.
The journalism business is a hard business. I may not agree with everything NYT does, they are most certainly not perfect, but they are operating in good faith and trying their best. Give them a break
Sending 5 marketing emails with no unsubscribe link is not "operating in good faith", that's a blatant CAN-SPAM violation and could be used in a textbook explaining UX dark patterns.
> Oh no I got 5 emails I better write a post complaining about this massive inconvenience hmph
ONE unsolicited unlawful (EU) spam mail is quite enough reason to get angry, block mail, and to complain to the relevant authorities. This spamming has to stop!
I use virtual credit cards for all subscriptions. If they make unsubscribing difficult, I just kill the card. NYTimes is actually great value for the $4 I pay. I think they have the best photography and infographics of any news site.
The problem you're going to have in these kinds of analyses is that the New York Times is the most successful news organization basically in all of North America. They're doing these things because they work.
Causative link not established. The NYT is (probably) the world's most successful legacy-newspaper business for many other reasons too. For example, its historic reputation as the paper of record; network effects and digital first-mover advantage; and America's need for a locus of media opposition to a bossy government.
The Washington Post is a national paper of record as well and it's in a tailspin; newsletters, games, and recipes are huge business areas of the Times.
I just want WSJ/The Economist/AP-etc tier journalism/news reporting that I can subscribe to and get a simple, full-text no-ads RSS feed in return for that subscription. Apparently that's too much to ask. I think ArsTechnica does that, if that publication is your jam, but I'm not aware of any general news outlet that does.
I don’t think that will ever be possible. Remember that every other news source is mostly just sourcing content from those legacy media outlets stories. So if they offered it as an open API or one that was easy to scrape, they’d be killing their own business.
They all have APIs of course, but you have to contact sales for what I’m sure is a very expensive negotiation. I believe that’s what news aggregators like Apple News and ground news does.
But yeah, it sucks. AP is outstanding. Their push notifications are all the mainstream news anyone really needs for timely updates. But their App is awful once you click on those notifications.
I only interact with them through their word and logic games. They finally coerced me into subscribing, but to their credit it was a pretty good deal. Now I'm worried.
Hmm. I also recently got a subscription to the NYT. I noticed they sent me a lot of email so I just filtered it with the click of a couple buttons. It's obnoxious but in the minor way that having to click a couple buttons one time is.
NYT makes more money from their games than actual news, right? Newspapers are dead and there is nothing to replace them. There is no loner money in informing the masses, only is disinformation. The people who can make money from the news and data buy surveillance data that is far more accurate than the government publishes and trade on it. You can’t have anything resembling a liberal democracy when the monetary insensitive are aligned like this and there is no pushback.
Just earlier I opened 404 Media's subscribe page and was going to spend sometime after work subscribing to them, NYTimes, and maybe a couple others. It's past time I pay for some news media.
This has guaranteed I will not even consider NYTimes for the foreseeable future. So disrespectful.
I pay the $2/month. They occasionally try and get me to pay more. No chance, I always tell them I’ll cancel (and I would.)
I don’t get it. If they cut out all the awful mid-article ads, stopped the page resetting to the top every time you hit the back button, and stopped nagging me to install the app (which I don’t use because of the aforementioned mid-article ads, but would use otherwise), I’d happily pay 5x the subscription. I like the content (mostly) but everything else makes me despise them.
Your problem. Read some of Michael Porter’s books on competition. In an economic interaction, all players compete with each other. The Times thinks it’s in its interest to try to brainwash you with some garbage.
NYTimes was the only subscription in well over a decade that was just sitting there collecting money when we thought we'd canceled it. It was for some crossword type app game, but it was just eating ~$7 monthly without any use. The only reason I noticed was my credit card bill. I really, really hate subscriptions.
Corporate desperation seems to be on the rise. So many products try to convince, beg, nudge, trick, and dark-pattern you into buying or even just interacting with them. They're all like clingy puppy dogs, begging for you to notice them, read their spam and be part of their ecosystem. Microsoft is one of the worst--forcing you to do things, begging you to do other things, forgetting that you opted out, and just in general nagging users to death about everything.
C'mon developers, stand up to marketing for a change and stop writing these software nags.
> C'mon developers, stand up to marketing for a change and stop writing these software nags.
Only things they ever stood up for were social issues (that's why you see banners with Ukraine and BLM, etc). Google kinda put an end to that when they fired 28 workers protesting Israel.
I never saw any banners protesting dark patterns.
Now, with (perhaps) most developers in the shadow of the AI-layoffs boot, there's really no hope for change coming from the inside.
Agree -they all do it. How do they justify the bounce rate? It's never once been shown to my knowledge that viewers love to have their browsing/reading/knowledge gathering interrupted by a volume-up video playing (usually) an ad.
Is it just so they can tell advertisers X amount of people "viewed" your ad?
NYTimes is not unique, but yes, they are a for-profit entity focused on audience building and audience retention. Their audience tends to be liberal leaning types, and so their aim is to produce content for that audience. This particular example is disgusting.
My suggestion is subscribe to Breaking Points or try them for free on YouTube. You won't get the breadth of content given their scale, but you will get a more honest approach to delivering news.
Everybody is obnoxious about emails now. I got "invited to complete a survey about my applicant experience" FROM A COMPANY THAT GHOSTED ME AFTER INTERVIEWS! fuck them!
I'm going to a baseball game soon. Naturally, 3 survey links, none with unsubscribe, because naturally i want a relationship with the team, their facilities, and their ticket vendor, naturally.
If you needed another reason to unsubscribe, the NYT has been a persistent peddler in American propaganda to the point that they arent willing to issue corrections for even their most falsified pieces. Their behavior since the start of the Gaza genocide has been particularly disgusting.
> In a response to The Intercept’s questions about Schwartz’s podcast interview, a spokesperson for the New York Times walked back the blockbuster article’s framing that evidence shows Hamas had weaponized sexual violence to a softer claim that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.”
That's not much of a 'walking back' much less a 'debunking'. That article is also bizarre - they talk about "October 7 sensationalism" - a murder rampage among families killing 800+ innocent people is pretty sensational.
Some quick research gives the following first hand reports of sexual assult:
_______________
Publicly identified survivors/victims who claimed personal experiences:
Beneath a veneer of respectability the NYT has always been a rag. In Steven Levy's "Hackers" he mentioned MIT stidents were calling it the New York Slime back in the 70s.
I just gave up on reading respectable news outlet like NY Times. I decided to just get it from "fringe" Youtube channels: Danny Haiphong, Dialogue Works with Nima, The Jimmy Dore Show. Recently, former CIA analyst, Larry Johnson, worked with Pepe Escobar and Zulfiqar Ali to vet a source saying Iran has 1 or 2 nuclear weapons. Let's see how long it will take the NY Times to avoid/deny/confirm that story.
Going all-in on fringe YouTube channels is not a good strategy if you want to be informed. Sounds like you are in the pipeline. Next stop: Ivermectin shampoo.
Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours for cancellation, is a toxic place. I've been told they have stopped this predatory practice due to some newly passed laws or something, but they did not stop their predation due to their own values.
I urge everyone reading to unsubscribe instantaneously from the NYTimes for their business practices. Do not do business with unethical companies.
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.
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.
Yay, American "capitalism".
If you think they give one flying fuck about what customers think I have news for you: the only thing that matters is what the board thinks and if revenue is rising but everyone hates the product/company they won’t even blink.
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.
In the beginning I would still compile user complaints into write ups for my managers à la “hey these 50 people hate that we do X, maybe we could do Y and win back their gratitude/trust” - but I soon realised that’s just a waste of my lifetime, because PM don’t give a fuck.
And why should they? Even if you improve the thing it won’t matter - the majority of people just want to vent like you; they don’t care anymore if the product improves, even if you would give them the perfect product of their dreams it wouldn’t change their minds.
This might sound jaded but there is a reason why the market is dominated by god-awful products - those that gave too much of a shit were sorted out early enough and only those that focus ruthlessly on the money and only the money survive.
There are a few exceptions of course but those just prove the rule to me.
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
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.
(I subscribe to Bloomberg, and send their emails to feeds which end up in a https://karakeep.app/ instance for consumption)
And for me, the second half is a stronger emotional reaction. So NYT can kindly fuck off and die because of their absolutely batshit terrible insane dickover tactics.
If anyone works at NYT who is responsible for the subscription stuff reads this: fuck you, you're actively contributing to the global downfall of democracy and I fucking hate you.
This new change has really disappointed me.
And making it hard to cancel is not just "marketing" . There are even laws to prevent that sort of thing.
Yes, we should be clear on this. It's fraud. What the NYT is engaging in is fraud.
Iraq war: not even once.
One caveat is the subscription "rental" is for only a 3 day period, so you have "renew" your subscription every 3 days. This only takes 2 clicks though. For San Francisco public library: https://ezproxy.sfpl.org/login/nyt.
I can’t promise I would pay $300/yr to access a great public library, but I would like the option to try it.
My in-laws have a decent (not great, but decent) one in their city, and for sure they will never use it, but they aren’t going to drag the documentation up there and get cards just for me.
Changes every 6-12 months, but that's easy to update.
That hasn't been true for, what, almost ten years? When I cancelled three months ago, it was about three or four clicks through the beg screens, and done. No, I don't live in CA.
Do not subscribe to the NYTimes. Use your library card, if one must read it, and unfortunately as the undeserved "paper of record" one must often read it to be kept aware of what others are being fed. There's no baby here to throw out with the bath water, I find other places have far better coverage for all the topics I care intensely about. For example, their Ukraine coverage is basically Russia-lite, and extremely anti-Ukrainian, I haven't seen such biased coverage anywhere else except for far-right rags.
This is very surprising to me, I thought they were kind of pro Ukraine biased.
I asked an AI and it came back with this:
> The New York Times' coverage of the war is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine in its framing, tone, and attribution of responsibility, though critics argue this manifests as omission of context regarding NATO expansion and US intelligence involvement rather than direct support for Russia.
That was 5 years ago. California's "click-to-cancel" law was amended in 2024, effective July 1, 2025.
Years later, I wanted to sub again, and this time I did it through the iOS app. Best decision ever, as now it just sits alongside my other App Store subscriptions and is easily cancelable in a single click.
If they got what I want, I don't care about ethics, I care about value. I've just never seen value in NYT.
Well you sound nice to share a society with.
If people stopped buying from unethical businesses it would be practically impossible to function in the modern day. Not only is it extremely difficult to know what businesses are “ethical”, but it’s becoming increasingly easy to assume no business is truly ethical. e.g. Environmentally friendly clothing brand Everlane just sold to SHEIN of all places.
Oh the irony of telling somebody to instantaneously unsubscribe from something notoriously hard to unsubscribe from.
Me personally, I just go on the web chat every once in a while and say I want to cancel, and they give me a nice discount.
Happily, this practice is illegal in California. Sometimes consumer-protection laws work ... and are necessary.
(As a hackaround, try using a VPN to make it appear as if you are connecting from California...)
that's totally irrelevant: Conde Nast for Wired is a shameless offender, for example. took me hours to cancel some autorenewing subscription i never subscribed for, perhaps enabled years ago through some dark pattern in iOS, but i genuinely don't know, and am not easily tricked.
I guess there are more people who give up on unsubscribing than who refrain from subscribing?
Honestly if it was easier to unsubscribe I'd probably have an on and off again subscription, but I'll never subscribe again because I don't want to jump through those hoops to unsubscribe.
FWIW, as a subscriber to both, I have more often found myself manually renewing lapsed subscriptions than going through painful cancellation processes to get out of them. I get the Economist through DiscountMags.com where it is often available with a discount.
You are not wrong for thinking that, but I encourage people to consider that generally the business and editorial areas are largely independent of each other because of the value of editorial independence in case they think that the lack of ethics applies to their journalism too.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/05/new-york-times...
They have predilection for defense of elites, including Trump, and have not challenged his corruption to the degree that they have challenged, say Clinton's accusations of corruption. Their defense of the elite in their coverage that launched the war in Iraq, the outright corruption of their own reporters and editors, is not reflected in the overall reputation of the NYTimes. Holding them up as the beacon of good journalism results in poor judgements on what's happening with current affairs, because they are often quite biased in very disastrous ways that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and trillions of wasted defense spending.
More recently, the circling of the wagons of those considered "in-group" like Olivia Nuzzi has also been despicable, but definitely descriptive of the general editorial choices at the NYTimes.
However I don't expect as many people to agree with me that the NYTimes has an undeserved reputation for journalistic excellence, so I focus mostly on their bad business practices.
This thread has a whole bunch of Charlie Browns in it who are "shocked, shocked" to find that Lucy has pulled away the football once again...
I unsubscribed a couple years ago. It was a click on the website. (Just checked. Cancelling online without talking to anyone is still an option.)
> I've been told they have stopped this predatory practice due to some newly passed laws or something, but they did not stop their predation due to their own values.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...
A couple of years later resubscribed. I also subscribe to the WSJ to make sure I receive a more balanced viewpoint.
WSJ offered me an online cancel option after I moved (cough) to California.
It was a digital subscription by the way - usually they have your address on file anyway because you used it to verify your credit card.
[1]https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...
One that particularly bugs me is Bank of America, which sends all kinds of promotional stuff with a note at the end saying "You're receiving this servicing email as part of your existing relationship with us." Can't block it without blocking actual important banking emails. Experian was doing the same - promoting services under the guise of offering account updates. It does feel desperate, but one has to imagine that this firehose technique works.
Luckily this kind of thing is very much illegal here in the EU. If they send me marketing shit without my explicit active consent, they are in violation of the law, and I can at least report them. As I do. It is still not perfect, but the amount of spam I get from previous business relations has declined a lot in the past years. Other spam is still rampant, and I can only block any such sender until they find a new way to push their shit.
Give them a masked email (if you get a custom domain, you can make it so any random string of characters is a new masked email). Block all calls and texts except from contacts
> Bank of America, which sends all kinds of promotional stuff
Use a different bank (for more reasons than avoiding spam)
I'd kinda understand it if they had sent me a polite text or email shortly after our initial engagement saying "hey, if you had a good experience please review us/recommend us" but coming in literal years late with a blast of multiple messages screams "we hired some sort of marketing firm and fed them our customer database".
And it stands to reason NYT do this so aggressively since they also have by far the most successful subscription business in the entire world of journalism.
I'm still paying the NYT intro rate ($4 a month billed annually) and on day 364 go to the account page to cancel my subscription before it resets to the "official" rate. Sure enough, they let you stay at the cheap rate if you tell them you'll walk.
Works for telcos and Adobe, too.
As for alerts and notices you can't unsubscribe from: filter or spam.
I was gifted a subscription and clicked cancel on it in January out of concern it would roll over.
It still rolled over and the person who gifted it had to call them, repeatedly, from New Zealand and spent ages on the phone (at their cost).
Also, for any subscription for which I don't use HME, I will immediately "mark as spam" any minimally-spammy email I get. The ones described in the article would be insta-marked due to the lack of Unsubscribe button.
Immediately met with 4 popups that you can not close until you press the completely fake "maybe next time" prompt only to find out the program doesn't even support feed scanning on my specific printer.
Imagine being a sysadmin that has to install this thing over and over on multiple machines.
If you ever wonder why your app has a 1.7 star rating on the app store look no further.
That's one thing that bugs me about hardware companies -- they all want you to install their app to monitor/configure/bedazzle their hardware. But really, it probably is just going to work anyway. And a printer or a mouse shouldn't need much.
At least on a Mac. On Windows, sometimes the vendor apps are helpful, but usually it's still not absolutely needed (except maybe for GPUs...)
I, like many others, play Wordle daily. When the page loads, there is a button to play todays challenge. Then, there is a very small delay (like 100ms) and suddenly a button to "View all games" appears, right where you would have tapped/clicked on the button to play the puzzle. To me, viewing all games is a way to "see what you could have" if you subscribed.
Both your experience and the article author's experience manifest in the feeling of an antagonistic relationship and frustration on the part of the customer. But what I'd wager is happening is that the analytics teams have looked at subscriber retention and seen patterns. Perhaps subscribers who use 3 of their 5 key features don't cancel nearly as often. Or maybe subscribers who share with family rarely cancel because they either assume their family is getting value from it or they don't want to have the conversation about whether it's worth the price.
I have no doubt that a pure-digital product like the Times has tons of data on their users and have determined the key metrics that lead to retention. So their natural tendency is to try to game the metrics by trying to push as many accounts into those high-retention buckets as possible. The behavior you and the article author have experienced is the result of an organization becoming extremely data focused and losing focus on the customer experience. It's something to remember for those of us who ever find ourselves in a meeting where we're dissecting retention metrics and trying to figure out how to make our companies more successful.
First of all they log you out way more often than they ever did, so constantly prompted to log back in. This is of course because after login they try to up-sell you to more packages.
I am more likely to exit entirely than add more packages at this point.
There's an unsubscribe link, but it directs me to login to my account to manage my e-mail preferences -- I don't have an account. They have a separate, hard to find, "remove me from your invitations" form, but they seem to ignore that. I finally sent a CCPA request (very hard to find the link), which went unacknowledged, but the e-mails seemed to stop until recently, when they started again.
The kicker is that they think I'm someone else (a relative), so it's all completely ridiculous.
The publisher may be preserving the family business during difficult times, but... in addition to the money and the upper-crust status that business survival confers, doesn't the publisher and everyone else involved with the NYT want to serve society, and to be known for serving society?
Not to be known for NYT's various sketchy subscription practices?
I've also experienced this elsewhere. TIAA was essentially sending me marketing emails I couldn't unsubscribe from. My financial manager with sympathetic and communicated my frustration to the business, but I don't believe it lead to any changes. As a result I have marked my emails from TIAA as spam, which now means email is not a reliable source of information from them, and so I unsubscribed from all email communication and instead receive paper mail. Sad.
I can name others using this pattern. Very frustrating. It's a lot of work to sever these relationships. I guess they know this and so think they can get away with it.
For a while they all had a footer like "This service communication provides information about your plan benefits to help you make informed decisions. It is sent as part of our plan services and is not subject to communication preferences. Thank you." But today's spam didn't even bother with that song and dance.
It's infuriating.
I've noticed similar predatory behavior from car and driver magazine. they would send me a bill marked "overdue" even though I never reknewed my subscription. they would harass me repeatedly over and over saying that I owed them money. It's fraudulent, and I will never subscribe to any print media or media subscriptions again!
I use a throwaway email that's just for NYT for the subscription itself, like I do many other things, and just expect to get the daylights spammed out of it.
The options are “yes” or “Not now”
No option for the “No thanks, please don’t bother me about this again for at least 30 days” that I want
The times will repeat this about ever 3 articles, which is really fn annoying.
There are so many times where I've bounced away from an interesting article because I didn't want to deal with the subscription paywall.
The argument for subscriptions is it helps cultivate a relationship with customers and gives the business recurring revenue. Which is fine if I want the relationship, like with Ars Technica, Wired where I'm usually interested in their reporting. But in most cases the relationship feels awkward and forced, like this linked article mentions.
Like I'm not paying $400/year to The Information just to unlock a one-off story.
From what I understand, the press is under assault from all sides... Internet has killed paper subs, political influence is attacking them... like what do you expect them to do?
Take my money, show me content. No adverts. No spam. Let me unsubscribe if I want to.
People want news online, and they do not want to see ads, they do not want to pay a subscription.
So if you are media company and want to stay afloat, you need to appeal to the people who are either willing (or don't know otherwise) to load ads or willing to pay a subscription. In both cases, it's in large part people on the fringe. Not your average person.
This is wrong in 2026. Lots of people want to pay. See: TFA
What they don't want is and _still_ see ads, get hassled by needy marketing emails. See: TFA
If you're saying "we're gonna show you ads and datamine you because you're getting it free", then when I do pay, you have to take that stuff out. Try to have your cake and eat it too = sub canceled, adblock on, ad nauseam enabled.
It's also true that most people are unwilling to fully "buy out" their ad value. For instance Meta makes about $27/mo/user from instagram ads.
Would you pay $27/mo for instagram? Maybe people would pay $5, but Meta will still close the gap with $22 of ads...
The New York Times is actually doing quite well financially, they are the exception to the trend
Relatedly, I've been answering those dumb-ass "How do you feel about our product?" popups that Microsoft Office is so fond of with some variation on the theme of "Be less needy."
You feel like the stereotypical clingy girlfriend... "Do you love me? Would you recommend me to your friends? Are you interested in the other services I can provide? Would you still love me if a witch turned me into a frog and I could only communicate in croaking sounds? Are you thinking of leaving me? Would you still be thinking of leaving me if I set all your documents on fire and scattered them across the front lawn and then told you my engineers 'accidentally' lost the backups?"
It's not like I have any expectation that anyone, even an AI, is reading these things anyhow.
Your KPIs are not my problem.
Sad to say but I'm guessing this is an effective strategy.
Given how the "hostility" is often more than just ugly-UI, and aspects like monopolies, surveillance, and billing you for services you don't want, I think this is relevant:
> I've written before about the futility of "voting with your wallet." [...] Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping. [...] No matter how indie your coffee, books and social media, your consumption choices will not have a material impact on Starbucks, Amazon or Twitter.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/
With all due respect, you are not responsible for covering every single thing the Trump administration is doing and ensuring they are held accountable. While simultaneously satisfying customers who are used to getting endless content for free, and sniff their noses at paying $2/month.
The journalism business is a hard business. I may not agree with everything NYT does, they are most certainly not perfect, but they are operating in good faith and trying their best. Give them a break
~ just a guy trying to get by on $690,000 a year in Queens
ONE unsolicited unlawful (EU) spam mail is quite enough reason to get angry, block mail, and to complain to the relevant authorities. This spamming has to stop!
Would love to be proven wrong, though.
They all have APIs of course, but you have to contact sales for what I’m sure is a very expensive negotiation. I believe that’s what news aggregators like Apple News and ground news does.
But yeah, it sucks. AP is outstanding. Their push notifications are all the mainstream news anyone really needs for timely updates. But their App is awful once you click on those notifications.
Cancellation wasn't difficult though, and didn't require me to call anyone.
Whatever they're doing, whether to maintain growth or increase it, it's mostly working. Just today coincidentally:
The New York Times Reaches Three Million Digital Subscribers Outside the U.S.. And last month:
The New York Times Passes 13 Million Subscribers
> For the second quarter of 2026, the company forecast a 14 to 17 percent increase in digital-only subscription revenue.
This has guaranteed I will not even consider NYTimes for the foreseeable future. So disrespectful.
Scott Alexander as the most memorable, and then the backlash after they post the backrooms movie creator's house on twitter recently
Just very shortsighted behavior
I don’t get it. If they cut out all the awful mid-article ads, stopped the page resetting to the top every time you hit the back button, and stopped nagging me to install the app (which I don’t use because of the aforementioned mid-article ads, but would use otherwise), I’d happily pay 5x the subscription. I like the content (mostly) but everything else makes me despise them.
I just want to read the news!
Just today coincidentally:
The New York Times Reaches Three Million Digital Subscribers Outside the U.S.
https://www.nytco.com/press/the-new-york-times-reaches-three...
And last month:
The New York Times Passes 13 Million Subscribers
> For the second quarter of 2026, the company forecast a 14 to 17 percent increase in digital-only subscription revenue
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...
Your problem. Read some of Michael Porter’s books on competition. In an economic interaction, all players compete with each other. The Times thinks it’s in its interest to try to brainwash you with some garbage.
And you look for Mommy.
Feel powerless? Set up a filter.
C'mon developers, stand up to marketing for a change and stop writing these software nags.
Only things they ever stood up for were social issues (that's why you see banners with Ukraine and BLM, etc). Google kinda put an end to that when they fired 28 workers protesting Israel.
I never saw any banners protesting dark patterns.
Now, with (perhaps) most developers in the shadow of the AI-layoffs boot, there's really no hope for change coming from the inside.
Is it just so they can tell advertisers X amount of people "viewed" your ad?
Jesus fucking christ. Somebody call the whaaaambulance
My suggestion is subscribe to Breaking Points or try them for free on YouTube. You won't get the breadth of content given their scale, but you will get a more honest approach to delivering news.
I'm going to a baseball game soon. Naturally, 3 survey links, none with unsubscribe, because naturally i want a relationship with the team, their facilities, and their ticket vendor, naturally.
Email was a mistake, frankly.
More info: https://writersagainstthewarongaza.com/boycott-nyt
The Intercept article linked to from your piece 'debunking' the piece (https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schw...) claims:
> In a response to The Intercept’s questions about Schwartz’s podcast interview, a spokesperson for the New York Times walked back the blockbuster article’s framing that evidence shows Hamas had weaponized sexual violence to a softer claim that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.”
That's not much of a 'walking back' much less a 'debunking'. That article is also bizarre - they talk about "October 7 sensationalism" - a murder rampage among families killing 800+ innocent people is pretty sensational.
Some quick research gives the following first hand reports of sexual assult:
_______________
Publicly identified survivors/victims who claimed personal experiences:
- D. (anonymous male survivor, Nova festival): First male survivor to publicly describe being gang-raped by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival. https://www.timesofisrael.com/male-october-7-survivor-recoun...
- Amit Soussana: Released hostage; first to publicly detail being sexually assaulted by her Hamas captor in Gaza. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/middleeast/hamas-ho...
- Romi Gonen: Released hostage; publicly described repeated sexual assaults during captivity. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/04/middleeast/israeli-hostage-ga...
- Rom Braslavski: Released hostage; described sexual assault and torture by captors. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgkz0yzde80o
- Ilana Gritzewsky: Released hostage; testified to sexual assault and abuse during captivity. https://www.timesofisrael.com/released-hostage-ilana-gritzew...
- Guy Gilboa-Dalal: Released hostage; detailed sexual abuse by a Hamas captor. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/world/middleeast/hamas-ho...
- Arbel Yehud: Released hostage; described relentless sexual abuse throughout captivity. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-886646
They are transactional emails. Maybe the author doesn’t agree with that but they’re welcome to take NYT to court over it.
Is their email provider charging you per email or something?