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Sounds like they're misusing the word "suspicious". Either that, or they're setting themselves for PayPal-esque issues at scale. If your business model is "one

by nathanb 14y ago

Sounds like they're misusing the word "suspicious". Either that, or they're setting themselves for PayPal-esque issues at scale. If your business model is "one suspicion means your account is frozen", once you are at a scale large enough to have false positives, you are destined for scandal. I guarantee that if you hope to have a million users and you retain this model, "Gittip froze my account and I can't get my money" is going to be on the front page of HN at some point. As with other commenters, I applaud the desire to be responsible with others' money and I completely understand the need to be conservative if you want others to trust you with their funds. But scale does funny things to good intentions. You will wind up with insufficient funds to staff an adequate support desk. You will wind up with bogus users trying to do shady things with your service, and they will be very convincing and make you want to help them. And you will wind up with legitimate users who love your service and want to use it the way you've designed it but end up tripping your heuristic. And those users will not love you and will feel hurt and betrayed by you, and if you do that to the wrong user it will quantitatively affect your business and the public perception of your organization.

whit537 14y ago
> But scale does funny things to good intentions. This is great feedback, thanks! You really nailed the ways that fraud burns both good people and good companies. What's the right thing to do, then? In publishing a detailed report about this incident, I hope to establish a pattern of adjudicating these things in public: https://www.gittip.com/about/fraud/2012-11-05.html https://www.gittip.com/about/fraud/2012-11-05.html Everyone who was affected by this incident is listed right there on that page. If someone wants to make the case that they're a false positive, they are free to do so, and we can all decide the case together. I think that's different than PayPal. > You will wind up with insufficient funds to staff an adequate support desk. Gittip is a community-managed resource, not a closed product. Right now I'm the support desk. As we scale, the support desk will be staffed by members of the community, chosen by the community, as the community has need. > You will wind up with bogus users trying to do shady things with your service, and they will be very convincing and make you want to help them. If they ask for help they'll be doing so in public, and I'll have you to help me spot them. Many eyeballs, etc. For example, here's a brand new GitHub account asking for details of Gittip's anti-fraud measures and making recommendations: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/364#issuecomment-10186628 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/364#issueco... https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issuecomment-10179510 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issueco... https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/347#issuecomment-10186850 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/347#issueco... https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issuecomment-10179510 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issueco... Waddya think? Fraudster? :^) > And you will wind up with legitimate users who love your service and want to use it the way you've designed it but end up tripping your heuristic. This has already happened. Half the accounts I originally suspended last week, I ended up reinstating with an apology: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/329#issuecomment-10000001 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/329#issueco... Again, that was done in public, as is the matter of recovering stolen money that was passed off on innocent bystanders: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/371 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/371 > if you do that to the wrong user it will quantitatively affect your business and the public perception of your organization. Again, Gittip is a community-managed resource, not a business. The wrong user can say very little that I wouldn't welcome them to say publicly.
- nathanb 14y ago
  In my opinion, by linking a person's gittip account with their public persona (twitter or, worse, github) and then calling a person out as "suspicious", you are doing your user base a disservice. If I was trying to do the right thing by tipping someone I appreciated and then not only did you tell me I was suspicious but you also told the world, I would not be passionate about how great your service was. At the very least I would have a bad taste in my mouth, and at the worst I would likely flee entirely. At a scale of a million people, 0.3% is 30k. Can you imagine a human trying to parse that page at that scale? I can't. You wave the magic phrase of crowdsourcing at the objections, but what person has the sort of energy, patience, and free time to sift through all that? Paypal can't hire enough folks to do that sort of thing; what makes you think you can convince them to work at it for free, month after month, year after year? Oh, you might gittip me fifty cents if I do that for you? Well, OK then. I understand that the last thing you want is for gittip to become a money laundering site. If news got out that your pet project is a great way to get funds out of stolen credit cards, that could easily destroy you completely. Perhaps avoiding that scenario makes the measures you've put into place worth it. But it feels like you've limited both the rate at which you can grow and the scale to which you can grow. Every now and again you read about someone's Amazon account being closed because it gets caught up in their automated scam dragnets and the customer service drone assigned to their case is monumentally unhelpful. Do you think that a system similar to yours (aggressively flagging accounts, exposing presumed fraudsters, relying on community volunteers and public transparency) would make their system better, at their scale? Do you think they could have reached their current scale if they used such a system?
  - whit537 14y ago
    I'm open to alternatives. What would you suggest?
    - whit537 14y ago
      The primary goal is to keep stolen money out of Gittip. The secondary goal is to recover stolen money once it's inside of Gittip. There are other kinds of fraud to watch for but let's focus on this for now. If Gittip does nothing, then stolen money gets into Gittip, and some portion of that is reported to the banks, and Gittip gets hit with chargebacks. Chargebacks are financially onerous, and if Gittip gets too many of them then we'll lose our privileges with the banks altogether. Moreover, chargebacks take months to hit. It's neither economical nor efficient to use chargebacks as the primary signal for bad accounts. Therefore, I don't see a choice but to try to predict which accounts are going to inject stolen money into Gittip before it happens. Once stolen money is in Gittip, some of that goes to good accounts and some to bad. Either Gittip makes an effort to recover that money somehow, or we simply factor the entire stolen amount into our cost of doing business.

by nathanb 14y ago

whit537 14y ago

> But scale does funny things to good intentions. This is great feedback, thanks! You really nailed the ways that fraud burns both good people and good companies. What's the right thing to do, then? In publishing a detailed report about this incident, I hope to establish a pattern of adjudicating these things in public: https://www.gittip.com/about/fraud/2012-11-05.html https://www.gittip.com/about/fraud/2012-11-05.html Everyone who was affected by this incident is listed right there on that page. If someone wants to make the case that they're a false positive, they are free to do so, and we can all decide the case together. I think that's different than PayPal. > You will wind up with insufficient funds to staff an adequate support desk. Gittip is a community-managed resource, not a closed product. Right now I'm the support desk. As we scale, the support desk will be staffed by members of the community, chosen by the community, as the community has need. > You will wind up with bogus users trying to do shady things with your service, and they will be very convincing and make you want to help them. If they ask for help they'll be doing so in public, and I'll have you to help me spot them. Many eyeballs, etc. For example, here's a brand new GitHub account asking for details of Gittip's anti-fraud measures and making recommendations: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/364#issuecomment-10186628 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/364#issueco... https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issuecomment-10179510 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issueco... https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/347#issuecomment-10186850 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/347#issueco... https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issuecomment-10179510 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issueco... Waddya think? Fraudster? :^) > And you will wind up with legitimate users who love your service and want to use it the way you've designed it but end up tripping your heuristic. This has already happened. Half the accounts I originally suspended last week, I ended up reinstating with an apology: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/329#issuecomment-10000001 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/329#issueco... Again, that was done in public, as is the matter of recovering stolen money that was passed off on innocent bystanders: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/371 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/371 > if you do that to the wrong user it will quantitatively affect your business and the public perception of your organization. Again, Gittip is a community-managed resource, not a business. The wrong user can say very little that I wouldn't welcome them to say publicly.

nathanb 14y ago
In my opinion, by linking a person's gittip account with their public persona (twitter or, worse, github) and then calling a person out as "suspicious", you are doing your user base a disservice. If I was trying to do the right thing by tipping someone I appreciated and then not only did you tell me I was suspicious but you also told the world, I would not be passionate about how great your service was. At the very least I would have a bad taste in my mouth, and at the worst I would likely flee entirely. At a scale of a million people, 0.3% is 30k. Can you imagine a human trying to parse that page at that scale? I can't. You wave the magic phrase of crowdsourcing at the objections, but what person has the sort of energy, patience, and free time to sift through all that? Paypal can't hire enough folks to do that sort of thing; what makes you think you can convince them to work at it for free, month after month, year after year? Oh, you might gittip me fifty cents if I do that for you? Well, OK then. I understand that the last thing you want is for gittip to become a money laundering site. If news got out that your pet project is a great way to get funds out of stolen credit cards, that could easily destroy you completely. Perhaps avoiding that scenario makes the measures you've put into place worth it. But it feels like you've limited both the rate at which you can grow and the scale to which you can grow. Every now and again you read about someone's Amazon account being closed because it gets caught up in their automated scam dragnets and the customer service drone assigned to their case is monumentally unhelpful. Do you think that a system similar to yours (aggressively flagging accounts, exposing presumed fraudsters, relying on community volunteers and public transparency) would make their system better, at their scale? Do you think they could have reached their current scale if they used such a system?
- whit537 14y ago
  I'm open to alternatives. What would you suggest?
  - whit537 14y ago
    The primary goal is to keep stolen money out of Gittip. The secondary goal is to recover stolen money once it's inside of Gittip. There are other kinds of fraud to watch for but let's focus on this for now. If Gittip does nothing, then stolen money gets into Gittip, and some portion of that is reported to the banks, and Gittip gets hit with chargebacks. Chargebacks are financially onerous, and if Gittip gets too many of them then we'll lose our privileges with the banks altogether. Moreover, chargebacks take months to hit. It's neither economical nor efficient to use chargebacks as the primary signal for bad accounts. Therefore, I don't see a choice but to try to predict which accounts are going to inject stolen money into Gittip before it happens. Once stolen money is in Gittip, some of that goes to good accounts and some to bad. Either Gittip makes an effort to recover that money somehow, or we simply factor the entire stolen amount into our cost of doing business.