Don’t Use Disney Minus. (Disney “Plus”)
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
When I was a child, we had video tapes. When parents wanted their children to watch Disney movies, there were tapes and there was the movie theater. That was it. That was all we had.
But it worked.
Disney was a business, and in business to make money, but it wasn’t the obscenity that it has turned into today.
Walt Disney banned alcohol from his parks. He said, “It would lead to a certain element frequenting our parks that you’d really rather not have.” Today, they sell alcohol (almost certainly at obscene price points, because captive audience). Nothing says “$6,000 vacation” like watching some drunk people get into a brawl at Disney, I guess.
Their creativity is gone, they’re morally bankrupt, the freaks and weirdos have taken over and even better yet, Communist China gets to approve the scripts because they’re a “more important market” now than Americans.
The asset Disney has is a massive back catalog from when they were….more.
Practically every release they’ve made lately has been a box office bomb, something unthinkable for a major Disney release when I was a child. There have been huge layoffs at divisions like Pixar, and even at their parks and management. The morons that run the company even managed to screw themselves by picking a fight with the government of Florida and losing badly.
When you went to the parks, it was at a relatively “high” price, but it wasn’t thousands of dollars a week like it is now. When you went there back then, society had not yet collapsed, and there weren’t drunken people in their parks, and a lot of perverts that, in modern times, you just have to “pretend not to see there” as you watch your children like a hawk.
But Disney is exploitative in other ways. They have pushed for “forever copyright” laws, and although they haven’t quite gotten them, they’ve more or less accomplished everything they’ve wanted due to widespread political corruption in the United States.
Their more recent scheme is “Disney Plus”, or as I like to sometimes call it “Disney Minus”.
With Digital Restrictions Malware, they’ve taken everything from you that you used to have, including the ability to make copies, or even just have a copy, and they’ve slowly been dialing up the cost per month, and stuffing it with ads.
Like most things you “stream”, as soon as you quit paying them, no matter how much you paid them, you lose everything. This means that your subscription turns into a “curse”. It keeps taking more and more.
When Disney Plus was new, Disney only charged $8 and there were no ads, ever. This wasn’t a long time ago, only five years. Today, the “ad free” tier is $20 a month, and it just keeps getting more expensive.
According to some people on Reddit, even the ad free tier has a few ads.
The $9.99 tier with ads has become so overrun with ads, that some people on Reddit have taken to complaining that every five minutes, there’s a minute and a half full of ads.
When you pause the video, the pause screen is another ad, and that’s with the intro ads of course.
So it’s clear that the only purpose of the $9.99 version is to annoy you into paying for the other half of the cost, to avoid having your evenings and weekend free time being filled with ads.
Disney Plus is so nasty that my credit card company would reimburse me for most of it, and I still don’t use it.
I read an article today that says that very soon, Walmart will make money on Disney Plus, by selling Disney your shopping history at Walmart so they can figure out what ads to play. Of course, the reason that this targeted advertising works so well is because Walmart never forgets what you buy, and Disney never forgets what shows you watch.
So they can ink a deal and trade lists, and figure out how to burrow into your head, and sell you stuff, and put you deeper and deeper into debt. They want to know what makes you tick, so that you spend beyond your means on products advertised on Disney Plus.
When you run ads, you are psychologically manipulating a person. You might make them feel like dirt for not having a thing, or make them think they’ll be very happy if they buy a thing, but then they buy the thing and they’re no happier than they were.
As one person on Reddit put it, it doesn’t matter how many times you run an ad for a $60,000 Ford truck, if I can’t afford the truck. Advertising will only make you feel bad.
Back to Disney Plus, back to more ads.
The truly horrible and dark part of this is that people using Disney Plus as a babysitter are plopping their kids in front of these ads while Disney Plus (the bait) trains them to be a “consumer”. █