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Apple does not keep the 30% commission on a refund

• Hokusai 6y ago
  > Apple does not keep the 30% commission on a refund That makes sense. I worked for a big mobile games company and refunds happened all the time. It was a classic that people will buy in-game items and ask, int our case, Facebook for a refund. They will keep the items and get the refund, until we created a tool to manage refunds and that cheat saw its due end. As to generate in-game items has zero cost, it was not a loss per se. But it was a lose in potential earnings if it becomes common place. If Facebook has make us pay for their % that would have been a disgrace from the beginning.
• BluSyn 6y ago
  In response to this earlier post for those that missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584
• duopixel 6y ago
  More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news. I don't mean this in a judgmental way, when I saw this posted I thought "that doesn't sound right, but I guess if it has so many upvotes on HN it must be true". It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584
  • carlmr 6y ago
    >I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. While that may be true, for me the gut feeling was in line with the fake news, which makes it even harder to spot (confirmation bias). I never worked on iOS apps, but my consumer experience with Apple was such that I would have expected exactly this kind of behavior. They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one. I just assumed that a company that treats their consumers like this also doesn't treat developers fairly. Granted, this is my experience from a decade ago. I've never bought anything Apple since. So maybe they've changed.
    • coldtea 6y ago
      >They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one. Do they regularly sell keyboard replacement parts? If not, why expect them to "sell you one"? And the laptop was "out of warranty", wasn't it? How does "barely" change this?
      • bpfrh 6y ago
        (I'm not the one who you commented to) Because we all want to live on this planet for a few hundred years? I expect a company that produces things to either supply spare parts on demand, or allow a third party to produce them. Even more so, when the device I bought costs >1000$ Sure, legally they don't have any obligation to do so, but many things are legal but ethically wrong.
        • carlmr 6y ago
          Exactly, and every other laptop company I never had an issue getting spare parts. So they were intentionally behaving worse than average.
          • coldtea 6y ago
            Most other companies have easier case constructions though...
            • RealStickman_ 6y ago
              I'm sure it would be in apple's interest and ability to make their parts as modular as possible to make repairs easier if that was what they were going for.
            • carlmr 6y ago
              Then they should revise their designs maybe.
  • coldtea 6y ago
    >More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news. "Fake news" is a regular thing on the tech/HN community. The whole hype around technologies (e.g. Mongo/NoSQL, etc) is just that. As Alan Kay put it "Programming is a Pop Culture".
    • amelius 6y ago
      The reason is that as programmers we're highly dependent on the technical choices made by the masses.
    • threeseed 6y ago
      You can't possibly be serious. There is no hype for NoSQL or MongoDB on HN. In fact it is the complete opposite with every one trying to push SQL and PostgreSQL for every use case under the sun.
      • barbecue_sauce 6y ago
        There was hype for NoSQL/MongoDB on HN ages ago, but it has long since passed. The only people bringing it up now just seem out of touch.
      • coldtea 6y ago
        There's no hype today, which is because the hype died out. 5-6 years ago it was all "SQL is dead", before those people got burned. I wasn't giving an example of a current hype -- just of a hype.
      • merpnderp 6y ago
        Why couldn't they be serious? NoSQL got big somehow. There was obviously a big push and support for it when it became big. How would HN be immune to this when it can't even spot an obviously fake story about Apple acting like cartoon villains?
      • hombre_fatal 6y ago
        threeseed is famously (to me) HN's personal MongoDB cheerleader. It always fascinated me. When I read the upstream comment my first thought was "I wonder if threeseed will show up." Not trying to call you out, I just think the consistency + choice of hobby horse is funny, and you always stand out as the one person defending MongoDB: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=MongoDB%20threeseed&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I always wanted to know though: why? What compels you, threeseed?
  • supernova87a 6y ago
    That's what happens when you want to believe in symbols more than taking the time to investigate the complicated facts. And the symbol here was Apple as the big bad evil company trying to exploit developers. Maybe it's a lesson to temper outrage before knowing facts.
    • xxs 6y ago
      In the very same thread there is a quote of devepors agreement with Apple that allows Apple to keep it.
  • tomduncalf 6y ago
    My bad for posting the original tweet up without proper fact-checking... I've emailed the mods to ask them to correct or delete the original to avoid confusion in future. I had heard rumours that Apple did not refund the 30% previously, and seeing a developer of respected apps post it (along with a graph, although actually that didn't prove anything lol) and doing a quick Google (where the top result is "Apple's iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers"), I thought made it seem legit enough to post, and thought it would get shot down quickly if it was incorrect! Interesting lesson in the realities of post-truth as you say! Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched...
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • thih9 6y ago
      > Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched... It seems so easy to spread misinformation with this way of thinking going on. My point is not to blame you, I just wanted to point out that as long as we accept believable data as true, we’ll see believable misinformation on top of HN.
    • vikramkr 6y ago
      It's a good example of the importance of using respect/a large platform appropriately. If I was in your position I also don't think I'd have really fact checked it, since that level of scrutiny on everything would be nearly impossible to maintain if I tried to fact check before posting any given titbit. And even then, I might have fact checked by checking in with a developer of respected apps that would have experience. A significant amount of the burden of getting this right is in the hands of the original twitter poster IMO. If you are originating, rather than sharing, a piece of information like apple keeping the refund, then the burden of fact checking should definitely be on you at that point.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    Apple's opacity leads to this kind of thing. The "rebuttal" doesn't have a citation either. How do we know that it itself is not also fake news? Apple should have a nice clear page we can all link to that explains how this works. But nobody seems to have found one. Edit: no, really, this is important: we're in the middle of the lesson of "social media can amplify things that aren't true and you should check them". Great. So, how do we verify things? What should we be doing? The counter claim link at the top of this thread is also just a random unsourced tweet!
    • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      It's in the terms: "In such cases,Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User."
      • hardlianotion 6y ago
        In other words: the rebuttal is not clearcut.
      • ShroudedNight 6y ago
        I have never engaged in any kind of professional legal training; I am most definitely not a lawyer. That being said, my understanding of 'notwithstanding' in this context would imply that Apple reserves the right to retain its commission even when they refund the price to the End-User. https://weagree.com/weblog/notwithstanding-is-a-tricky-one/ https://weagree.com/weblog/notwithstanding-is-a-tricky-one/
      • voxic11 6y ago
        What is in the terms? That part says they can keep the commission if they want to. But the question is do they actually keep it.
        • LanceH 6y ago
          That may not have a single answer.
  • stunt 6y ago
    This is not a new era. Tooling is new indeed which makes it tremendously faster and available. On the bright side, you can also get facts back rather quickly like this.
    • bilbo0s 6y ago
      You're thinking incorrectly as well. There is no need to debate patent nonsense. Just correct it and move on. Why did we as a community waste so much time discussing and getting outraged over patent nonsense as opposed to doing the rational thing and calling it patent nonsense from the outset? The answer to that question is troubling. HN as a community is far too accommodating to a lot of silliness simply because it gets votes. Remember yesterday's "news" that Intel was moving TSMC? And don't even get me started on the political nonsense HN upvotes. We should all be taking a good long look in the mirror. If we're not going to learn from incidents like this, at least a bit of self awareness would be nice.
  • Illniyar 6y ago
    I don't see upvotes as being a form of agreement. I often upvotes things I have no knowledge about and sometimes even things I don't agree with that I think would be interesting to hear more about from the HN community. It an interesting topic for many HNers and such seems appropriate that it'll get on to the front page. That being said, downvoting dissenting comments in the thread are extremely problematic. And is a common theme in HN. Which I think stems from the implicit assumption by many people that upvoting a comment or item means agreeing with it.
    • _qulr 6y ago
      Same. I legit didn't know the answer and thought it deserved discussion.
  • FriendlyNormie 6y ago
    I pointed out that it was obviously a lie being spread by one solitary dumbfuck on twitter, but I was randomly shadowbanned one day by the huge faggot dang because he feels the need to protect grown adults from the bad fee-fees they might get from reading words on a screen, so no one saw my comment. Too bad.
  • jka 6y ago
    Do you think that asking people to read -- and potentially answer a simple captcha-like comprehension question -- about content before amplifying it could help in situations like this? (Twitter is apparently experimenting[1] with the former approach) [1] - https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-unread-feature-conversations https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-un...
  • Razengan 6y ago
    One of Apple’s main adversaries, Samsung, has been taken to court for paying students to manipulate social media against their competitors. And given Apple’s stance against the bread and butter of less scrupulous companies (privacy intrusion and data mining), it would be no surprise if there are many other people who are literally paid to make them look bad at any cost.
    • Razengan 6y ago
      https://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web-reviews/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web-re... https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paying+students+for+reviews https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paying+students+for+...
  • malwarebytess 6y ago
    Not only was the original story incorrect, but the top comment defending the incorrect information was also wrong.
    • unix_fan 6y ago
      this is why I don’t take anything at face value, especially if it’s trending on social media. I wait for the drama to blow over,and check for the actual truth later.
  • AmericanChopper 6y ago
    > I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. Another word for this is groupthink.
  • mcv 6y ago
    Some years ago, HN had a reputation for loving everything Apple. That has clearly turned around.
  • nojito 6y ago
    The idea that HN is well informed is incorrect. The top comments to many posts are completely incorrect. Social media caters way too much to feelings and biases.
  • hesarenu 6y ago
    Isn't it again some random tweet not an actual apple document/confirmation.
  • natch 6y ago
    Where people think they are well educated and well informed. You give us a lot of credit. Most of us are ignorant about a lot of things we have strong opinions on.
  • 0xfaded 6y ago
    This is a very good observation. The "news" that intel was moving to TSMC was also on the front page the other day.
  • rimliu 6y ago
    “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”
    • gridlockd 6y ago
      In this case, "the truth" is misleading. Apple presumably doesn't do what was claimed, but it reserves the right to do it.
  • christophilus 6y ago
    At least the correction also made the front page. That’s more than can be said for normal media outlets who seem to broadcast the lie with a megaphone and bury the correction in a footnote.
  • thelittleone 6y ago
    To be fair you say "our gut feeling" as if everyone shares the same 'gut feeling', i.e., that Apple would not do such a thing. On reading the original post my gut feeling believed that this could be or is quite likely true. Why? Because it aligns with the continuous declining customer experience I've had with them for the last 5-7 years. Examples include declining product quality, difficulty getting them to service properly, getting busted for impairing performance on older hardware (planned obsolescence) all that feels like tall poppy syndrome, dark patterns and arrogance.
  • UweSchmidt 6y ago
    While voting is now getting considered a statement of ideological alignment (see Reddit banning people based on their vote for unsavory posts, and people in Germany being prosecuted for 'liking' a violent crime), my vote on the original post was to signal my interest, encourage posts of that sort on this website and to raise awareness, to encourage potential corrections.
    • KingOfCoders 6y ago
      "people in Germany being prosecuted for 'liking' a violent crime" Do you have a link for this?
      • UweSchmidt 6y ago
        Can't find the article about a specific case, but according to the link below it appears that a new law specifically includes "liking" as punishable in serious cases. https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/nachrichten/region/daumen-hoch-fuer-hass-und-hetze-wird-strafbar;art140897,4364244 https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/nachrichten/region/daumen-ho...
        • KingOfCoders 6y ago
          Thanks though the article is very sketchy on "liking"
          • UweSchmidt 6y ago
            I agree.
  • coronadisaster 6y ago
    If you post anything that aligns with republicans on this forum (true or not), it has a very high chance of being downvoted or not upvoted.
  • AndrewKemendo 6y ago
    Critically though, a correction is at #1 top spot today. That's about as good as it gets. Corrections in newspapers don't run the same as headlines, nobody upvotes corrections to reddit or Instagram etc... I'd suggest that as far as iterating in the direction of finding the truth, this is a best in class example of how to do it.
    • paulintrognon 6y ago
      Maybe a tag in the original title could also help? Something like: "[FAKENEWS] When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple doesn’t refund the 30% cut" People not reading the comments will then have a way of knowing this is false information.
      • aaron695 6y ago
        A current front page article - "Anti-climate action statements get more visibility in news coverage, study finds" is [FAKENEWS] You want to fight that battle?
        • Illniyar 6y ago
          The article is not fakenews. It covers a research about anti-climate statements. Those can be fakenews (though depends on the nature of the statement I would say).
          • aaron695 6y ago
            I'd like to keep this meta if possible. When you wrote this comment had you read the journal article to see if the Press Release and Press Release Title linked on HN accurately represents the published journal article?
      • yborg 6y ago
        Terrible tag idea, it's implicitly negative and accusatory. In this instance, the guy was apparently just honestly misinformed. The main problem is that most of the original thread ballooned with upvotes because it became general "<big corporate entity> is bad" kvetching which is perennially popular and probably doesn't belong on HN at all. As long as these kinds of threads aren't modkilled, these things will happen, you just have to deal with it. Tagging them won't solve anything.
  • wolco 6y ago
    In fairness if you take what you find here and applied it to the real world. Everyone would be using rust/go. Meanwhile everyone is still using php.
  • bzb3 6y ago
    It is 2020. If you believe what you read on the internet...
  • paulintrognon 6y ago
    > We are in the post-truth era indeed. Was it really better before? The cognitive biases behind fake news are not knew. Maybe there were there from the beginning, but we are just getting better at spotting them?
    • goalieca 6y ago
      No, we're certainly more politicized though.
  • peter_retief 6y ago
    Now we wait for all the justifications. I really enjoy HN but there is a large number of politically indignant ready to punish who they disagree with rather than allow debate.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
    That's why I treat HN the same way as Reddit. Just because people talk in a more sophisticated manner doesn't mean that they are anymore factual.
  • duxup 6y ago
    Yeah there's certainly a factor of "title seems about right, I'll up-vote" out there. There have been a lot of articles where even the comments were entirely "nothing about this is right" and that's not counting opinion / perspective articles, like cold hard facts wrong. It's really frustrating to see on HN.
  • eternalban 6y ago
    Downvotes should force a comment box, or have a link for list of users downvoting a comment. I don’t see what value anonymous downvotes bring to a forum dedicated to informed discussion.
  • Kiro 6y ago
    Are you surprised? The HN crowd instinctively upvotes any headline that makes big tech look bad and is always quick to jump on the bandwagons in the comment thread without hesitation. We're no better than reddit.
    • gridlockd 6y ago
      Nothing bad came of it, because it highlighted a potentially abusive clause in the terms that many developers might not even have been aware of when they agreed to them. "Apple is evil" might be wrong, but "Apple reserves the right to be evil" is still closer to the truth than "Apple is not evil".
      • Kiro 6y ago
        A lot of people won't see the rebuttal and will continue thinking this is true.
        • gridlockd 6y ago
          In terms of risk, it is better to believe that it is true, because it could become true at any time.
  • rvz 6y ago
    > We are in the post-truth era indeed. Indeed we are, it's also the interesting thing about confirmation bias in communities. In any community, they seem to always believe any news that is immediately negative about the subject that they haven't researched about or want they don't like as the real truth. It's up to us to do our own research with actual evidence rather than sources such as: 'X suggested', 'sources say', 'my friend who works at ABCXYZ' or because it has 1000+ retweets, upvotes, etc. Generally, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed on social media content like FB, Twitter, HN, etc.
  • yepthatsreality 6y ago
    Yes the Apple cult may have always been here but has grown more aggressive and defensive the last 5 years or so. Check any Apple thread and you will see similar results. You cannot utter a word of criticism towards the company without mass downvotes.
    • sbuk 6y ago
      Likewise the FOSS cult. It has been ever thus. Both sides make false claims regularly.
    • Illniyar 6y ago
      mmm... that's the exact opposite of this situation - statements in favor of Apple were downvoted.
    • moogleii 6y ago
      I think you've misread the comment you're replying to; otherwise, I'm not sure I understand how your comment applies. He's saying the post claiming that Apple kept the 30% was fishy (and false). I don't know about a cult, but in this case, the criticism was unfounded. Ironically, your comment is an example of a cult of the anti-cult - always looking out for signs of that other cult.
  • eanzenberg 6y ago
    Oh please, HN is one of the least trustworthy areas of my life primarily because of its echo-chamber, vocal minority ways. All online communities that allow upvoting / downvoting devolve to this. In fact, I’ve started perusing old-style BB sites of my interests which explicitly have no upvoting or downvoting, forcing me to read through comments and replies and where the only nominal “upvoting” occurs in popular threads with lots of posts that continuously push to the top of the BB. It’s a literal breath of fresh air. I’m close to done with community sites that allow upvotes/downvotes.
    • ColanR 6y ago
      Any recommendations?
    • lowkeynthorough 6y ago
      Curiously, stackoverflow uses upvotes and downvotes too. How does that work?
      • zymhan 6y ago
        StackExchange is a like a highly moderated subreddit mixed with a Wiki. Mods ensure the posts are of minimum quality, require sources for novel claims, and remove disinformation. An SE community also tends to strongly embrace the general rules for SE, which keeps it from being overrun with "reposts" and "clickbait".
      • johnfn 6y ago
        A lot of content on StackOverflow is trivially verifiable - just put it in your IDE and see if it runs. You'll notice that the more subjective questions on StackOverflow almost always 1) get closed immediately or 2) are filled with bad answers. (You'd think getting a refund is trivially verifiable, too, but who's going to go to all that work?)
      • rplnt 6y ago
        > just use jquery Not that well.
    • 6y ago
  • sigzero 6y ago
    People want to hate Apple.
  • lowtolerance 6y ago
    Anytime there’s a negative news story against Apple, rational thought goes straight out the window.
  • kerkeslager 6y ago
    I'm not really sure where the impression that HN is particularly well educated and informed comes from. My experience here is that people don't read what's linked, they just opine on the title (which may be clickbait) or other people's comments (which are also opining on the title or other people's comments--it's uninformed opinions all the way down). There are a few posters who are knowledgeable in their fields, but overall, I get the impression that HN users are remarkably uninformed on the topics they choose to opine on. HN specifically prohibits remarking on this when it happens; the guidelines say: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' I understand that the intent of this is to create a polite environment, but the end result is one where uninformed opinions are welcomed. It's even to the point that some people will proudly proclaim that they didn't read the thing they're responding to, often paired with a complaint that the linked content is too long, or that it didn't account for some gotcha (which it accounts for, just not in the first few paragraphs). To be clear: you may be informed on a topic, but if you don't read what you're responding to, you aren't informed on what you're responding to. And over time, people whose only source of "information" is uninformed comments are going to be uninformed on topics as well, while believing that they are informed. > It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed. But neither community consensus nor gut feeling have anything to do with truth. Primary sources, scientific observation, and to a lesser degree, logic and expert opinion--those are what we should be trusting.
    • Tallasatree 6y ago
      It comes from the fictitious idea that if you play with bits, you're smarter than most people. My outside-of-industry perspective has me come to this conclusion.
      • kerkeslager 6y ago
        Well... I think there's an important distinction to be made between intelligence and knowledge. If you "play with bits", you probably are smarter than most people, because there are a lot of people who can't do that. I've spent a good amount of time as an educator, and it does seem to me that some people just can't wrap their head around programming. That said, being smarter than most people isn't worth much. I've also learned that intelligent people are a dime a dozen. There's no barrier to intelligence--you're just born smart, and fully half of people are born with above-median intelligence--so the relative value of intelligence is limited. Knowledge, on the other hand, is hard to come by: even if you're extremely well-informed on one subject, there are hundreds of subjects upon which you are completely uninformed. Intelligence can help you become informed if you apply it to learning, but as often as not, intelligent people just use their intelligence to skate by without having to learn things. I know that for a lot of my early schooling, I didn't apply myself to learning because I could get away without work due to my intelligence. This didn't pay off, and in my mid-twenties I had to really learn how to learn. Nowadays I would rather be informed than intelligent. EDIT: Note that in the "fixed vs. growth mindset" theory, "knowledge" is just the growth version of intelligence--I'm making a distinction between intelligence and knowledge, but that's not necessarily the terminology other people use.
  • karlakush 6y ago
    The average HN user is not intelligent. If you've been reading this forum for any significant amount of time and still think "wow, these guys are smart," that does not reflect well on you. HN, like most internet forums, consists primarily of the lowest rung of society. It's a natural consequence of the fact that people without jobs have more free time and less money to spend on hobbies. For example, read any thread about UBI or the tech interview process (there are multiple posted every week). The large majority of HN commenters support UBI and hate the FAANG interview process. Why is this? Because they are not smart enough to pass the FAANG interviews and are struggling financially as a consequence.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed Many threads in HN reflect the tribalism that now permeates society. There are plenty of people on here that will upvote a comment or story simply because it paints Apple in a bad light. Same thing happens to Google, Oracle, and to a lesser extent these days, Microsoft. It doesn't matter if a piece of information is true, it just has to align with someone's personal-conceived biases. We have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are better than the people who get sucked in by political trolls on Facebook just because we work with computers.
    • chasd00 6y ago
      This was on full display when the early Covid19 studies were coming out suggesting many more infections than what was being counted. It implied changes to thinking and numbers were needed and people came out of the woodwork, with anger even, to discredit anyone who dared agree. Same goes for anyone who dared to consider Sweden's model as anything less than a killing field for their own citizens. it was pretty disturbing for me, i had held this place in very high regard prior to that experience.
  • josefresco 6y ago
    Except, it wasn't false information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510
    • nojito 6y ago
      That section is about payment processors and chargebacks. Which is standard practice across the board.
  • Shivetya 6y ago
    If you read the thinly veiled political pieces on this site you would never expect anything different. For a site mostly aimed at start ups and technology this site has a very large anti business view branding the whole with the happenings at outliers within the world.
  • loceng 6y ago
    Perhaps it was in part good timing for the false information, with the top tech CEOs hearing that Apple/Tim Cook was involved with as well - it would seemingly be the time for such an unreasonable behaviour of keeping 30% fee on refunds to make it to the surface for public viewing. I have a similar shock or fascination when seeing how little the HN crowd understands the benefits of UBI (when tied to inflation + VAT) - there's seemingly been little critical thinking done from foundational principles, and the same common misunderstandings repeat. There's enough momentum of people with little understanding jumping to post that those comments all gain the most traction, and it's too much to jump into discussion with. A good comparison of differences in abilities and then innate failure/mistakes that we can all make - Elon Musk, who understands exponentials and economies of scale via his success as a marker, and stating he decision makes from first principles, is in support of UBI. He says it's inevitable with technology-automation, and then comparing that to his tweeting some arguably misinformed or shallow on the details about COVID-19 - perhaps not having as full or clear as a picture as he should before someone with his reach posts about something so serious. To me however it's really all just signals for the state of the union, and these are canary moments that highlight how reactive people are and how ill-informed they are - due to not having a hierarchy of trusted sources that most of us follow. Is there someone who's as successful and trustworthy competence wise as Elon is with EVs (etc) but for viruses? It was supposed to be Fauci in the US, right? But he first lied to Americans saying masks don't work - and that lack of integrity is harmful and blinding.
  • dicomdan 6y ago
    HN has been overrun by CCP trolls promoting fake news and propaganda for a long time now, more so than Reddit and Facebook even. At the very least the latter try to do something about it, whereas on HN it's business as usual.
    • dang 6y ago
      That's not true at all. You've posted bogus insinuations about this repeatedly. It's time that stopped, so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • methodin 6y ago
    It's more important how one deals with being wrong than always being right.
  • lazyjones 6y ago
    The upvotes of false information, based on random Tweets meeting negative bias towards Apple, worry me less than the malicious downvoting of corrections, of opinions diverging from the echo chamber's collective bias, of meta-comments addressing these issues. The downvote is just used as a very low effort sh.tpost without content these days. It's risk-free and even more detrimental to actual discourse than its sibling.
  • nonbirithm 6y ago
    And what if a more radical piece of demonstrably false information ended up being believed by enough people that they'd rise up to take corrective action? Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance? If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information. I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way. So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?
  • amznthrwaway 6y ago
    This is not a site where people are well educated and informed. This is a site full of arrogant ignoramuses who like capitalism, technology, and white supremacy. Nothing more. If you had put it on a pedestal that was your own personal error, and you should simply stop being an idiot, instead of spouting nonsense about a post-truth era.
  • manmal 6y ago
    And the correction has 1400 upvotes.
  • xvector 6y ago
    What was worse about this is that some people that described and provided evidence that the story was false were often downvoted. For all of this community's focus on civility, clearly it, too, falls victim to mob mentality.
• y7 6y ago
  Apparently it's still in the developer agreement you have to sign in order to be allowed onto the App Store [1]. Apple can't really blame people for spreading misinformation if the only reason this isn't true is that they usually decide not to enforce the clause. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510
  • carlmr 6y ago
    It's not misinformation if it's part of the developer agreement.
    • sbuk 6y ago
      It’s misinformation if the clause isn’t understood by the individual sharing it.
      • carlmr 6y ago
        That doesn't invalidate my statement. I made it contingent on the fact that it is in the agreement. You should take this up with OP.
    • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      If it's in the agreement but they don't do it then it is misinformation to claim that they do it.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • sirn 6y ago
    > In the event that Apple receives any notice or claim from a payment provider [...] Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User. "From a payment provider" means a chargeback, e.g. a customer calls their credit card company the charge was fraudulent, and the credit card company files a dispute code against payment provider (usually Visa 83/JCB 546/Mastercard 4853/Mastercard 4863 depending on the case). In this case it's not uncommon to not refund the fee. In fact, many payment providers will also charge you extra fee for the dispute (e.g. Stripe charges $15[1]). There's also filing fee in case the merchant trying to fight the dispute and lose. The fee varies by network: $500 for Visa, at least $600 for Mastercard. [1]: https://stripe.com/docs/disputes https://stripe.com/docs/disputes
• 91edec 6y ago
  Kind of scary how a random person on twitter can say something and that gets turned into a fact.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    But it didn't get turned into a fact. There was a period of discussion, and the facts eventually came out, which the original tweeter even acknowledged. You might even say, the system worked. ;-)
    • gilrain 6y ago
      It's very likely that the original story spread to more people than the retraction. So sadly, yes, for a significant number of people the falsehood is now a "fact". One they might drop as a curiosity in conversation long after the retraction has faded from view, further spreading the "fact".
      • _qulr 6y ago
        Yes, but many who saw the original story will probably forget about it in time. Moreover, the retraction did spread in a way that it wouldn't have if this controversy never got public discussion. People who saw the retraction will now be available to refute the assertion if it comes up again.
        • _qulr 6y ago
          Falsehoods will spread, that's inevitable. But that's not the real misinformation problem. Falsehoods also get pushback, often strong pushback. Falsehoods can get corrected, eventually. As a society, we have a real problem when people deliberately push falsehoods that they know to be false. This is not such a case, however.
          • deleted 6y ago
            [deleted]
  • 6y ago
• cosmodisk 6y ago
  This will serve me,and many others on HN as a lesson on how easy it is to fall for false information. I did read the related post yesterday and there were lots of emotions, mainly negative. Now I don't even know whether they take the money or not, so I'll put a question mark until proven otherwise for time being.
  • bambax 6y ago
    But it isn't false information! It's part of the licence agreement, that Apple chooses to sometimes enforce, sometimes not.
    • asutekku 6y ago
      If you would’ve read comments in this post thorough, you would’ve found it most likely has to do with the payment providers and not apple itself, as there’s nothing apple can do in that case (other than pay the difference from their own pocket, but they have no legal requirement to do that). Thus it’s not random.
      • bambax 6y ago
        > most likely ... means maybe. Apple reserves the right to keep its commission and doesn't attach it to payment processing issues. It can do whatever it wants, and we can only guess.
      • josefresco 6y ago
        Apple is beholden to "payment providers"? Thanks for the laugh.
• sulam 6y ago
  At the time it made no sense as a business practice, and seemed painful enough that I should have heard about it long before this. My immediate reaction was "really? I'll have to see confirmation before I treat this tweet as authoritative". What is really amusing in hindsight was the number of people willing to pile on and argue that this was in fact totally reasonable of Apple to be doing and that we shouldn't be surprised or upset at all about it.
  • rydre 6y ago
    > What is really amusing in hindsight was the number of people willing to pile on and argue that this was in fact totally reasonable of Apple to be doing and that we shouldn't be surprised or upset at all about it. Exactly, while I had doubts about this accusation on Apple, I was surprised about how many people were okay with it. These people (defenders of Apple) vote, but they're not even likely to be Billionaires (it's not wrong to be a Billionaire if you play fair). Why do they defend such an awful practice if it actually happened and wasn't fake news?
    • pjc50 6y ago
      > Why do they defend such an awful practice if it really happened? (do you mean "didn't really happen"?) Controversialists work like that. There is no position in defence of power that people won't argue for, and have a little circle of people cheering them on.
      • rydre 6y ago
        > (do you mean "didn't really happen"?) I messed up (just edited the comment to correct), what I mean is in a hypothetical scenario where Apple really did this, why would you defend them?
    • sirn 6y ago
      I used to work in payment industry (I kinda still do, but no longer involved in the talking with Visa/Mastercard part), and I can see why they could be doing this if they do. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I _personally_ do not think 30% is outrageous as many people believe so although I also do hold an opinion that App Store should allows the app to use their own payment infrastructure if they have one (currently only possible for physical goods). Stripe and other modern payment gateway makes pricing simple, but it's far from simple behind the scene. Most people on HN are probably using credit card for App Store, so it's easy to overlook that App Store offers different kinds of APMs: carrier payment[1], local wallet, stored value card, and local payment services[2]. I don't think Stripe supports half or even third of what App Store supports. I've worked on local integration for few countries for different kind of payment methods. In some payment method they simply don't refund your fee. In some cases where currency conversion happens it's not possible to refund using the exact rate the charge was made. In some cases the fee is prohibitively high (e.g. 12% for carrier payment). In many cases there are contract fees, connection fee, infrastructure ("nah you have to have your own server cage and a direct fiber line from us") fee and many more. This, plus CDN, maintenance and everything, is one of the reasons why I don't think 30% is outrageous and will probably found it acceptable if they don't refund this fee, taking operational costs involved into account. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205102 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205102 [2]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202631 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202631
• coding123 6y ago
  This is what I suspected the entire time lol.
• helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  This is a good example of where a strong belief in something (in this case Apple greedily taking a huge cut of developer earnings) that something that sounds patently false is believed automatically and instantly. Happens with people, companies, religion, and politics. [edit: I believed it too without thinking]
  • rsa25519 6y ago
    Agreed. Generalizing based on assumptions is very useful. Using those generalizations (e.g. assuming the apple thing is true) to reinforce beliefs is incredibly harmful
  • sigotirandolas 6y ago
    And the thing here is that this tweet contained a single fact that could be disproven with a little additional information. Now try to imagine how many false yet popular beliefs there are in areas like politics or economics where you can spend your entire day counter-counter-argumenting in circles.
• jasode 6y ago
  >More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information Not only upvoting the story but also downvoting posters to minus-12 who tried to counteract it with correct information: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hn_check https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hn_check [ footnote: his profile was -12 at the time I wrote the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hn_check https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hn_check ] [ another edit:] Sorry for confusion. I wasn't trying to say that _one_ comment got downvoted to -12. His 2 top-level comments ("and this submission is just farcically wrong" and "This isn't correct at all.") ... were at various levels of grey so those 2 comments contributed -4 or -5 or more to the -12. I do agree his tone (especially the [dead] comments) contributed to negative scores but it can simultaneously be true that downvoters thought he was incorrect. This was how his downvotes looked early this morning: https://imgur.com/a/GuTffzP https://imgur.com/a/GuTffzP The top-level comments have since been upvoted so they are no longer greyed out.
  • fermienrico 6y ago
    This is scary. And should scare everyone. We need to remove downvoting temporarily for next 6 months. See how things pan out. Cancel culture. Dissent and attack on free speech. Smearing of truth. People are afraid to speak up. Chilling effect. @dang - this is urgently needed. It’s raising alarm bells like no other to me.
    • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      I think this guy downvoted for being rude, not necessarily for being wrong, although probably everyone who downvoted him thought he was wrong as well, when he was correct.
      • oblio 6y ago
        > when he was correct. How do you know he was correct? This whole "cancel culture" thing is a 2020 thing, while HN has operated like this since when? 2005? HN has been "cancelling" comments since forever, and it's suddenly a problem? It's part of the rules of the game here :-) You play or you don't.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• hboon 6y ago
  It has been like this since day 1 — the developer agreement says Apple has the optional to retain their 30%, but in practice, I have not heard of anyone hitting it.
• tempodox 6y ago
  There is no such thing as a trusted source, and there never has been. Before you act on information, always double- and triple-check, if at all possible. Treating Twitter, of all things, as a trusted source seems especially risky.
  • sokoloff 6y ago
    Treating Twitter as a trusted source is like treating the town square as a trusted source. Treating individual people with a proven track record who happen to be on Twitter (or in the town square) as a trusted source is far more reasonable.
  • nojito 6y ago
    This overt cynicism isn't a good way to consume content. If you create yourself a nice echo chamber (which social media and internet allows you to do so) you can triple/quadruple check to your heart's content and still consume "wrong" information.
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Aside from all this I would think a commission on a charge that was then refunded would be illegal in a lot of jurisdictions.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I was actually surprised that no one else posted excerpts from the Apple Developer Agreement[0]. There's millions of copies out there. It clearly states that Apple is entitled to do what was originally tweeted, but, from a lot of anecdotal stories by developers that have actually processed refunds (I am not one. I have never processed a refund), Apple does not actually do this. A few folks have pointed out that, even though the contract stipulates it, the practice may be considered illegal, or at least open to court challenges; which might be why it isn't enforced. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510
  • jjcon 6y ago
    No Apple states they are entitled to not refund credit card fees (which they would not get back) - they don’t state they are entitled to not refund the 30% cut
    • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
      I don't read that at all: > In the event that Apple refunds any such price to an End-User, You shall reimburse, or grant Apple a credit for, an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application. In the event that Apple receives any notice or claim from a payment provider that an End-User has obtained a refund for a Licensed Application, You shall reimburse, or grant Apple a credit for, an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application. In such cases, Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User. "an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application" sounds like we're on the hook for the full nut. "In such cases, Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User." Sounds like they get to keep the 30%, no matter what. Like I said, it may not be enforceable, in the real world, but that's what the agreement I have, says, verbatim.
      • DangerousPie 6y ago
        Isn't this about user-initiated chargebacks through the CC provider rather than developer-initiated refunds? Or am I reading this wrong? > any notice or claim from a payment provider that an End-User has obtained a refund
• mabbo 6y ago
  I like that the original tweeter is the one loudly yelling that he was wrong. Too often, people are too proud and ashamed of being wrong to do that. So kudos to that guy for doing the right thing.
  • mac01021 6y ago
    Well it's definitely in your interest to retract rather than to be called out publicly be another person.
    • mabbo 6y ago
      You would think that, but have you ever seen a politician before? (I careful avoid naming any one in particular, lest this get political)
    • owenmarshall 6y ago
      The history of, well... everything, seems to refute this: very little harm seems to come from digging in your heels even if you are factually wrong. Most of the time you can lie, distract, and slander your way out of any sticky situation. The same biases that got everyone believing the original lie will take over and your support will be deepened.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        And if anyone doesn't believe this, there is currently an elected official in the highest position of government of a major nation for whom this is modus operandi.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    I agree. As it turns out, there is a decade-old issue. Apple has a stipulation in their contract that allows them to do it, but they don't actually do it. He misinterpreted some kind of interaction.
    • joshstrange 6y ago
• Ghostt8117 6y ago
  I am disappointed in myself that I believed this information without any evidence. I wanted to believe it because it confirmed and amplified my bias. I hope this gets more points than the first post.
  • yboris 6y ago
    A post on twitter from someone isn't much evidence, a post that got upvoted a lot seems more credible ("wisdom of the crowds" kind of thing). I fell for it too, because it's not a far stretch to imagine Apple doing thing sort of thing. Just yesterday I read that Audible credits expire, and the reason Audible provides is clearly just a veneer of PR over greed.
  • josefresco 6y ago
    Wait till you hear the guy was technically correct, but Apple "chooses not to enforce" the rule.
  • gowld 6y ago
    There was evidence (chart showing negative income), but it was misinterpreted. What is interesting is that Twitter got a lot of corrections,but HN didn't get a bunch of iOS devs saying "No, this doesn't happen on my app" (at least not in the dozens of comments I read).
• the-dude 6y ago
  Are we sure this is not a babylonic mistake? Original take was 'customer refund', which I interpreted as a 'chargeback'. A refund and a chargeback are very distinctive things.
• pk_kinetic 6y ago
  So does Apple keep the 30% or not? It’s too much information for my brain to process.
  • criddell 6y ago
    They reserve the right to keep it but in practice they do not.
    • josefresco 6y ago
      This is even worse IMO.
• raziel2p 6y ago
  The scariest part of this for me is "I don’t know where I got the idea that it worked the way I thought it did". If it was based off of incorrect sources or whatever I'd understand, but how can you make such a bold claim in a public social medium and forget where the idea came from within 1-2 days?
  • searchableguy 6y ago
    Um this is how twitter works. 280 char limit. Before it was 180. The nature of twitter wasn't ever meant to be taken seriously as a source but current media popularized it by being lazy and sourcing from twitter. People say all sorts of crazy things there if you follow active users on twitter. They are quick at deleting them too. I mean there are startups to take screenshots of tweets - https://pikaso.me https://pikaso.me Should tell you enough.
• outime 6y ago
  It's good to see that a chunk of HN (the ones who upvote/downvote, including myself) see that HN is formed by humans and therefore it has its own biases and that fake news aren't an external evil that can't just appear here. That being said, if we dig a bit this also shows how Apple is being seen as a bit of a villain by many people (again, including myself) nowadays and had no problems believing Apple was doing this because it pretty much aligns with their IMHO abusive practices when it comes to grabbing money from devs. Apple will keep selling and having some bad PR isn't going to affect sales much I guess but I can't stop thinking that some day some competitor will show up, or some law will change and they'll be forced to lift the app store restrictions and most of the devs will fly. Maybe it's time for Apple to start considering reducing the greediness with the people who make their platform attractive when these kind of news pass all filters, even in communities like this.
  • bilbo0s 6y ago
    I don't know man? The only thing worse than fake news, is probably taking real world actions based on fake news. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's how the US got itself into the mess we're in now.
  • dangus 6y ago
    The “Apple being a greedy bully” narrative was always just an opinion, and never grounded in their actions. That’s why this piece of fake news was so easy to believe for those people tied up in that narrative: because they’d already built up an opinion that Apple was the evil empire through sensationalized editorial pieces. (e.g. Hey being pissed off and publicly complaining that their business model wasn’t compatible with App Store rules, and yet, we don’t see Fastmail having any issues). In reality, Apple has a monopoly on absolutely nothing, and doesn’t really engage in anything particularly evil or abusive. Apple has a 14% global market share in smartphones, even less for computers, 19% market share of streaming music: what I’m getting at here is that Apple basically isn’t a leader in nearly any of the segments it sells to except for smart watches and fully wireless earbuds (which are not the entire market).
    • smichel17 6y ago
• filleduchaos 6y ago
  Occam's razor strikes again. What's more likely: That Apple has been sneaking a 60% cut under thousands of companies' noses for a decade and they're all super chill with this because of...what, charity? Or that a handful of business owners on Twitter are just not great at interpreting figures?
  • josephcsible 6y ago
    Where did 60% come from? I don't think anyone ever said that.
    • filleduchaos 6y ago
      That is what would be happening if both 30% of the purchase and 30% of the refund were coming from the dev's pocket.
• wlesieutre 6y ago
  Glad to be corrected! That would have been a bonkers policy. Someone quoted an Apple contract that appeared to indicate this was a real Apple's policy, which I also found sourced on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/apples-iphone-app-refund-policies-could-bankrupt-developers/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/apples-iphone-app-refund-p... > In the event that Apple refunds any such price to an end-user, You shall reimburse, or grant Apple a credit for, an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application. Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the end. But I'm unable to find that on Apple's current site, so hopefully it's been removed. TechCrunch's link to the referenced document is on "docstoc.com" and no longer exists.
• DevKoala 6y ago
  I guess HN is susceptible to the same issues plaguing other online communities. I don’t know why I thought it would be different here.
• atarian 6y ago
  The other lesson here is before you blast someone on Twitter, double-check your math.
• umeshunni 6y ago
  It's almost like there was some incentive for someone to spread false information about a company's practices on the eve of a congressional testimony about the company's practices.
• gridlockd 6y ago
  It's misleading either way. The fact that Apple reserves the right to keep the commission is very old news: https://www.imore.com/apple-charging-developers-100-app-refunds https://www.imore.com/apple-charging-developers-100-app-refu... I have heard anecdotes that, at least in some instances, Apple did keep the commission: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/50181 https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/50181 That might of course be an assumption, not based on proper accounting.
• osrec 6y ago
  I am still not happy with the 30% cut though. It is really rather high.
• GoodJokes 6y ago
  Tech people aren’t smart
• sadfev 6y ago
  Lmao! Some guy “thought” Apple doesn’t refund the commission and HN and Twitter and reddit had complete meltdown! As some of the comments point out here, people who tried to correct the claim with data from their experience or cite directly or indirectly Apple, they were downvoted to oblivion. If HN isn’t guarded against fake info, I guess no one should be expected to.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dekhn 6y ago
  Thanks, twitter.
• rexreed 6y ago
  I posted earlier how HN is highly susceptible to both groupthink as well as confirmation bias [1]. Check yourself and ask yourself if what is posted is actually true or is rather something you WISH was true, and also if what is posted is something that you would prefer to go with the herd than to try to run against the stampede. But humans are humans. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23846631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23846631
• josefresco 6y ago
  The rush to clear Apple's name, and the inflated indignation surrounding this mistake is embarrassing. Tesla is the only other brand where I see this behavior. I don't understand the evangelism of brands by people with seemingly no direct connection. The dude was wrong (Edit: turns out technically he wasn't wrong, Apple just "chooses" to not enforce it), get over it, Apple doesn't need your help - they have an army of attorneys who can squash any legitimate threat to their empire.
  • yalogin 6y ago
    That’s an odd take, I think you are looking at it wrong. IMO, this is the hacker news community getting embarrassed. After all this is a community of entrepreneurs, where everyone has an app and many multiple, on the App Store and so we must have known how it works. No one is redeeming Apple here, if anything I am thinking how easy it is to fall into this groupthink hole and not even bother to check because “we” have to rail against someone because of perceived/alleged wrong doing against the whole community.
    • josefresco 6y ago
      > this is the hacker news community getting embarrassed Exactly! Both posts are showing how reactionary and ignorant these supposedly brilliant entrepreneurs & engineers can be. At least on this thread, the second highest voted thread actually explains the issue clearly without hyperbole.
  • pwinnski 6y ago
    This is not about Apple so much as it is about the HN community rushing to judgement based on... whatever prejudices and assumptions they/we had. Apple can be good or bad or irrelevant. The facts should still be the facts, and HN got the facts very wrong in this case.
  • hu3 6y ago
    Plus I still don't see the point of this post. Apple is pointing a loaded gun at developers and we are praising them for not pulling the trigger. Apple simply chooses to not enforce (from the anecdotes known so far), but the menace still lingers in their ToS.
• elwell 6y ago
  I wonder how many of the upvoters of this post similarly didn't bother fact checking the correction. Not commenting on its veracity, however I think the truth is somewhere in between (Apple has the right to hold onto the 30% commission, but hasn't invoked that in practice yet). I, for one, upvoted both threads on the basis that this is playing out as a peculiar display of groupthink; a microcosmic martyrdom of truth tellers in the wave of internet points.
• code4tee 6y ago
  A good lesson to all to fact-check what you read. Especially if your source of news is some random guy on Twitter.
• pcunite 6y ago
  Whenever I try to correct falsehoods here, I get down-voted into oblivion. HN should take a good long look at itself.
• jason0597 6y ago
  I am now ashamed that I upvoted the previous HN submission. I wish I could take back that upvote, but unfortunately too much time has passed since then. From now on I will be more careful about what I upvote.
• krick 6y ago
  Ok, now this is funny.
• kanobo 6y ago
  When I saw the news yesterday I did think it was fishy because I have never successfully gotten a refund for a broken app store purchase from Apple before. I assumed returns weren't ever given so how could there possibly be a refund commission policy?
• leptoniscool 6y ago
  How did almost no one on HN fact check this? Groupthink at work?
• google234123 6y ago
  Love to see fake news upvoted on HN. I figured it was most likely nothing more than Apple hate.
  • unethical_ban 6y ago
    Love to see an imperfect, community moderated site calmly admit and accept retractions from people, which is a higher standard than some of the most well known "news"rooms in the country.
• dang 6y ago
  The related thread from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584. This was a moderation failure too. We try to find out when stories are false and downweight them or at least change their titles. We want HN to be a place where erroneous claims, especially indignation-rousing ones, get fixed, not amplified, and it pains me that we missed such a clear case. I admire that people have been so proactive about correcting it, though. That is rare.
• rexreed 6y ago
  As a side note, in my experience Paypal does keep their transaction fees even when processing a refund. How does this behavior differ from what people were incorrectly accusing Apple of doing?
  • josephcsible 6y ago
    Three reasons: 1. Apple has a monopoly on sales of iOS apps. If PayPal does something you don't like, you can leave them for their competitor and still keep providing the same products and services to your customers. If Apple does something you don't like, you need to either put up with it or abandon your iOS customers. 2. PayPal's fee is an order of magnitude less than Apple's fee. 3. PayPal usually has actual costs when someone buys and refunds something, since most consumers don't keep a balance in their PayPal account. Apple usually doesn't, since a lot more consumers do keep a balance in their iTunes account (from, e.g., gift cards).
• ffggvv 6y ago
  this was believable to me specifically because platforms like audible/kindle actually do this for book sellers. same with payment processors
• tus88 6y ago
  > I don’t know where I got the idea that it worked the way I thought it did Hold on...so where did he get it? Surely it wasn't a figment of his imagination?
• neximo64 6y ago
  People did mention it but then you get all 'citation needed' and get downvoted or plainly flat ignored. So much so the outrage is heard more than the fact.
• adverbly 6y ago
  Another one who fell for the fake news right here. Part of me wishes there was a better way to model retractions, corrections, and certainty of claims within social media platforms. I almost feel like by default a post or tweet should be marked as uncertain/not serious, and in order for someone to mark it as certain, they require some form evidence like a link or a picture. Then people browsing on the platform should by default only see posts made with certainty unless they manually select to view uncertain or unserious posts. This might also stop the community backlash when someone says something stupid and people take them too seriously and start a flame war over it. For those browsing in serious mode, if one user has their evidence discredited too often then they lose privileges and rights on the serious platform.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]