[lolinder]

Note that half of those submissions were flagged to death. I don't doubt that there are some legitimate stories here, but one of those is a repeated repost with verbatim content from months earlier, and others are very vague about what sort of business they were running. It's become common knowledge that making a big stink on HN can get a lot of attention and sometimes resolve your problems, so even people who were shut down for clear violations of policy or law will try to use HN to get a mob going.

Not that there aren't legitimate problems with Stripe, but the extent of those problems is blown out of proportion if you take all of these complaints at face value.

[snvzz]

Seeing the discussions in these submissions doesn't give me that impression.

Instead, I am inclined to think that mass-flagging is being done by Stripe sockpuppets as a means of mitigating negative impact on Stripe's public image.

[lolinder]

The person who called out "Don't Use Stripe" [0] tied a very legitimate account to their accusation.

jacquesm is a very prominent user, and called out another one for being too vague, with no reply [1].

The third was clearly selling an NSFW AI service [2] and admitted it.

The other three I'm willing to believe, I'm just cautioning against believing every submission you see.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34036111

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34272248

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969195

[numpad0]

While my heuristics says a lot of those deserves bans, where in that process are local law enforcement and court systems involved? It sounds wrong that a Stripe account, AdSense account, these quasi bank accounts used by small businesses and individuals(and criminals) as quasi public utility can be opened and closed by decisions of "the team", by unqualified software engineers and ex-engineer managers, completely unmonitored. The web is not a huge advert or scientific experiment anymore, I mean, it hadn't been for a decade or two, but now it's significantly less so.

[lolinder]

This is a problem, but it's not a problem with Stripe, it's a problem with banks in general. Banks use heuristics that are "good enough" to detect fraud and money laundering, and if they do then they'll block you just as surely as Stripe will.

Stripe's processes may very well need improvement, but private fraud teams making important calls is how finance is run everywhere.

[coder9874]

Thanks for diving into the evidence for us. It's an important lesson not to believe everything you read on HN.

[bravura]

Than you for the parent post clarification, but your GP post did NOT have an agnostic tone or focus on the spirit of sober inquiry. Instead, it came across as an admonition. I just wanted to share.

"Not that there aren't legitimate problems with Stripe, but the extent of those problems is blown out of proportion if you take all of these complaints at face value." That conclusion feels a bit like legerdemain, considering that you acknowledge the strength of some of these claims (which are HN only).

It's a bit like you're boxing your argument into: "If there are only seven people dead from mass shootings this year, their importance is blown out of proportion versus much more common preventable causes of death." But in a universe where the only people that get any news coverage for mass shootings are the ones that get posted and upvoted on HN. I hope my point here isn't too oblique.

[lolinder]

> Instead, it came across as an admonition.

That's because it was intended to. OP hijacked a Show HN to share a bunch of links with complaints about Stripe. They were so quick to do so that they didn't notice that half their links were dubious. Then this hijacking post becomes pinned to the top with upvotes just like the dubious Stripe posts did before clearer heads prevailed.

HN needs to get out of this habit of accepting people's inflammatory claims at face value, or we're going to rapidly lose credibility and become just another internet outage farm.

---

As far as your specific complaint goes: HN's sense that Stripe can't be trusted comes from the subjective experience of seeing many complaints about Stripe on HN. There are no stats to help us understand the extent of the problem. If a full half of these complaints were dishonest, do you not see how that would skew our collective sense of how likely getting screwed over by Stripe is?

As I said, I'm not trying to discount the experiences of the three stories that OP shared that seem to have been legitimate. What I'm challenging is the idea that everyone should steer clear of Stripe on the basis of a clearly flawed heuristic, as well as the idea that it's okay to hijack a Show HN to push that heuristic on people.

[omniglottal]

Dismissing all claims on the face value of some is also in error. The simple fact that there are so many of these claims, and also given the exact repercussions of those who were in (ToS) error, are enough to recognize a statistically strong weight toward the "do not trust" response which blanket dismissal and acceptance of partial ignorance cannot overcome. The extent to which hidden forces (i.e., "sockpuppets") quash this dialogue further suggests that we're only seeing the tip of this customer-antagonistic iceberg.

[bravura]

Fair enough and well argued.

I guess I’m just expressing a bit of anxiety towards picking of payment processor, and also wish there were concrete stats on the issue.