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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, Stripe also kind of brushed this off until it got more attention.

There are StackOverflow posts going back to 2017[0] and Github issues with direct acknowledgement from Stripe employees with no solution offered.[1]

I even reached out to Stripe support before publishing my first post, and they told me that the collection behavior was by design and in my users' best interest.[2]

I've been very impressed by Stripe's response here, but it's demonstrably not the same response they deliver to customers who go through normal support channels.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/q/45718026/90388

[1] https://github.com/stripe/react-stripe-elements/issues/99#is...

[2] https://mtlynch.io/stripe-recording-its-customers/#reporting...

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I’m sure I’ll get downvoted but why should it be? Stripe has thousands of items in the backlog across many areas, and in a larger company there’s prioritization at many different levels.

I’m happy that they addressed this but I often see on HN that folks expect that an email to support staff gets the same level of support/awareness as a highly viewed post on HN does.

As a Stripe customer, there are several things that I’d love to see improved or modified but I don’t expect all, if any, of them to make it into the roadmap immediately as they’re trying to scale & fix really big issues that have already been identified.

Do I wish it was possible for businesses to address every single customer/consumer complaint? Of course, but that’s not the reality we live in.

Also - I’m not letting any company off the hook with this statement, there’s plenty of companies out there that intentionally neglect glaring issues because they don’t want to deal with the noise that comes along with it but Stripe hasn’t really even been one of those companies.

Sometimes it is the best company policy to ignore items until they go away, and to deal with the ones that rise to the top naturally.

> Stripe has thousands of items in the backlog across many areas, and in a larger company there’s prioritization at many different levels.

"Hey, you're doing something that may be illegal." - "Yeah, we know"

That's an issue. If they'd say "but the color of our signup button has a higher priority", that's an even larger issue.

>I’m sure I’ll get downvoted but why should it be? Stripe has thousands of items in the backlog across many areas, and in a larger company there’s prioritization at many different levels.

>I’m happy that they addressed this but I often see on HN that folks expect that an email to support staff gets the same level of support/awareness as a highly viewed post on HN does.

I agree that Stripe of course can't give the same time and attention to every support request that they give to issues that bubble to the top of HN. The parent commenter was saying that PayPal didn't escalate as well as Stripe, and I was pointing out that Stripe didn't prioritize this either until it got attention.

But one point I'd like to add is that not all issues are equal. If there's an issue like an account takeover vulnerability, I think most people would agree that something is seriously wrong if a company only gives it top priority when it receives publicity. And then there are minor issues like "why don't you support dark mode?" I think it's fine if dark mode got regular priority and then got bumped up when there was a massive outcry where thousands of users said they were desperate for dark mode.

When people criticize a company for only addressing an issue when it reaches the front page of HN, the argument is that the company's internal process for prioritizing the issue failed. But this criticism is always going to be subjective because everyone has their own particular priorities of what should be fixed and at what priority. It's also limited in that commenters have no insight into the competing priorities within the company.

I think it is appropriate to criticize a company for failing to give issues proper priority until they get more attention, but I think you're right that we should be doing it with an appropriate degree of humility, recognizing that prioritization is subjective and we don't have all the information.

Stripe "brushed this off" until a sensationalist headline appeared on HN.

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