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.
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.
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.
The New York Times is actually doing quite well financially, they are the exception to the trend
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.
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.
From what I understand, the press is under assault from all sides... Internet has killed paper subs, political influence is attacking them... like what do you expect them to do?
Take my money, show me content. No adverts. No spam. Let me unsubscribe if I want to.
Is it just so they can tell advertisers X amount of people "viewed" your ad?
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.
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".
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.
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'm still paying the NYT intro rate ($4 a month billed annually) and on day 364 go to the account page to cancel my subscription before it resets to the "official" rate. Sure enough, they let you stay at the cheap rate if you tell them you'll walk.
Works for telcos and Adobe, too.
As for alerts and notices you can't unsubscribe from: filter or spam.
I was gifted a subscription and clicked cancel on it in January out of concern it would roll over.
It still rolled over and the person who gifted it had to call them, repeatedly, from New Zealand and spent ages on the phone (at their cost).
Also, for any subscription for which I don't use HME, I will immediately "mark as spam" any minimally-spammy email I get. The ones described in the article would be insta-marked due to the lack of Unsubscribe button.
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.
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...
Sad to say but I'm guessing this is an effective strategy.
Given how the "hostility" is often more than just ugly-UI, and aspects like monopolies, surveillance, and billing you for services you don't want, I think this is relevant:
> I've written before about the futility of "voting with your wallet." [...] Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping. [...] No matter how indie your coffee, books and social media, your consumption choices will not have a material impact on Starbucks, Amazon or Twitter.
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?
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
More info: https://writersagainstthewarongaza.com/boycott-nyt
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.
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.
Cancellation wasn't difficult though, and didn't require me to call anyone.
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.
Feel powerless? Set up a filter.
Would love to be proven wrong, though.
I don’t get it. If they cut out all the awful mid-article ads, stopped the page resetting to the top every time you hit the back button, and stopped nagging me to install the app (which I don’t use because of the aforementioned mid-article ads, but would use otherwise), I’d happily pay 5x the subscription. I like the content (mostly) but everything else makes me despise them.
I just want to read the news!
~ just a guy trying to get by on $690,000 a year in Queens
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.
(I subscribe to Bloomberg, and send their emails to feeds which end up in a https://karakeep.app/ instance for consumption)
And making it hard to cancel is not just "marketing" . There are even laws to prevent that sort of thing.
This new change has really disappointed me.
I deleted linkedin a few years ago because of the ridiculous volume of emails and their dark patterns about cancellation. NYT is just not a hill i'm willing to die on unlike linkedin, for example
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.
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 unsubscribed a couple years ago. It was a click on the website. (Just checked. Cancelling online without talking to anyone is still an option.)
> I've been told they have stopped this predatory practice due to some newly passed laws or something, but they did not stop their predation due to their own values.
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...
Happily, this practice is illegal in California. Sometimes consumer-protection laws work ... and are necessary.
(As a hackaround, try using a VPN to make it appear as if you are connecting from California...)
that's totally irrelevant: Conde Nast for Wired is a shameless offender, for example. took me hours to cancel some autorenewing subscription i never subscribed for, perhaps enabled years ago through some dark pattern in iOS, but i genuinely don't know, and am not easily tricked.
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.
I guess there are more people who give up on unsubscribing than who refrain from subscribing?
That hasn't been true for, what, almost ten years? When I cancelled three months ago, it was about three or four clicks through the beg screens, and done. No, I don't live in CA.
Do not subscribe to the NYTimes. Use your library card, if one must read it, and unfortunately as the undeserved "paper of record" one must often read it to be kept aware of what others are being fed. There's no baby here to throw out with the bath water, I find other places have far better coverage for all the topics I care intensely about. For example, their Ukraine coverage is basically Russia-lite, and extremely anti-Ukrainian, I haven't seen such biased coverage anywhere else except for far-right rags.
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.
If they got what I want, I don't care about ethics, I care about value. I've just never seen value in NYT.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...
hparadiz•54m ago
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.
mbreese•38m ago
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...)
dpoloncsak•24m ago