this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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On a related note... I went to cancel a membership a few weeks back, and the site displayed a message "you don't have an active membership to cancel". I thought it was strange, so I checked out the network requests being made, and turned out the cancel API call was getting blocked for "security reasons". Nothing else on the site was blocked for me, just the cancellation endpoint.
I opened a ticket, and it took them nearly 2 weeks to respond, and there was zero acknowledgement on why cancellation would be blocked.
Not sure if it's a purposeful dark pattern, but it sure seems like it!
Pretty sure that if it was purposeful, they'd get slapped with a massive fine sooner than later
Maybe, but it would also be very easy to blame on misconfiguration / mistake. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the behavior itself isn't purposeful, but ignoring / not fixing it is. I've definitely seen such behavior at other companies, where they drag their feet on fixing a bug that is bad for the user, but helping them.
I'm guessing the intentionality could be uncovered with a couple well crafted subpoenas.
But yeah, def can see what you're describing happening