Disney+ Cancellation Page Crashes as Customers Rush to Quit
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Disney+'s cancellation page crashed as customers rushed to quit following Jimmy Kimmel's suspension, sparking a heated discussion about the company's handling of the situation and the broader implications for streaming services.
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> 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.
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.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/
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."
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
vpn is all you need to pay for.
1. You can use VPN only when you need to use it.
2. "split tunnening" You can configure VPN to be used only for some programs, like those you use torrenting programs.
3. You can build your own mini-PC/RasPi "TV box" with VPN, storage for programming, connected to television. I wonder if there is not already ready software package for that.
Best thing for a copyright holder is if people pay for their stuff. Next best is if people consume it but don't pay for it, as that at least preserves their relevance. Worst is to be ignored and become irrelevant/forgotten.
If nobody watches the shows they can blame the content. If everyone clearly loves the content but refuses to give ABC/Disney/ESPN/FX their business it means the company is the problem (although that wont stop them from falling back on the lie that piracy is all about greedy people who just want everything for free)
Edit: there's clearly several ways to interpret what he said. I'm not making any kind of argument here, just answering op's question.
Not a fan of Trump or Jimmy, and I don’t think this is a proportional or good response. I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air. I also don’t understand why he left that little dig in his monologue.
Very little was needed. The U.S. president had already ominously threatened Kimmel and other late night hosts the day after Colbert was canceled, weeks before the shooting.
I thought Kimmel was hilarious; but as they say, there’s no accounting for taste.
The most ridiculous thing about this is that the world doesn’t cleave neatly into “radical left lunatics” and the righteous real Americans. I still can’t tell what the murderer was. Whatever that was, he acted on his own impulses - ones that are not broadly celebrated, irrespective of claims to the contrary.
Death by shitpost: Why modern media is so ill-equiped to diagnose Tyler Robinson
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/19/tyler-robinson-alleged-...
https://archive.md/Lil0U#selection-941.0-941.80
Watching the US media struggling to cleave this into either left OR right as if the world is binary is, as you noted, ridiculous.
Have you not been paying attention to where rhetoric in this country has gone in the past 8 months? The first amendment is dead, the great leader is publically calling for his critics to lose their broadcast licenses, and the new SOP is for the government to squeeze the shit out of anyone who doesn't toe the line. (Which is an ever-shrinking group of people.)
Be it with SLAPP suits, or by holding merger approvals, or by just threatening witch-hunts.
This is what 48% of the electorate wanted, and, well, it's what they've delivered.
---
Meanwhile, in Fox land, Brian Kilmeade was publically calling for mass-murder of the mentally ill the other day. For some strange reason, neither Trump nor the FCC, nor all the people outraged about political violence are making a peep about that.
This Administration was basically founded on making strident claims on TV which turned out to be lies they couldn't back up in a court of law.
>After the assassination Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian on abc, suggested erroneously that Kirk had been killed by a maga fan. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasters, threatened consequences: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Within hours abc took Mr Kimmel off the air indefinitely. Mr Carr then said all broadcasters should ease up on the “progressive foie gras”.
https://archive.is/ze4pD
You can check the other articles in the same issue and see they're not exactly cheerleaders for the Trump administration.
That said, the FTC shouldn't be in the business of strongarming critics, even if they're wrong.
The second part of what he said is also a true statement, that they're using this tragic event to score political points and go after their political opponents.
>The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it
Kimmel didn't explicitly make the accusation that the killer was MAGA, but the use of the wording "desperately trying to imply ... as anything other than one of them" definitely gives that impression. I mean, why else would they be "desperately" trying to? If an attempt was made on Bernie or AOC I wouldn't characterize leftists prematurely blaming it on the right as "desperately". It's just the most logical inference. The "killer was right wing" narrative was also being pushed in some left leaning circles, so it's not exactly outlandish either.
He did not. But even if he did, so what?
Does either interpretation make his comment somehow illegal and deserving of government threats to retaliate against folks unless Kimmel was punished?
That's not a rhetorical question.
IMNSHO, you're focusing on the wrong thing here. What difference does it make what legal speech was used? The problem is that the government is trying to silence the critics of those currently in power. And at least in the US, the government isn't allowed to do that -- whether they're critics of the current administration or not.
If you don't decry that, it could be you and yours next. You've been warned.
Let’s just say that the alleged shooter’s political philosophies are likely complex and are yet to be fully understood.
Did you miss the second part of my comment? Even if Kimmel was in the wrong he shouldn't be taken off the air. I'm just pointing out why Trump might be upset. It's a reason, not necessarily a good reason.
>Let’s just say that the alleged shooter’s political philosophies are likely complex and are yet to be fully understood
By most accounts it's safe to say he's left leaning. You don't have to be a card carrying DSA member or have your ideology fully align with the Democrats platform to earn that label.
The former is (for some at least) interesting. The latter is actually consequential. I'm concerned about the latter.
The former, whether I agree or not, is about legal, protected political speech.
Also, even if it were, as you say, "misinformation", that is now somehow taboo on television? A sacred line none must dare cross?
???
It was a very obvious dig at the president. There's still not good justification for the government to step in, but claiming it's "milquetoast" is baffling.
The other people who lost jobs seemed to have said much more direct and offensive remarks than Kimmel as well.
Thus “milquetoast”: an implication that any reaction to this is, objectively, an overreaction.
That the current President is a habitual over-reactor does not change that fact. It just means that you can paradoxically be taking a heterodox / outré stance by saying objectively milquetoast things.
That's a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Necessarily.
Carr threatened to revoke licenses based on the political speech of ABC. That's clearly unconstitutional. Trump followed up by saying licenses should be revoked for criticism of himself. Unitary President cuts both ways.
If this is okay, the next Democrat who's President needs to shut down Fox News and their ilk or be impeached. (From the perspective of fomenting rebellion and generally posing a threat to our republic, Jimmy Kimmel isn't even on the list.)
To your point, The Democrats, when back in power, could extend licensing issues into cableTV, etc... and attempt to fire Fox or Newsmax commentators... I would argue the Biden administration already attempted to do a form of this, as we saw with Facebook, Twitter, et al, the last administration certainly tried influencing the online arena.
I just think both sides do it, although on this forum it seems to trigger mostly the left side.
Not comparable. That said, I agree—if this precedent stands, there should be personal liability for Newsmax commenters under a future administration. (And, of course, they should be barred from federal property.)
One would also go after the online streaming companies to delist their content. Google and Meta are constantly under antitrust controlled. TikTok is government owned. And you could start knocking on X with its money-transfer ambitions and Elon’s robotaxi approvals (to say nothing of federal contracts).
What they ignore is that local Fox affiliate stations who are also licensed by the FCC have a history of aligning with Fox News misinformation campaigns relating to covid, election integrity, Russia and Ukraine, Palestine, etc.
So no, the FCC licensed world is not left leaning, and these local affiliate stations should absolutely be held to the same standard.
[0] https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fcc-and-speech
https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#JOUR...
> Hoaxes. The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if:
> The station licensee knew that the information was false
There quite a few other rules, obscenity and violence and such. But they probably got Jimmy on the crime that was just committed + spreading false information.
> Nothing he said was false though, the Republicans were trying to paint the shooter as anyone other than one of their own.
Yeah, and the show owners could have fought it. There might be a warning, a lawsuit, maybe a period to comply and make changes etc. But they folded immediately. They probably figured technically they could have explained it, but the PR aspect of it was a losing battle. Here is another part of the country flying flags half staff, and what is ABC's doing? Oh right, explaining away Kimmel's news and jokes and defending him. A lot of these corporations and their leaders can smell the way the wind blows and they really hate it when the wind blows away their profits, so they just react accordingly.
They folded because they knew how the statement was perceived. Here is half the country flying flags half staff and ABC owners are defending Kimmel. They are worried about views and profits and when that is threatened everything goes out of the window.
Paradoxically, I think Kimmel is all of the sudden on top again, just due to the controversy. The younger crowd who don't sit and watch ABC, might have just learned about this Kimmel guy the first time. May be another network will pick him up, it could be a win for him overall.
In fact there is a more than credible argument that criticizing and mocking politicians is an essential public service.
They are not sending Jimmy to gulag or arresting him. Jimmy can still continue his show just maybe on his own youtube channel or his own online platform or something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association_of_...
https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#JOUR...
Note:
> Nevertheless, there are two issues related to broadcast journalism that are subject to Commission regulation: hoaxes and news distortion. Hoaxes. The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if [...] The station licensee knew that the information was false.
All Jimmy had to do, it seems, was to say "this is all a made up joke" and move on, instead of presenting whatever he was saying as information or news.
> If a station airs a disclaimer before the broadcast that clearly characterizes the program as fiction and the disclaimer is presented in a reasonable manner under the circumstances, the program is presumed not to pose foreseeable public harm.
> However, as public trustees, broadcast licensees may not intentionally distort the news. The FCC has stated that “rigging or slanting the news is a most heinous act against the public interest.” The Commission will investigate a station for news distortion if it receives documented evidence of rigging or slanting, such as testimony or other documentation, from individuals with direct personal knowledge that a licensee or its management engaged in the intentional falsification of the news. Of particular concern would be evidence of the direction to employees from station management to falsify the news. However, absent such a compelling showing, the Commission will not intervene.
Again, Jimmy didn't get sent to the gulag and didn't go to jail. He can still run a show on his own platform or a youtube channel or maybe Netflix will sign him up. Heck, after this, I'd say he would easily triple his view numbers if anything.
I needs a comma, or semicolon at least.
> The US government threatened a private company
Threatened with what, imprisonment, death? They threatened to pull the FCC license. It turns out broadcast content is controlled by the government. It always has been. Kimmel can and should continue saying what he was saying on his own website or platform or whatever.
> This is a violation of the US Constitution.
Ok, let's say it's a clear cut violation, with a full stop, an open and shut case. ABC can file a lawsuit, it's an easy win isn't then? And, plus they get to show how they fought and won over fascism. Why did they fold so quickly then?
If that's the rebuttal, I'll take it as an acknowledgement that's it's right.
Here, interestingly, just a threat was enough. I wonder why the owners didn't want to fight it at all? The speed with with they folded was very telling. As others mentioned, I suspect if they decided they just didn't want to keep paying Kimmel for the show. He was making somewhere around $15m/year or something they saw a chance to say "goodbye".
They are submitting to what they view as either an existential threat, or the opportunity to make millions in the merger they want the FCC chair to approve.
Technically I think they could have fought, could have argued he was just describing the behavior of maga people or that his shows is all made up parody and everyone should know it, etc. However it would have been a losing PR battle even if the FCC lost eventually in court.
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
It doesn't say anything about the FCC not pressuring Disney. They are not congress and are not making a law. I mean I don't agree with it but it's not clear it violates the actual text of the first amendment as written in the constitution. The spirit of it perhaps.
Where does the FCC's authority to do anything come from? Congressional laws. If the FCC is using the laws to abridge free speech it is clearly an unconstitutional action.
It's so weird to see sooooooo many people trying to make up reasons to justify clearly unconstitutional behavior, with extremely motivated reasoning, or perhaps motivated lack of reason. You cited exactly what you are saying doesn't exist! This is baffling behavior.
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