Hacker News Reader

Comment by urda | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit horrifying it takes a disgruntled HN post and the pure chance you happened across it. It's also discomforting how comfortable Stripe employees like yourself think holding 50% of someone's earning for any amount of time is acceptable. I really don't care if Stripe is HN's baby, this is awful customer service and gives me great pause in recommending or using Stripe.

View on HN

I feel like these posts should be disallowed. Seems like Stripe is using HN as a free help forum, and it's customers have accepted that this is the place to go when you need to talk to a human. I don't think HN should encourage it, and I don't know why we all play along. I've seen a solid handful or two of these posts, and most of the time users aren't looking for discussion, only enough attention to get the Stripe team to act. My opinion only, obviously I sympathize with OP whose just trying to get their money and this seems to be the tried and true way to get a response, but I definitely don't think it adds anything positive to the site other than a recurring warning to other would-be Stripe customers.

HN should encourage it, because startup founders read HN. They should think twice risking their business existence, after seeing this benevolent approach.

> I don't know why we all play along

Sunlight kills all infection.

Tell that to Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, or one of the billions of working families all over the world that everyone knows is getting f*cked over on a constant basis.

Sunlight is not a disinfectant. Better to try gasoline.

Sunlight only works reasonably well for waterborne pathogens, and only when you've got time.

As with disinfecting anything, and especially for societal issues, we need more than sunlight alone.

> other than a recurring warning to other would-be Stripe customers

that seems like an exceptionally high-value positive in a site with a large number of users who need payment services.

These types of companies are often frauds (anything involving large amounts charged for travel, or housing of some sort). A bunch of big charges comes in, and then months later there are massive chargebacks and the company in question no longer exists. Stripe is left holding the bag. Their only option with these large charges for services to be delivered in the future is to not release funds until they are quite certain there won't be a charge back.

For every instance of what appears to be bad behavior by a payments company, consider the angle of the fraudster. They are really screwing things up for everybody.

In a working payment system, the scenario where someone initiates a valid dispute nine months after the fact would be extremely rare: it would be limited to a few types of physical card theft where the card owner is unable to report the card missing for some relatively unusual reason. We just don’t have a working payment system, so unfortunately this stuff is incredibly common and everyone has to suffer because of it.

There are genuine cases (travel and lodging are the obvious ones) where people tend to pay for things months in advance. I don't see it going away. If you can come up with a cheap, effective, convenient payment method to cover these things, you are on a winner. I don't think it's possible because the time horizon creates risk, there is no avoiding it.

The alternative is likely not being able to work with the business at all due to their risk profile and chargeback rates.

That seems... better? At least you know what you're in for (ie. you can only take crypto or go with a risk-taking payment processor that has an explicit net 120 payout schedule), so you can plan your business around it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com