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.
Big corporations are made of people, some who post here.
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.
I appreciate this peek behind the curtain but don't share your cheer that humans being involved in the process somehow means it should get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen.
In fact, the reverse is actually quite common. The big corporation part often removes too much of the humanity from people. Too many people are comfortable making incredibly callous decisions at work because, hey, it's not their fault, they're just one small cog in the human crushing machine, and we all know what happens to bad cogs...
As you acquire properties, it's almost never possible to rebuild the systems from scratch, and instead it's becomes layers upon layers of patches and quick fixes.
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.
Hulu had some major problems during the broadcast of the Oscars so I was surprised but not surprised to hear about the issues with this.
>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.
This way of thinking has excused a lot of evil/malicious actions. I think it's time we actually start shining our collective flashlights at things, especially big companies, when their own systems break in ways that benefit them.
It's possible but I think Hanlon's Razor is more likely. I saw this happen myself and the form submission was successful on the second attempt. I just don't think they had the capacity to handle this surge of traffic to this endpoint/service.
It can be a mixture of both. It's extremely easy to Cover Your Ass while intentionally dragging your feet when a bug works in your favor. The manager simply has to decide that other tasks are higher priority.
Why would any manager prioritize this when it's going to blow over in less than a day, as evidenced by other commentators saying the site is already back up?
Right. I mean, ideally, because regulations have sufficient teeth that the company's existence is jeopardized by having shady business practices. When "it's a bug" is no longer an excuse, they could have avoided such a risk by having customers buy punch cards rather than saving their credit cards, for instance.
The problem with "Hanlon's Razor" is that everything can be explained by incompetence by making suitable assumptions. It outright denies the possibility of malice and pretends as if malice is rare. Basically, a call to always give the benefit of the doubt to every person or participant's moral character without any analysis whatsoever of their track record.
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.
> 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.
I agree. It seems to be an all too common example of both:
1. lack of nuance in thought (i.e. either assume good intentions or assume malice, not some probability of either, or a scale of malice)
2. the overwhelming prevalence of bad faith arguments, most commonly picking the worst possible argument feasibly with someone's words.
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 :)
It doesn’t say don’t think about malice as a possibility, it says that if you aren’t going to think about it, you should ignore malice as a possibility.
Yep, "Hanlon's Razor" is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It sets up a false dichotomy between two characteristics, neither of which is usually sufficient to explain a bad action.
IMHO you're taking it a bit too literally and seriously; I suggest interpreting it more loosely, ie "err on the side of assuming incompetence [given incompetence is rampant] and not malice [which is much rarer]." As a rule of thumb, it's a good one.
To me the more problematic part is anchoring the discussion into rejecting a specific extreme (malice) when there will be a lot of behavior either milder, or neither incompetence nor malice. For instance is greed, opportunism or apathy malice ?
That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.
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."
The "malice" part of the razor is bait. People typically act out of self-interest, not malice. That's why anyone who parrots Hanlon's Razor has already lost; they fell for the false dichotomy between malice and incompetence, when self-interest isn't even offered as an explanation.
> Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.
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.
Agreed that actual malice is relatively rare (at least, relative to incompetence!). But I feel your take on Hitler is questionable. The question of evil is a tricky one, but I don't think there's a good case to be made that he was only trying to do the right thing. He was completely insane. But leaving aside moral culpability or metaphysical notions of judgment, for any definition of "malice", he embodied it to an the absolute maximum degree.
> That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people,
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.
> 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?
I recently heard on a podcast where one of the guests recounted what his father used to say about the employees making cash-handling mistakes in the small store he owned. It was something like, "if it was merely incompetence, you'd think half of the errors would be in my favor."
It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them.
If you short charge a customer they will demand correct change if you overpay a customer won't complain. In the cases of customers giving back extra money it becomes neutral.
His father's theory didn't take into account this.
Hanlon's Razor is for a situation where good faith can be assumed, or the benefit of the doubt given.
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.
my first manager told my as i started my first oncall "we dont think anybody actually cares about this thing, so if it breaks, dont fix it too quickly, so we can see who notices"
I’m amazed at the prevalence of conspiracy theories on HN in recent years. Even for simple topics like a website crashing under load we get claims that it’s actually a deliberate conspiracy, even though the crashes have turned this from a quiet event into a social media and news phenomenon, likely accelerating the number of cancellations.
No, what I said was the COVID years. People became dramatically more prone to conspiracy theories and significantly more polarized in the 2020-2025 period. A lot more happened to people than just exposure to COVID, which was of course part of it. I'm not talking about the people who died or the healthcare workers. There was a meaningful step change in the way we interact with each other and what is acceptable. There was a huge impact to the social fabric and cohesion of society.
Using my eyes, I looked back at the text on my screen next to your username.
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.
That's true, but it's seldom going to be the case that the account cancellation portion of the app is all on it's own. It's going to be built into the rest of the application, including the parts your happy customers are actually paying for. You're taking down a lot of the site.
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.
That’s the trick with capacity planning around cancellation. You can always deprioritize it because any improvement increases the speed with which revenue decreases (not valuable to the business) and customer satisfaction with this flow generally doesn’t matter since you’re losing their business. The only negative risk factor is CC chargebacks which will cost you some money but at scale most people generally don’t deal with that hassle vs just trying to cancel a few times.
These protest boycotts never last very long. There are many large brand names that have been boycotted over the years and they are all still in business and mostly bigger than ever.
Boycotts are different from unsubscribing. You can boycott Chic-fil-a and then one day return, but cutting off monthly revenue streams all at once is a much different dynamic. It takes a lot to get those customers back, especially for a service that already reaches most Americans.
I cancelled on Wednesday night. We probably haven't watched anything on Disney+for two or three weeks; the value was getting lower over time (possibly because we've watched a lot of what we wanted to).
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.
Maybe. There are lots of people who subscribe to these streaming services for a month or a season and then cancel, and then sign up again later because there's a new show they want to watch.
Some people have been boycotting target for a while now, but people have also been boycotting walmart for longer. Both companies are still around and have billions (tens and hundreds of billions) in assets. Enough people will keep shopping there to keep them in business. If either company ever does die off it won't be because of a boycott. Even where boycotts have a measurable impact on their earnings it's not as if it matters. Do you think the CEO of either company would have to meaningfully change their lifestyle one bit if the company makes make a few billion less one year? They wouldn't feel it even if they never got another dime from their company again. They'd still be able to live out the rest of their lives without ever worrying about money. They have no reason to fear a boycott.
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.
Targets CEO of 11 years is currently being forced out. Yeah, I’d say the shareholders are pissed when the stock is literally -40% on the year while other companies in this sector are doing the opposite. Their stock is one of the worst performing in the sp500 this year. Long term outlook is worse by the day.
The big conglomerates are more resistant to it. Even of one of their brands becomes damaged, they have 20 others. It's hard for people to even understand all the things they own.
It would be hard to keep a secret. Someone would leak it. When i worked a for a social network, we were accused of censorship during a presidential election campaign. People were sharing and posting a clip of text in support of a candidate. It triggered the spam system which categorized it as bot spam and deleted all the posts because all the posts were identical.
> A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.
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.
