[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.