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Can you email me at smca@stripe.com? We support a bunch of AI businesses on Stripe and I'd like to take a closer look. (What you're describing doesn't sound un

by smca 4y ago

Can you email me at smca@stripe.com? We support a bunch of AI businesses on Stripe and I'd like to take a closer look. (What you're describing doesn't sound unsupportable to me.)

water-your-self 4y ago
Employee vigilantes browsing forums is not a viable method of customer support.
- Kelteseth 4y ago
  Have they ever responded to this criticism on HN? This is so weird, and it really shows that you should stay away as far as possible from Stripe.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    Stripe is probably the tech company doing the most outreach ever in terms of help, support and documentation. They have people on HN and many subreddits, they officially use Discord, Reddit, Twitter as support channels, they provide phone support… Really there’s many tech companies guilty of the “so complaining on HN is the only way to fix it” but in my experience this is not the case with Stripe. Disclaimer: I work in fintech and sometimes partner with Stripe.
    - figassis 4y ago
      Parent comment is right. Whether they monitor social media or not, it is only needed because their official support channel failed and shut the door on their customers. So they're here to pick up the pieces for PR. If this forum was not full of entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs what might one day be a larger customer/partner to stripe, I'm not sure they'd show up here. It makes me very hesitant to use stripe at any considerable scale. Why is it that we don't see 1+ posts/month regarding AWS? Seems to me that there is an incentive to closing cases in companies like stripe, regardless of actual resolution.
      - scrollaway 4y ago
        I’ve seen these types of post for AWS here too, they just don’t get upvoted because more people use AWS and know better. I have seen this pattern a lot with HN. Stuff gets upvoted based on the external perception of how things “probably” work. Another example about stripe from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760887 Guy complains his business was shut down by stripe; you dig into it, you find that he was proxying payments in a way that bypasses KYC for his customers (and was even aware of the issue and fixing it but chose to grandfather existing customers into the old system). In other words, if a customer wanted to sell deeply illegal stuff on his platform, they could do so untraceably. No wonder he got hit by a massive fine. Just as you’d be dubious if you encountered a customer saying “aws shut down my account for no reason and won’t talk to me”, I am similarly dubious when people say this about stripe. That’s not to say they’re flawless; they’ve definitely been getting worse as they keep scaling. I just don’t think it’s fair to put them in the same category as Facebook or something. My guess, this was a mistake, and a resolution would have easily been possible through any of the support channels (faster if using the external ones probably) iff indeed it is a mistake.
  - cosbgn 4y ago
    Actually from what I've seen is the best way to get someone to really care. I appealed 3 times, always rejected. I posted this and in 30 minutes my account was getting re-enabled.
- parker_mountain 4y ago
  It's not, but employees who see things that are wrong and shrug their shoulders isn't exactly viable, either.
  - adql 4y ago
    shrug works for google, amazon, microsoft
    - parker_mountain 4y ago
      Do you honestly think that people from those companies aren't on here and taking active feedback? And actually, I've seen people from two of those companies (amazon and microsoft) in the comments actively engaging with the community, so not great examples to use.
      - uoaei 4y ago
        You're talking about issues feedback, but this thread is about issues resolution.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        parker_mountain 4y ago
        It's really two sides of the same coin.
        uoaei 4y ago
        That makes zero sense.
        parker_mountain 4y ago
        They are both examples of using public channels to identify issues and respond to people having those issues. It is extremely clear.
- RGamma 4y ago
  Scale first, clean up later. It's the DNA of unicorns.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    When does a startup stop being a startup and starts being a normal company that handles things like support and "edge cases" only affecting 0.01% of their users/customers? At some point, those 0.01% are still (tens/hundreds of) thousands.
    - carom 4y ago
      To be fair Stripe support is pretty helpful. I chatted with them tonight to clear up trouble I was having with the API.
      - smca 4y ago
        I'm glad to hear that.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      Maybe the ideal is to exist in a superposition where you are a normal unresponsive scaled-up tech company to your boring ordinary customers, but still project a startup image to cutting-edge users who might bring in substantial new business. Stripe seems to be doing a pretty good job at that.
- Applejinx 4y ago
  Seems you can usually replace 'not a viable' with 'only available' and be in basically the same place. Practically, you gotta thank the person for the role they're taking on. Holistically, they're not really part of the system, so that role doesn't exist. They're certainly not getting paid to do that and it needs to not scale up to where it's interfering with their real job.
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  Seems like it is though.
KyeRussell 4y ago
I’m surprised by how often I see these threads about Stripe specifically. I don’t know how much of this is because Stripe is the biggest player, or how much of it is because people have learned that you can come here to get your stuff sorted. Honestly, to me, it doesn’t matter. There are a handful of beyond viable Stripe alternatives that I’d be tempted to use because this is just teaching me that this is a regular thing that happens for anything but the most bland Stripe uses. I vaguely understand that anything financial has these sorts of ham-fisted risk controls. That doesn’t help quell the unease I have about Stripe. The optics are just…not great.
- FredPret 4y ago
  Same. I put my startup on a different platform because of things like this. I’m not a crypto bro but I strongly hope crypto eventually develops into a system where I can just get a direct payment from my users without a pearl-clutching middleman like Stripe / Paypal / whatever.
cosbgn 4y ago
Hi Sam, I just got a personal email from you and my account is being re-enabled. I just want to underline the fact that I did send 3 different appeals and they all got refused, and it seems that HN is the only way to get attention from Stripe. I like Stripe but is getting painful to deal with this sort of support. Thanks for looking at my case personally!
- smca 4y ago
  I'm glad I could help resolve this for you. The number of appeals you had to step through to get to this point is frustrating and I'm sorry for the hassle. We're going to take a closer look at our policies for businesses tangential to "essay mills" and how we can better delineate between them so that this doesn't happen again.

by smca 4y ago

Can you email me at smca@stripe.com? We support a bunch of AI businesses on Stripe and I'd like to take a closer look. (What you're describing doesn't sound unsupportable to me.)

water-your-self 4y ago

Employee vigilantes browsing forums is not a viable method of customer support.

Kelteseth 4y ago
Have they ever responded to this criticism on HN? This is so weird, and it really shows that you should stay away as far as possible from Stripe.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Stripe is probably the tech company doing the most outreach ever in terms of help, support and documentation. They have people on HN and many subreddits, they officially use Discord, Reddit, Twitter as support channels, they provide phone support… Really there’s many tech companies guilty of the “so complaining on HN is the only way to fix it” but in my experience this is not the case with Stripe. Disclaimer: I work in fintech and sometimes partner with Stripe.
  - figassis 4y ago
    Parent comment is right. Whether they monitor social media or not, it is only needed because their official support channel failed and shut the door on their customers. So they're here to pick up the pieces for PR. If this forum was not full of entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs what might one day be a larger customer/partner to stripe, I'm not sure they'd show up here. It makes me very hesitant to use stripe at any considerable scale. Why is it that we don't see 1+ posts/month regarding AWS? Seems to me that there is an incentive to closing cases in companies like stripe, regardless of actual resolution.
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      I’ve seen these types of post for AWS here too, they just don’t get upvoted because more people use AWS and know better. I have seen this pattern a lot with HN. Stuff gets upvoted based on the external perception of how things “probably” work. Another example about stripe from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760887 Guy complains his business was shut down by stripe; you dig into it, you find that he was proxying payments in a way that bypasses KYC for his customers (and was even aware of the issue and fixing it but chose to grandfather existing customers into the old system). In other words, if a customer wanted to sell deeply illegal stuff on his platform, they could do so untraceably. No wonder he got hit by a massive fine. Just as you’d be dubious if you encountered a customer saying “aws shut down my account for no reason and won’t talk to me”, I am similarly dubious when people say this about stripe. That’s not to say they’re flawless; they’ve definitely been getting worse as they keep scaling. I just don’t think it’s fair to put them in the same category as Facebook or something. My guess, this was a mistake, and a resolution would have easily been possible through any of the support channels (faster if using the external ones probably) iff indeed it is a mistake.
- cosbgn 4y ago
  Actually from what I've seen is the best way to get someone to really care. I appealed 3 times, always rejected. I posted this and in 30 minutes my account was getting re-enabled.
parker_mountain 4y ago
It's not, but employees who see things that are wrong and shrug their shoulders isn't exactly viable, either.
- adql 4y ago
  shrug works for google, amazon, microsoft
  - parker_mountain 4y ago
    Do you honestly think that people from those companies aren't on here and taking active feedback? And actually, I've seen people from two of those companies (amazon and microsoft) in the comments actively engaging with the community, so not great examples to use.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      You're talking about issues feedback, but this thread is about issues resolution.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - parker_mountain 4y ago
        It's really two sides of the same coin.
        uoaei 4y ago
        That makes zero sense.
        parker_mountain 4y ago
        They are both examples of using public channels to identify issues and respond to people having those issues. It is extremely clear.
RGamma 4y ago
Scale first, clean up later. It's the DNA of unicorns.
- luckylion 4y ago
  When does a startup stop being a startup and starts being a normal company that handles things like support and "edge cases" only affecting 0.01% of their users/customers? At some point, those 0.01% are still (tens/hundreds of) thousands.
  - carom 4y ago
    To be fair Stripe support is pretty helpful. I chatted with them tonight to clear up trouble I was having with the API.
    - smca 4y ago
      I'm glad to hear that.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Maybe the ideal is to exist in a superposition where you are a normal unresponsive scaled-up tech company to your boring ordinary customers, but still project a startup image to cutting-edge users who might bring in substantial new business. Stripe seems to be doing a pretty good job at that.
Applejinx 4y ago
Seems you can usually replace 'not a viable' with 'only available' and be in basically the same place. Practically, you gotta thank the person for the role they're taking on. Holistically, they're not really part of the system, so that role doesn't exist. They're certainly not getting paid to do that and it needs to not scale up to where it's interfering with their real job.
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Seems like it is though.

KyeRussell 4y ago

I’m surprised by how often I see these threads about Stripe specifically. I don’t know how much of this is because Stripe is the biggest player, or how much of it is because people have learned that you can come here to get your stuff sorted. Honestly, to me, it doesn’t matter. There are a handful of beyond viable Stripe alternatives that I’d be tempted to use because this is just teaching me that this is a regular thing that happens for anything but the most bland Stripe uses. I vaguely understand that anything financial has these sorts of ham-fisted risk controls. That doesn’t help quell the unease I have about Stripe. The optics are just…not great.

FredPret 4y ago
Same. I put my startup on a different platform because of things like this. I’m not a crypto bro but I strongly hope crypto eventually develops into a system where I can just get a direct payment from my users without a pearl-clutching middleman like Stripe / Paypal / whatever.

cosbgn 4y ago

Hi Sam, I just got a personal email from you and my account is being re-enabled. I just want to underline the fact that I did send 3 different appeals and they all got refused, and it seems that HN is the only way to get attention from Stripe. I like Stripe but is getting painful to deal with this sort of support. Thanks for looking at my case personally!

smca 4y ago
I'm glad I could help resolve this for you. The number of appeals you had to step through to get to this point is frustrating and I'm sorry for the hassle. We're going to take a closer look at our policies for businesses tangential to "essay mills" and how we can better delineate between them so that this doesn't happen again.