Open Letter to Roku Re: HBO Max Dark Pattern

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Hello Roku Support,

It appears there is a dark pattern on your platform wherein when I click the '*' button on my Roku remote while in the HBOMax section, I cannot pull up an "unsubscribe" menu option.

I also tried to pull up the option by pressing the big "A" in the upper left corner which stands for my first name "A.J." and lists my settings.

REASONS I WISH TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM HBOMAX:
1) It is a luxury channel and if I'm paying three times what I pay to subscribe to Hulu, I expect luxury treatment, not dark patterns.

2) When I click "play" to watch the most recent episode of Bill Maher on Saturdays, the app keeps replaying an episode from April 2020. This has heppened two weeks in a row.

3) I've seen the two good shows you offer now "Made for Love" and "Search Party". When I clicked to watch Season 2, Episode 1 of "Crashing" the app froze and crashed. This alone would not be a deal breaker were it not for items 1 and 2 above.

4) I'm convinced that Hollywood platforms (or is it studios?) are spreading themselves too thin. For example "Made for Love" has a brilliant, timely premise with great casting and is an OK show. It needs a better director, or more writers, or the same writers with a better show runner, or perhaps the same show runner with a bigger budget. One of these fixes is needed to drive up the tension that the female lead is experiencing when she weighs the tradeoff that is returning to the life-sucking Byron in order to get her dad life-saving cancer treatment.

"MADE FOR LOVE" could be the show of our time! Tech CEOs like Byron try to control everything and it sucks the LIFE out of our LIFE.

Please help me unsubscribe from HBO Max and also "Great Courses Plus".

Sincerely,
A.J. Fish





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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