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> I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be. (This is a general comment; not directed at Stripe with whom I

> I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be. (This is a general comment; not directed at Stripe with whom I personally have had no dealings needing support.) It's simple. If you can't provide useful customer service, then you can't provide a service at all. Similarly if you can't scale professionally, then in reality you can't (and shouldn't) scale at all. Tech scales, and customer bases scale, but the real world doesn't scale with it. Professionals with morals, and standards, and pride in what they do, should self-limit their business to what they can realistically handle. And that includes the greedy behemoths across all of tech. If they truly cared about their customers they would accept that there is a limit to how many they can provide quality support for, and artificially restrict their own growth until they've ironed out enough issues that they can release the tap and scale a little bit more. Of course financial imperatives beat both professionalism and pride in how the company operates, so that never happens. There's no technical fix. There's no financial fix. There's probably no legal fix either. It needs an attitude fix.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Your argument basically boils down to "companies shouldn't be greedy", so I'm going to have to throw it onto the "not a realistic solution" bucket. But I also don't believe the moral lines are as clear cut as you would like to make them. The issue is that the vast majority of users receive excellent service, at a historically extremely low cost. The problems always arise at these edge cases where legitimate human behavior is often indistinguishable from malicious behavior without further information. But if a company decides to go with the solution of "we're not going to scale unless we have 100% of all these edge cases covered", that company would long be out of business from competition who is able to offer a lower priced product with better support for 99.9% of users. This type of problem is essentially the same as classic externality issues, and after reading some of the other responses to my comment, I think the only way this can be solved is with government intervention requiring some level of responsiveness so that there is a level playing field for all companies.
- kcartlidge 4y ago
  You're right in it not being a realistic solution. It's a shame, but I'm not naive. Your main comment though is about requiring 100% fixes before scaling. I specifically said "until they've ironed out *enough* issues that they can release the tap and scale a little bit more" which is not the same thing, so I'm not actually advocating what is implied. I suspect I'm closer to what you yourself are saying in that argument than perhaps I made clear (sorry). With that said, I see all this as part of a larger problem. The examples of YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook come to mind. They are terrible at moderation, and the reason is that the default approach is to automate these aspects due to the scale involved. And I think that's wrong for the same reason as my original comment - if you cannot moderate at scale you shouldn't scale. The annoying thing is that they can moderate at scale, but to do that they would need to employ more humans. Which they won't do. An awful lot of what is wrong in tech is down to the willingness to scale purely by automation and not with humans, consequences be damned. Again, though, I'm not naive about the chances of it ever being otherwise.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Your argument basically boils down to "companies shouldn't be greedy", so I'm going to have to throw it onto the "not a realistic solution" bucket. But I also don't believe the moral lines are as clear cut as you would like to make them. The issue is that the vast majority of users receive excellent service, at a historically extremely low cost. The problems always arise at these edge cases where legitimate human behavior is often indistinguishable from malicious behavior without further information. But if a company decides to go with the solution of "we're not going to scale unless we have 100% of all these edge cases covered", that company would long be out of business from competition who is able to offer a lower priced product with better support for 99.9% of users. This type of problem is essentially the same as classic externality issues, and after reading some of the other responses to my comment, I think the only way this can be solved is with government intervention requiring some level of responsiveness so that there is a level playing field for all companies.

kcartlidge 4y ago
You're right in it not being a realistic solution. It's a shame, but I'm not naive. Your main comment though is about requiring 100% fixes before scaling. I specifically said "until they've ironed out *enough* issues that they can release the tap and scale a little bit more" which is not the same thing, so I'm not actually advocating what is implied. I suspect I'm closer to what you yourself are saying in that argument than perhaps I made clear (sorry). With that said, I see all this as part of a larger problem. The examples of YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook come to mind. They are terrible at moderation, and the reason is that the default approach is to automate these aspects due to the scale involved. And I think that's wrong for the same reason as my original comment - if you cannot moderate at scale you shouldn't scale. The annoying thing is that they can moderate at scale, but to do that they would need to employ more humans. Which they won't do. An awful lot of what is wrong in tech is down to the willingness to scale purely by automation and not with humans, consequences be damned. Again, though, I'm not naive about the chances of it ever being otherwise.