Flagged because we are seeing a lot of these on HN, and they seem to be attempts to fraudulently manipulate customer support, rather than genuine stories.
This is legit. We run escape rooms. Breakoutgames.com and have been Stripe customers for 6+ years on all of these accounts. No issues and low chargebacks. Not sure what triggered this.
It might be legit, but that doesn’t change the fact that HN is rapidly becoming the defacto escalation point for failed customer support; and while @dang hasn’t yet set a policy around this, it’s not really in the spirit of the website.
Well what would you do if it was your $400k when you know that they look here. If this is the only place that the higher ups actually communicate then this is where they need to see the issues with their company.
The principles that we apply to this kind of thing are clear, but they conflict with each other in this case because Stripe is a YC-funded startup. Basically, these two:
- We downweight overly repetitive topics and follow-up posts [1] because repetition goes against the mandate of the site [2]
- For major ongoing topics, keep the stories that contain significant new information and downweight the rest [3]
conflict with this one:
- We moderate less when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story [4]
The latter takes precedence, so for years we've downweighted these posts much less when the story is connected to YC. However, they've been proliferating, and when complaints like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189858 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744053 start showing up in numbers, that's a community immune response that we have to take care of. So we've recently started downweighting.
(Of course none of this is a comment on the OP's situation, which I'm sure is distressing and stressful.)
Edit: I got an email with a question that I should clarify. The "major ongoing topic" here is really the "customer support of last resort" category of post in general. It's not Stripe-specific—there are tons of these, like this one from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116361. The trouble is that they're repetitive and usually not intellectually interesting (not to discount how important these situations are to the people caught in them). For this reason and because of the repetitive quality (see [2]), we often downweight these. It's just that when the YC angle gets entwingled into this, there's a constraint on how much we can downweight. That's the aspect I was talking about above.
Thanks @dang. Let me know if there is anything that I should change with this post. I'm trying to stick to facts and not get too emotional with this post. I'm sure that Stripe has automated things in place and we got caught up in them. I don't really have an issue with that. I'm trying to provide them with whatever they need to show we are legit, but right now the communication from their support hasn't given me any way to do that.
I'm writing to some contacts at Stripe. If you want to send a note to hn@ycombinator.com with permission to pass on your email address, I can do that as well.
This is legit. We run escape rooms. Breakoutgames.com and have been Stripe customers for 6+ years on all of these accounts. No issues and low chargebacks. Not sure what triggered this.
It might be legit, but that doesn’t change the fact that HN is rapidly becoming the defacto escalation point for failed customer support; and while @dang hasn’t yet set a policy around this, it’s not really in the spirit of the website.
Well what would you do if it was your $400k when you know that they look here. If this is the only place that the higher ups actually communicate then this is where they need to see the issues with their company.
Using a side-channel to get your problem solved sounds like legit hacker spirit imo.
Using HN to contact founders is absolutely the spirit of the site imo
I guess you can call this a policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192.
The principles that we apply to this kind of thing are clear, but they conflict with each other in this case because Stripe is a YC-funded startup. Basically, these two:
- We downweight overly repetitive topics and follow-up posts [1] because repetition goes against the mandate of the site [2]
- For major ongoing topics, keep the stories that contain significant new information and downweight the rest [3]
conflict with this one:
- We moderate less when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story [4]
The latter takes precedence, so for years we've downweighted these posts much less when the story is connected to YC. However, they've been proliferating, and when complaints like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189858 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744053 start showing up in numbers, that's a community immune response that we have to take care of. So we've recently started downweighting.
(Of course none of this is a comment on the OP's situation, which I'm sure is distressing and stressful.)
Edit: I got an email with a question that I should clarify. The "major ongoing topic" here is really the "customer support of last resort" category of post in general. It's not Stripe-specific—there are tons of these, like this one from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116361. The trouble is that they're repetitive and usually not intellectually interesting (not to discount how important these situations are to the people caught in them). For this reason and because of the repetitive quality (see [2]), we often downweight these. It's just that when the YC angle gets entwingled into this, there's a constraint on how much we can downweight. That's the aspect I was talking about above.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Thanks @dang. Let me know if there is anything that I should change with this post. I'm trying to stick to facts and not get too emotional with this post. I'm sure that Stripe has automated things in place and we got caught up in them. I don't really have an issue with that. I'm trying to provide them with whatever they need to show we are legit, but right now the communication from their support hasn't given me any way to do that.
I'm writing to some contacts at Stripe. If you want to send a note to hn@ycombinator.com with permission to pass on your email address, I can do that as well.
Thank you very much @dang
sent you an email. thanks again.
manipulating customer support to actually providing customer support seems pretty genuine to me, regardless of the reasoning
+1
Sounds like an amusing homebrew for shadowrun: Heist, grift, or socially engineer your way to customer support.