I'm sure it's an accident and not intentional! A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.
Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.
What is happening is that routes and systems that normally have little and predictable traffic now are getting exercised... a lot harder (the exact numbers are for management to explain). Most things are going to be very resilient to this, as it's not THAT much traffic: It's still a small fraction vs resubscriptions and logins, but not everything is. Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.
You don't have to believe me, but I tell you it's incompetence, not malice.
A fun one lately has been AT&T. We have streaming with DirecTV, and they of course share authentication with the parent AT&T. So whenever I try to login to AT&T's website to manage my wireless or fiber, it redirects and logs me into DirecTV, everytime. The only way I can manage my service is to use AT&T's mobile app.
Logging in to pay AT&T wireless service sometimes takes half an hour of attempts resulting in any number of weird errors until it just works.
This in itself makes the situation intentional.
>Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.
Finance bros and execs love M&A because they can hire a consultant to do all the hard work and get a nice paycheck yet they really suck for the little people and those trying to keep the lights on. Good luck out there.
Maybe one day we'll figure out this anti-trust thing.
> COVID years really messed some people up.
You seem to think that you said something different than you did.
If you don't see where your communication broke down, look closely the first word of the quote above. That's you, in case you forgot.
Your comment was 7 words, one of which is literally "COVID". Then you said you're weren't actually talking about COVID, but you actually meant something about how you think others are now prone to dramatic conspiracy theories.
It seems like you're experiencing some of this yourself or are stuck in some sort of race condition where if someone else doesn't agree with you, it's clearly a them issue. They're the conspiricist.
While explaining that you intended me to get a whole different message from your initial 7 words, you go on to say that while discussing the "COVID years" that...
> I'm not talking about the people who died or the healthcare workers.
Why aren't you focusing on these things? It seems much more important than whatever you are spinning on about the social fabric and cohesion of society as you type into a webform to a stranger about how everyone has conspiracies now.
It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them.
His father's theory didn't take into account this.
Robert Hanlon himself doesn't seem to be notable in any area of rationalist or scientific philosophy. The most I could find about him online is that he allegedly wrote a joke book related to Murphy's laws. Over time, it appears this obscure statement from that book was appended with Razor and it gained respectability as some kind of a rationalist axiom. Nowhere is it explained why this Razor needs to be an axiom. It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities. Bayesian reasoning? Priors? What the hell are those? Just say "Hanlon's Razor" and nothing more needs to be said. Nothing needs to be examined.
The FS blog also cops out on this lazy shortcut by saying this:
> The default is to assume no malice and forgive everything. But if malice is confirmed, be ruthless.
No conditions. No examination of data. Just an absolute assumption of no malice. How can malice ever be confirmed in most cases? Malicious people don't explain all their deeds so we can "be ruthless."
We live in a probabilistic world but this Razor blindly says always assume the probability of malice is zero, until using some magical leap of reasoning that must not involve assuming any malice whatsoever anywhere in the chain of reasoning (because Hanlon's Razor!), this probability of malice magically jumps to one, after which we must "become ruthless." I find it all quite silly.
Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. To quote CS Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Why do incentives result in perceived malicious actions rather than just malicious actions or minor malicious actions?
On top of this no one has said corporations are filled with evil people.
This rationalization is cope. All US Corporations making "normal" decisions all the time isn't casually obvious. I would say that wherever there is an opportunity to exploit the customer, they usually do at different levels of sophistication. This may mistakenly seem like fair play to someone who thinks a good UI is a good trade for allocated advertisement space, when it's literally social engineering.
Corporations make decisions that more frequently benefit them at the cost of some customer resource. Pair that with decisions rarely being rolled back (without financial incentive), you get a least-fair optimization over time. This is not normal by any stretch, as people expect a somewhat fair value proposition. Corporations aren't geared for that.
> Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak.
Disgusting take. Don't simp for hitler. How am I having to type this in 2025?
Corporations don't have to be filled with evil people for malice to be rampant. All it takes is for one person in a position of power or influence who is highly motivated to screw over other human beings to create a whole lot of malice. We can all think of examples of public officials or powerful individuals who have made it their business to spread misery to countless others. Give them a few like-minded deputies and the havoc they wreak can be incalculable.
As for Hitler, if we can't even agree that orchestrating and facilitating the death of millions of innocent people is malicious, then malice has no meaning.
C. S. Lewis has written a great many excellent things, but his quote there strikes me as self-satisfied sophistry. Ask people being carpet bombed or blockade and starved if they're grateful that at least their adversary isn't trying to help them.
In this case instead of a possibility of it being a small act of opportunity (like mentioned above of just dragging feet) not premeditated, alternatives are never mentioned but instead just assumed folks are talking about some higher up conspiracy and on top of that that must be what these people are always doing.
Anyway thank you for your point it is an interesting read :)
Assuming malice from people you interact with means dividing your community into smaller and smaller groups, each suspicious of the other.
Assuming malice from an out group who have regularly demonstrated their willingness to cause harm doesn’t have that problem.
> It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities
Parent isn't advocating for assuming malice, or assuming anything really, but to reason about the causes. Basically, that we'd have better discourse if no axiom was used in the first place.
When the actors involved have shown themselves to be self-interested, bad-faith, or otherwise undeserving of the benefit of the doubt, it can be abandoned, and malice assumed where it has been clearly present before.
And I don't know about others, but the one thing that's sure to make me cancel and never return is when a business tries to be a jerk about subscribers. I know one subscription service that when you try to cancel will instead ask you to pause. Except when you pause, the site will make the buttons to complete a sale begin disabled. Then 10 to 15 seconds later, the button enables. It only does this so that they can show you a request to resume your subscription. Nope. I immediately went and fully cancelled, and I haven't been back. I only intended to pause for a short time because I was unable to use the service at all for several weeks. Instead because they wanted to grasp onto every customer too tightly, and they lost me for good. They didn't respect me, so I don't want their product anymore.
I believe Disney has been subjected to several.
Had it not been for this event, I'd have probably just let the subscription hang around indefinitely (or until some big price increase caused me to reevaluate it), but as you note, it's going to be a struggle to get me back --- not because of the politics involved, but because the politics got me over the "eh, can't be bothered" hump to evaluate the value I was getting and it came up kinda marginal compared to when I first signed up.
It doesn't stop me from avoiding shopping at them both, but I know they aren't losing any sleep over it and I don't expect they'll suddenly stop putting profit over everything else.
They better be sure there are no disgruntled or unhappy employees and no layoffs coming up, otherwise that slack or email message will come out and it will just make things worse.