cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/28397398
The suspension triggered strong responses across social media and beyond. Hashtags like #CancelDisneyPlus and #CancelHulu trended as users shared screenshots of their canceled subscriptions.
With cancellations surging, many subscribers reported technical issues. On Reddit’s r/Fauxmoi, one post read, “The page to cancel your Hulu/Disney+ subscription keeps crashing.”
“Crashes”? How convenient.
The cancellation page specifically. Everything else is fine.
On one hand, could be a “crash”. On the other hand, tons of websites break when they get a little extra traffic.
Side tangent, seems odd to me this is still a thing. Most company websites aren’t hosted on premises, so do these services like (i assume) AWS not scale for when there’s traffic? Squarespace has been advertising for years that it will scale up if there’s extra traffic. I’ve never tested it but still.
Scaling has a budget, I’m sure. They’ll only pay for so much.
If your page is just static, e.g. no login, no interaction, everyone always sees the same thing then it scales easily. Scaling means you copy the site to more servers. Now imagine a user adds a comment. Now you need to add the comment to every copy of your site, so that everyone sees it regardless of which server they use. So a comment creates more work the more servers you use. And this is where scaling becomes a complex science, that you need to manually prepare for as a software developer. You need to figure out what data will be stored where and accessed how.
Caching servers, they self replicate when a change is committed, then send back a signal to main server that task has completed
I am not sure what you are trying to say?
Oh right, I skipped a part. It is not really a dev complexity prep issue. You build the database that serves the comments etc in as of in one place, then you deploy cache servers for scaling. They self replicate, so a comment in California gets commited to the dbase, the server in new York pulls the info over from the Cali change, it sends back that it is synced with the change. And vice versa. The caching servers do the work, not your program.
That entirely depends on your application. What you described is one possible approach, that will only work in specific circumstances.
Besides application specifics, its how the internet works currently to give low latency. AWS, Azure, Linode etc have data centers across the globe to replicate data near where the people are.
It could also be poor graceful failure. What we see as a crash may be from some unavailability deep in a long pipeline of services.
You have to design for scalability. Bottlenecks may be wherever. Even if their virtual server CPU and RAM can scale up, other stuff may be bottlenecks. Maybe the connection to the DB. Maybe the DB is elsewhere and doesn’t scale. Can’t really reasonably guess from the outside.
Mass cancellation is not usually a thing they would design around bottle-necks. It also doesn’t add value to them.
I feel like Disney has internal stuff? I listened to a podcast where an ex employee changed the fonts on a bunch of stuff to be wingdings, etc, and made everything unusable.
What Kimmel has to do with Disney+?
Welcome to the world of mega coorporations owning almost everything
Kimmel is selling his show to abc which is owned by Disney
The classic card payment and subscription model is actually insane. You literally have to beg companies to stop taking money from you. Good thing it is changing with more modern payment systems - you literally just stop paying for services you don’t need and it’s on them to stop providing them to you. Nothing is ever charged off my account without an explicit action from me.
I cancelled my Disney sub when the Gaza genocide first started. Glad its catching on. Disney is run by assholes.
crashes
Maybe, but could it also be an intentional dark pattern to make it difficult to cancel?
They use AWS and specifically design their software to be able to dynamically scale, ever since Wandavision crashed their playback.
Is it possible that they never entertained having to make their cancellation page scalable? Sure. Is it more likely that they intentionally haven’t made it scalable? Yes.
Maybe. But more probably it was just fast written and untested.
Could also be a decision to limit how much the service scales as more people use it. It’s not like they are incentivised to throw a bunch of hardware at the problem when the problem in question is “people are unable to leave the platform”
Sure. It’s a design flaw. Yep. Nothing to see here.
Yup
Unlikely. I was trying to contact support and that was completely broken also. Unlikely if they were just trying to make cancellation harder. Likely if they were overloaded.
But overloaded by design?
There’s a huge public rush to cancel their services. It’s probably just overloaded by reality.
Anytime I want to cancel something and the company makes it difficult I just cancel the credit card side of it. Sod them. That’s what they get if they want to play silly buggers.
even if that is the case it’s a good sign imo. it means people were causing an impact big enough for them to notice and take action.
It’s amazing to think that people were fooled into thinking a greedy litagatious mega global corporate conglomerate like Disney was actually progressive in the first place instead of just following market trends for maximum shareholder profit.
Or they crashed it when they saw how many were trying to quit
Nah, cancellation resources are always minimal. Doesn’t make sense to pay for serious hardware to please people on their way out the door. Every service I’ve ever had to cancel has always been a maze and generally more annoying, slow, and cumbersome than the signup process.
Yeah well when the laws regarding this allow mass psychological manipulation for profits then it’s on the countries for enabling the greediest pieces of shits to do this.
Edit:Antilaw suits everywhere but Mark Zuckerberg creating an entire algorithm dictating your view on Instagram and Facebook is completely fine using psychology to manipulate everyone.
Consider thanking the money you save and using it to donate to npr and pbs
Fr fr
This is the way.
I canceled my Hulu/Disney+ subscription two days ago. A long time ago, I had an absolute boycott on Disney because I hated their hypocrisy when it came to copyright law. They tried to extend their copyrights indefinitely, even though the majority of their IPs came from the public domain. They were like a dog who only knows how to fetch the ball, but won’t ever release it.
When Disney acquired Pixar and was the American distributor for Studio Ghibli, and bought Star Wars, and distributes Marvel, at some point I eventually relented and stopped my boycott. I stopped caring as much about hypocrisy, in general. But never again. It was obviously a mistake to ever give them money. They will never get anything from me again.
I’ll admit, I’m hypocritical on some things. Disney became an easier choice for me when all their stuff became kinda bad.
Same here, except I stopped giving a shit about Marvel & Star Wars when they bought them.
Same here. When they bought SW, 1313 was cancelled. I remember i had a friend who had faith in disney owning SW… he isn’t my friend anymore (because other things) but he won’t stop bashing disney for what they did to the IP, lol.
i had optimism they’d handle star wars well given how they handled marvel up to that point. unfortunately they learned absolutely zero lessons from that success.
“Crashes”
MAGA hates Disney because of their current movies perceived “wokeness” so the big brained executives decided to piss of the Left as well by attacking the 1st Amendment and bowing down to the Right. Big brain move there.
the thing to understand is that for Disney it’s not always about the money. they control so much power over all media that they can inflict their world view on everyone through their propaganda streams. the performative wokeness that still sits within overall metanarratives about the value of the status quo? that’s for the dollar. cutting Jimmy Kimmel loose? that’s in alignment with their core values
are you still alive, Nazi?
No, I’m pretty sure it’s about the money. They wanted a merger and didn’t want trouble, so they cut Jimmy Kimmel’s show to help that progress more smoothly.
Disney is really easy to understand because it is always about the money with them.
merger with who? i haven’t heard anything relating to this. i’m willing to buy in though given what happened to colbert
Nexsar owns ABC affiliates and wants to buy Tegna, which owns more affiliate stations.
Disney isn’t really part of that deal, but I’m guessing they also want to appease the FCC for similar reasons.
Colbert’s show seems completely unrelated. My understanding is that the cancellation has been planned for some time and has more to do with it having run for 10 years than anything political he has said.
“crashes”
“If we don’t let you leave you might forget you were mad at us and keep giving us money”
Torrent, thank me later.
StremIo is the move
Let me check out!
AH nah… I still need to pay for subscriptions here.
No subscription required for stremio
One subscription that’s a fraction of the price of any of the major streaming services and gives access to anything you could want to watch. Trust me, it’s worth it.
Just dig up an old laptop and setup the full *arr stack with jellyfin. Takes some work up front but after that it’s basically painless.
People keep saying this but I don’t understand how it works at all.
Ah… just try other streaming services like Sportsurge.net for now if you are not very technical. Also install uBlock Origin ;D
Live sports is the real question. Hard to get on the free scale.
I’m an avid sports fan and all I pay for is my internet connection, currently watching a live ball game
Fully link https://v2.sportsurge.net/home5/
Will check this out! Thanks!
Yo ho ho matey. Ironically, it was location/blackout restrictions on stuff like NHL tv that I was willing to pay for but simply couldn’t watch that led me down the path of free live streams. The business screwed themselves out of a subscriber with their own DRM
crashing, or DISNEY+ trying to stem the cancellation, until they can reorient thier positions.
They can stream to millions of people at once but their basic page is crashing… Right.
No it’s definitely crashing. Definitely nothing happening here, they’re not worried, or panicking, or anything. Everything Is Fine I Wouldn’t Say There’s A Problem At All. EVERYTHING IS ABSOLUTELY FINE. IT’S FINE
