“Deutsche Bahn, the fully state owned railway company, is a well liked company”.

Eh, nope. It’s a horribly mismanaged entity with permanent delays, bad service and outrageous pricing…

And people think the government has their best interests in mind.

Once, long ago, I ended up buying the wrong ticket from Deutsche Bahn. I no longer remember whether this was my fault or theirs, but I do remember that support was completely unhelpful.

My credit card provider was considerably more helpful when I solved the problem with a chargeback.

It's not fully state owned, it's semi-privatized. You get the worst of both worlds, so to speak.

Oh yeah, I've had one of those several years ago. It was a Bahn25 and I got a new one in 2 months and got sent a bill for it. Then, I called them because I couldn't cancel and I tried to tell them about this. At least at that time, the customer support knew about this sneaky practice, and would, on request, allow you to cancel it manually.

I did get a debt collectors post about my unpaid bill and I had to send around emails to them as well that I was pardoned and I didn't use the card at all. I don't remember if I got a confirmation about it and that's why I still have it on my records. After like 7 (8?) years, who knows when they would go under and then come up to me that I owe them like half a million in unpaid debt.

So many subscription-based things in Germany are outright scams that would be criminal elsewhere.

Mobile phone contracts, internet service contracts principally among them. Two year contracts that auto renew and can only be cancelled in small windows a long time before auto-renew.

Last year I got a yearly membership for the Copenhagen Zoo.

As time was running up, I was reminded to renew the membership.

If I didn't, the membership would get cancelled.

If I did, the membership would turn on auto-renewal.

So they auto-renew memberships once you've paid twice.

This ensures that people who get auto-renewed but forgot about it at least liked renewing once.

Auto-renewal of subscriptions supposed to be a feature for veterans of a service, and not something to cheat people out of their money after they never get a good return of investment the first time.

Just to give Kagi some credit here: They have a friendly reminder every month that my subscription is about to renew. Every month I'm given the chance to cancel, and every month I'm reminded of what a decent service that is. It surely does mean they'll lose some customers. But it also means that those who stay, stay forever.

My favorite trick by various German service providers is impossibility to cancel. Like literally it's impossible. You cancel, you show deregistration from current address but they say "rejected, you can still use our service at the new address". Got fuck yourself and rot in hell.

Couple of years back, I made a mistake on trusting Deutsche Bahn. I took a regional train from Düsseldorf, hoping to get at some connection hub (never reached and don't remember, possibly Cologne), I have to ICE to reach Brussels. It was evening and at some point the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and an announcement followed 20 minutes later, saying the train went through the wrong tracks and it cannot return! And, we need to wait couple of hours before the rails are cleared and then we will need to get of the next station, a tiny town where only few trains run per day and none after 10pm!. Genius idea to leave people there, conductor also puts his unsatisfaction because apparently he also needs to get off there and request a ride. Let alone, I missed my connections. I had to either wait there until morning or get a ride. Never used Deutsche Bahn again, I feel less stressed by driving, even I really enjoy train rides in general.

Did I get compensation? Yes I did after four months for the ticket price only (around 40 euros), but after ridiculous process of that I need to send them forms and tickets via regular post, with a stamp that can only post within Germany. Nice try by their side..

Also you can cancel your Deutschlandticket only before the 15th of the month. And somehow getting a Deutschlandticket not starting at the first of the month is impossible.

It's all around scams and it's utterly embarrassing that 210k people are actually employed in Germany for this. There are people who get payed for implementing dark patterns as a government service to get a little bit more money.

They'll send debt collectors and affect your credit rating if you don't pay for your renewal, even though it's not valid until you pay. You have to post a filled form to cancel the membership.

I went to germany and got a DB card, for some reason despite giving them my card details, they instead asked me to pay them within 14 days (after the ticket has expired) via bank transfer or they would fine me an extra 50eur

(I checked, they never took the price of the ticket from my account initally, why not is bizzare)

Was Tablet Magazine syndicated article in the vein of Huxley's somatic aspect of transcription.

Alternatively, Wender's credits, for the American Friend was the procuring of a series of gaffers to film the long-shot of Hamburg.

[1]:https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/nat...

I love that subscriptions in the US are (usually) immediately cancellable. Germany is the wild west of predatory subscription plans, and unfortunately the legal framework weighs heavily in favor of the businesses issuing these contracts and not the consumers.

>Deutsche Bahn, the fully state-owned railway company, is a well-liked (Trustpilot: 1.2/5) company running most major long-distance railways in Germany

Very confusing, the irony/sarcasm of the second part is not clear: yes it is 100% owned but 1.2 is a really bad score, Germans hate DB. That sentence if even more confusing for a German, because in Germany 1 is a good score and 5 is a fail (at school at least).

I'm worried about the situation when Dark Patterns are not widely recognized enough as a malicious practice for users.

Half a month ago I see someone on Twitter defending its own product design as "transparent and nothing hidden" - the "$0 now, then $15/month in 14 days" description where all text after "$0" are small and in grey. I don't think it maintains trust between the product and users, and thus it doesn't seem like a good thing.

OMG yes this keeps biting me in the ass and is so absolutely infuriating, I feel scammed every time I fail to cancel it (probably needs a blood/urine sample, sent by post). There are no words for how much I hate Deutsche Bahn, Germany's 2nd biggest shame.

I think 'ending up with an accidental BahnCard and losing a painful amount of money because of it' might be almost a rite of passage at this point.

Happened to me as well; I had a 'youth' card for people below the age of 27, even remembered that some cards auto-renew and checked online to see if mine would, because I wanted to make sure I wouldn't just get upgraded to the regular and much more expensive BahnCard... couldn't find a renewal date and thought I'd be fine. But apparently I didn't check thoroughly enough, and only got informed of now having 200€ less and a shiny new BahnCard by email. Also emailed support, also didn't get anywhere.

Later I mention this to a friend... and he says 'ah, yeah, same with me'.

Commenting from neighboring Poland: my sense is that the dark patterns are less a result of deliberate manipulation and more a result of crappy publicly funded tendered software development.

It's, like, when the designs are made in a perpetual bureaucratic Kafkaesque then the results are like this. They're only building to specification, there is no UX research.

You're not going to not take the train. Not like the ticket experience is going to make a big difference with another train provider.

I recently decided to upgrade to BC50 again after some years of less travel and a subscription of a BC25. I went to the DB site, logged in, manually provided my BC25 card number in the order process even though it’s right there in my profile. And ended up with a second subscription: I now own both a BC25 and BC50 in parallel, which makes no sense as you can of course only use one of the two.

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