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.
> 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.
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.
The flipside of companies not caring is that sometimes they tend to throw you a bone in the form of something they can control, like a free month of service, or a coupon for a free/discounted widget.
Even if the faulty product/service never changes, writing those letters can result in savings of hundreds of dollars a year if done right.
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
I think it's pretty simple: the value of good journalism vastly outweighs the crappy subscription practices, but the value of stuff like same-day delivery does not outweigh th e harm Amazon causes.
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.
The product they sell is trustworthy news but they still have accountants. The high-quality news business is a rough business and few are profitable. I can understand why they might feel defensive and a more than a little spooked. How many profitable quality newspapers can you identify? NYT and WSJ - any others?
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.
>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.
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!
If the NYT subscription indeed has a tremendous value, surely it can attract and retain the subscribers without resorting to dark patterns in their products.
If my polite neighbour smiles, holds the door, but also pisses on my doormat every few days, I call him LOUD a jerk and tell him to stop. I never approve the piss because he said good morning.
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.
Supporting the war is a hell of a lot different from laundering lies and justifications to build public support for the war. They lied, they knew they lied, and they knew a lot of innocent people would die because of it but did so anyway.
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.
> 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".
> 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.
> 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
I moved into a new home. I kept the old one for a few weeks extra. Needed time to move out.
I signed up for CenturyLink at my new home.
After six weeks, I tried to turn off internet at my old house.
* I can’t.
* CenturyLink wouldn’t let me cancel, without waiting on hold for an hour or more
* I work overnight
* CenturyLink is open when I’m asleep
So I’m paying for two plans with the same company. Thanks CenturyLink.
This is a good argument for local brick and mortar representation for the critical services we consume. My bank, mobile and fibre providers all have branches/offices/shops in the town closest to where I live (15km drive).
At each of these locations there is one or more necks that can be wrung if something goes wrong with my services
I know it's not really a solution for your nocturnal proclivities, but I think the argument holds. If you had to sacrifice a couple of your sleeping hours but you know you can sort your problem, then you migt be inclined to do so?
If all else fails resort to old-fashioned letter. As long as it's certified you will have proof of delivery. And then, if they continue to make unauthorized charges, it is your credit card company's problem. They are awake during business hours, and they WILL sort it out.
> 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.
Respectfully disagree that it's toxic or predatory. Very easy to cancel via chat as well. New York times is an incredible jewel of a company. I am fine with some marketing tactics that aren't incredibly heavy handed. They are far far far from unethical.
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 had the same experience after subscribing for crosswords around 10 years ago, but I think at that time they did let you ask nicely for cancellation via a support chat bot. I think they might have only supported this in California due to California state law.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Especially because in most ways it actually isn't better in the app. Even on an iPhone 17 it is usually quite slow and hangs frequently. Offline reading SHOULD be a clear advantage to the app, but it is completely inconsistent about what will be available offline, when I'm sure a significant fraction of their readership are New Yorkers trying to read while commuting on the subway.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
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 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!
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.
As an alternative, the Free Press is honestly much better. I joined it because of the NY Times' bitter hit piece on Bari Weiss, who left them to found the Free Press. I wanted something that wasn't woke. I've stayed because of the excellent quality of reporting, varied points of view, and well researched investigations.
I was upset when Weiss announced she was leaving the Free Press to head a big American news agency because I was worried it would affect the Free Press. That's how much I like it. Thankfully it hasn't much, just mostly her personal reporting - which was great - isn't there anymore.
The Free Press has its own biases. But it's much more varied and inquisitive than other news sites. Sometimes I get to the end of an article and I'm annoyed that the author didn't make more of a stand and then I realise, that's the point.
Some articles are just super interesting. Their indepth investigation into the Free Birth Society wasn't a big story, but it made a profound and personal impact on me.
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.
This is one of the main reasons that Amazon is my default online merchant, despite all of my reservations with them: a purchase won't increase the amount of marketing email I receive. I don't know how much spam they send to new accounts, but I must have my preferences tweaked to eliminate most of it. Contrast that to every merchant that thinks that since I bought a product from them once, they should spam me multiple times per week, oftentimes even when I've unchecked the "receive marketing emails" box.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
There can only be one newspaper of record, that's the point. In a media landscape where everything became nationalized, the NYT leveraged its status to take the pot. Most of America's serious newspapers (Boston Globe, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, all the rest) are now even more dead than the WaPo. The NYT, with its massive frontrunner advantage, did not need games and crosswords to win this battle.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yay, American "capitalism".
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.
The flipside of companies not caring is that sometimes they tend to throw you a bone in the form of something they can control, like a free month of service, or a coupon for a free/discounted widget.
Even if the faulty product/service never changes, writing those letters can result in savings of hundreds of dollars a year if done right.
Cancelling yhe subscription does both. You can't cancel if you're not subscribed.
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
I think it's pretty simple: the value of good journalism vastly outweighs the crappy subscription practices, but the value of stuff like same-day delivery does not outweigh th e harm Amazon causes.
Your dollar is always your vote. What society spends its labour on is the society it creates, far more so than a random tick in a box.
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.
The product they sell is trustworthy news but they still have accountants. The high-quality news business is a rough business and few are profitable. I can understand why they might feel defensive and a more than a little spooked. How many profitable quality newspapers can you identify? NYT and WSJ - any others?
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.
>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.
FYI you can get Money Stuff delivered by email without a Bloomberg subscription.
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.
For anyone else interested, here’s the link to the newsletter: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
If you prefer pull, subscribe to it with https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com/
(I subscribe to Bloomberg, and send their emails to feeds which end up in a https://karakeep.app/ instance for consumption)
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!
Great idea and thanks, will check it out!
If the NYT subscription indeed has a tremendous value, surely it can attract and retain the subscribers without resorting to dark patterns in their products.
The quality of the New York Times as a product is irrelevant to them being predatory about subscriptions.
The quality of the NYT as a product is relevant to GP’s assertion that everyone should unsubscribe from the service though.
If my polite neighbour smiles, holds the door, but also pisses on my doormat every few days, I call him LOUD a jerk and tell him to stop. I never approve the piss because he said good morning.
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?
This new change has really disappointed me.
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.
I like their content. I would subscribe, but knowing how their unsubscription process is deliberately broken, I never will.
So subscribing to NYT somehow changed your stance on online privacy? Color me confused...
I won't even read the NYT lol let alone pay for it.
Iraq war: not even once.
If you only read news from companies against the iraq war your options consist pretty much solely of companies that didnt exist on 9/11.
Supporting the war is a hell of a lot different from laundering lies and justifications to build public support for the war. They lied, they knew they lied, and they knew a lot of innocent people would die because of it but did so anyway.
If that's what it takes
gp's comment had nothing to do with value of the publication. are you implying it ok for them to do that because value?
And making it hard to cancel is not just "marketing" . There are even laws to prevent that sort of thing.
No, I am not implying it is OK for them to do that because I read their paper.
> And making it hard to cancel is not just "marketing"
Yes, we should be clear on this. It's fraud. What the NYT is engaging in is fraud.
You’re not responding to anything the parent said.
The parent didn’t respond to anything their parent said either.
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
It’s now one day only, at least through my library.
It's 3 days through mine.
What's your library's page?
I have a few library cards so I'm curious as to which ones have better or worse terms.
I just bookmarked the apply-code page.
Changes every 6-12 months, but that's easy to update.
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.
> 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 cancelled last week and it was all on the web, pretty easy.
I bet if you read actual Ukrainian Telegram channels that openly discuss military setbacks and government corruption you would conclude they are "anti-Ukrainian".
> 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.
> Of course it is and always has been.
Somewhere Walter Duranty is looking up and smiling.
See, you've made a fundamental mistake: NYT is a far-right rag in sheep's clothing
> 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
I moved into a new home. I kept the old one for a few weeks extra. Needed time to move out.
I signed up for CenturyLink at my new home.
After six weeks, I tried to turn off internet at my old house.
* I can’t.
* CenturyLink wouldn’t let me cancel, without waiting on hold for an hour or more
* I work overnight
* CenturyLink is open when I’m asleep
So I’m paying for two plans with the same company. Thanks CenturyLink.
This is a good argument for local brick and mortar representation for the critical services we consume. My bank, mobile and fibre providers all have branches/offices/shops in the town closest to where I live (15km drive).
At each of these locations there is one or more necks that can be wrung if something goes wrong with my services
I know it's not really a solution for your nocturnal proclivities, but I think the argument holds. If you had to sacrifice a couple of your sleeping hours but you know you can sort your problem, then you migt be inclined to do so?
If all else fails resort to old-fashioned letter. As long as it's certified you will have proof of delivery. And then, if they continue to make unauthorized charges, it is your credit card company's problem. They are awake during business hours, and they WILL sort it out.
Certified mail? I know it's old-fashioned but then you could hold their feet to the fire if they kept charging you.
Copy/paste this to your local news organization and your representative in congress.
A certified letter never fails in my experience.
Unsubscribe? And then miss out on all that excellent "There is another thing you should be worried about" content?
> 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.
Respectfully disagree that it's toxic or predatory. Very easy to cancel via chat as well. New York times is an incredible jewel of a company. I am fine with some marketing tactics that aren't incredibly heavy handed. They are far far far from unethical.
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.
I love this simple but excellent suggestion, thank you.
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.
Assuming they are both the same price this also speaks directly to NTY: people will give Apple a 30% cut just to not deal with their shitty practices.
No it doesn't, because the price is the same. If the Apple Pay route was 30% expensiver, then I reckon most would not opt for that option.
I had the same experience after subscribing for crosswords around 10 years ago, but I think at that time they did let you ask nicely for cancellation via a support chat bot. I think they might have only supported this in California due to California state law.
> Do not do business with unethical companies.
If they got what I want, I don't care about ethics, I care about value. I've just never seen value in NYT.
> I don't care about ethics
Well you sound nice to share a society with.
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.
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 don’t remember how it worked but I did a one year subscription last year because of a discount and had no problems cancelling.
“unsubscribe instantaneously”
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.
.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.
Have they issued a retraction for the biologically impossible “dog rape” claims yet?
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
Well I would also encourage people to unsubscribe for their editorial practices, and this was the incident that prompted my second unsubscription:
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.
I haven't had a NYTimes subscription since around 1991.
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...
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.
Wired once sent my dad to collections for an automatic renewal that wasn't even due yet.
That's why it's best not to give companies your credit card number. If you subscribe through PayPal, you can cancel through PayPal.
you can do a merchant block on your CC then it doesn't matter what they claim, no more payments issued to that merchant (NYT in these examples).
> makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours
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 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.
If you read one more sentence further:
> 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.
Depends on the jurisdiction you are in.
No, it doesn't. I live in WA, with no such consumer protections, and it was a few clicks.
I’m in Wyoming. There is zero chance we have any consumer protection laws around this.
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.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...
I like the system. Every single time I talked to the human, and explained that the Times wasn’t worth the “regular” price, back came a much lower one.
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?
The fact that they have an online unsubscribe option that's only available for California users is seriously scummy.
That isn't a fact. Plenty of folks under the OG comment that don't live in CA have said they cancelled online, myself included.
lets not throw out the baby with the bathwater
The NYT is not a baby. At _best_ they're a pail of dirt that occasionally has some flecks of gold mixed in with the mud.
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.
I heard this, but I cancelled without fuss during the worst of cancel culture.
A couple of years later resubscribed. I also subscribe to the WSJ to make sure I receive a more balanced viewpoint.
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.
[1]https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...
What a load of crap. You can just cancel your subscription from the app or on your account on the desktop.
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.
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!
> 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.
That is correct, and it his also correct that most of the spam we receive comes from outside the EU.
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.
I never check it, and still get these.
> 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)
The Mitch Hedberg joke about getting a receipt for a donut is now an email newsletter.
There needs to be a small claims private right of action for this.
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.
Especially because in most ways it actually isn't better in the app. Even on an iPhone 17 it is usually quite slow and hangs frequently. Offline reading SHOULD be a clear advantage to the app, but it is completely inconsistent about what will be available offline, when I'm sure a significant fraction of their readership are New Yorkers trying to read while commuting on the subway.
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.
This is what I use to block the news feed on FB to prevent doomscrolling.
You can also install Bypass Paywalls Clean on mobile Firefox.
Despite having a NYT audio subscription, I continue to listen to the ads in a third party podcast app just so I don't have to use their god damn app.
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.
> If you think that's bad, 5 years ago you had to call someone on the phone to cancel NYT subscriptions
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).
I gave up on and unsubscribed from the Times about 20+ years ago. Even back then the unsubscribe process was painful. I guess nothing has changed.
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.
Firefox relay also good for this sort of thing.
And 1password which works fantastically with Fastmail with their Masked emails feature.
It’s fantastic, and also lets you track exactly who leaked your email.
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 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.
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.
They could sell a Premium subscription with access + no ads.
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.
Semi linked:
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.
My gripe is that they constantly spam me with overlays about purchasing a family account. As far as I can tell this is unblockable. So annoying.
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?
Maybe they should find a way to keep the news flowing without having to pay for a skyscraper in the middle of NYC.
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.
maybe mark it as spam? If you don't have an account anyway, you don't miss anything. Also maybe they get punished a bit by being ranked as spam
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 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 had the same experience and feeling.
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.
It's infuriating.
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!
How could they have tested them without detection?
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.
As an alternative, the Free Press is honestly much better. I joined it because of the NY Times' bitter hit piece on Bari Weiss, who left them to found the Free Press. I wanted something that wasn't woke. I've stayed because of the excellent quality of reporting, varied points of view, and well researched investigations.
I was upset when Weiss announced she was leaving the Free Press to head a big American news agency because I was worried it would affect the Free Press. That's how much I like it. Thankfully it hasn't much, just mostly her personal reporting - which was great - isn't there anymore.
The Free Press has its own biases. But it's much more varied and inquisitive than other news sites. Sometimes I get to the end of an article and I'm annoyed that the author didn't make more of a stand and then I realise, that's the point.
Some articles are just super interesting. Their indepth investigation into the Free Birth Society wasn't a big story, but it made a profound and personal impact on me.
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.
This is one of the main reasons that Amazon is my default online merchant, despite all of my reservations with them: a purchase won't increase the amount of marketing email I receive. I don't know how much spam they send to new accounts, but I must have my preferences tweaked to eliminate most of it. Contrast that to every merchant that thinks that since I bought a product from them once, they should spam me multiple times per week, oftentimes even when I've unchecked the "receive marketing emails" box.
NYT is doing great though. It’s actually doing so well it’s in danger of becoming a monopoly.
I expect them to treat subscribers well so they will renew.
> 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.
I love the bottom pop up which says “It’s better with the App”
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.
> I'm aware media and journalism sites have been getting hit hard over the last few years, but is it this bad?
The New York Times is actually doing quite well financially, they are the exception to the trend
They are desperate, all of media is desperate.
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.
>they do not want to pay a subscription.
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.
Conversion rates from user to subscriber are on the order of 5%. 5 people paying for every 100 people consuming is not sustainable.
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...
If being user-hostile in tech created real consequences, Facebook would've shuttered 15 years ago.
Sad to say but I'm guessing this is an effective strategy.
> Facebook would've
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/
I think that's true, but I am still frustrated with people who continue to use services that are openly hostile to them.
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.
[delayed]
Since a few years I find it hard to not associate to Julius Streicher at the mention of NYT.
"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.
Your KPIs are not my problem.
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.
When I sign in, NYtimes asks me to subscribe to other services, even though my subscription has access to the article I am trying to read.
The fact that this somewhat banal article has climbed this far on HN tells you that the schadenfreude of seeing the NYT berated is high indeed.
~ just a guy trying to get by on $690,000 a year in Queens
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.
> 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.
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.
There can only be one newspaper of record, that's the point. In a media landscape where everything became nationalized, the NYT leveraged its status to take the pot. Most of America's serious newspapers (Boston Globe, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, all the rest) are now even more dead than the WaPo. The NYT, with its massive frontrunner advantage, did not need games and crosswords to win this battle.
I subscribed 2 years ago and it took over 2 weeks to actually get my first paper at my door. I live in NYC..
Cancellation wasn't difficult though, and didn't require me to call anyone.
Also why do they just keep doxing people left and right?
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
Bari Weiss' resignation letter is a good indication of what happened to the NYT in the last decade: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
Oh no I got 5 emails I better write a post complaining about this massive inconvenience hmph
> 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 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.
Would love to be proven wrong, though.
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.
The fact they know they are sending marketing emails, not associated to your account itself speaks volumes ;(
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.
I just want to read the news!
I posted on Bluesky about NYT the other day after getting repeatedly dark-patterned: https://bsky.app/profile/mmclar.bsky.social/post/3mkiznfgvvk...
I used to subscribe, but the quality of the journalism absolutely plummeted around 2020.
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.
ChrisArchitect posted this:
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.
Yeah, in short, don’t support the NYT. Their business practices are predatory and unethical. Use archive.ph to get by paywalls.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
It was almost impossible to unsubscribe a few years ago. Seems like not much has changed.
Who still reads emails?
Feel powerless? Set up a filter.
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.
Another example of being user-hostile is that they put videos on the front page that autoplay and can't be paused. I will not renew either.
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?
The videos I'm complaining about on the NYT aren't ads. They seem to think they're CNN or something. I don't want CNN. I want a newspaper.
“It made me feel powerless.”
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.
> They probably think it's a clever marketing copy. It's not. It made me feel powerless. It put a sour taste in my mouth.
Jesus fucking christ. Somebody call the whaaaambulance
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.
Email was a mistake, frankly.
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.
More info: https://writersagainstthewarongaza.com/boycott-nyt
> that they arent willing to issue corrections for even their most falsified pieces.
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
Not sure what the author is bitching about. They’re a one-time series of email messages over 14 days.
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?
What is transactional about a daily message for 14 days? Especially when you haven't made a transaction to trigger said message?
They clearly fit within the definition of transactional.
They are part of the transaction and they are not an ongoing marketing mailing list. They end completely after 14 days.
The author described them as "marketing" but did not disclose the content in any way.
And you should have the right to stop them immediately. I don't see how that's controversial.
Let's just stop the shenanigans and just already have the CIA finance it directly...
What are you referring to?
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.
Youtubers are using something as sources. Someone still has to do the journalism. Not sure YouTubers can replace that.
Balancing your news consumption among right and left fringe sources isn't a great way to find the truth "in the middle".
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.