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PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

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Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#81

Post by zarkov99 »

indigochill wrote: post #41
zarkov99 wrote: post #16

They also reportedly shutdown Subscribe Star recently, when people started to use it instead of Patreon, in the wake of the Patreon banning of some prominent You Tuber. This isn't working. The free market doesn't seem to work well in the tech world, where we have all powerfull monopolies controlling what we say, what we know and what we buy. We need new laws.

Can you expand on this line of reasoning a bit? Specifically, what's stopping a competitor from eating Paypal's lunch right now? They have a majority market share now, but disruption still seems a possibility. Often it seems would-be disruptors get bought by the goliaths, but that's on the owners of the disruptors making their company purchasable such as through accepting investor money. On the flip side, if we did g…

Others comments have addressed the difficulties with creating a PayPal alternative. New laws would be vulnerable to corruption, yes, of course, but that is not a new problem and there are mechanisms to fight it. As things stand now we are fast and sleeply sliding back to the Rober Baron times as more and more of our lives are gated by a handfull of players.

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#82

Post by tgtweak »

myself248 wrote: post #67
febin wrote: post #20

Paypal has done this multiple times, here are some incidents. https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/My-Account/Permanent-BAN... https://medium.com/@puntofisso/paypal-closed-my-account-with... https://www.elliott.org/blog/banned-from-palpal-account-limi... https://www.success.grownupgeek.com/index.php/2008/04/05/pay... Completely relying on any third party is a bad idea. We should consider the risks when we signup to an…

Yup, they froze the Neo900 project's funds and caused them to miss a bunch of supplier contract deadlines: https://neo900.org/news/paypal-trouble-delays-project Basically killed the project. It's still sortof moving, but a shell of what it once was. PayPal's size allows them to dictate terms like "We'll screw you worse than a bank but you can't sue us like a bank", and nobody's been able to take them down yet. One ca…

They've screwed countless group buys by locking the organizers account and freezing funds after "detecting" unusual spending (ie receiving money from a bunch of other users in a short period of time). Same thing happened to a friend organizing a group gift for another mutual fiend. Unethically, PayPal kept receiving funds to the account after they froze it.

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#83

Post by outoftheabyss »

hirundo wrote: post #60

From the follow-up tweet: > Instead of giving a valid reason, company says "specific reasons for such a decision is proprietary & it is not released since that could impair PayPal's ability to do business in a safe and secure manner" I've been trying to close my PayPal account for the last week and will keep trying, but so far have not been able to. I've had this account since 2000. I want to close it because of the…

I'm with you. The problem is, PayPal weren't the only payment processors to bail on Substar, if we want to purchase online which popular/accessible processors are not engaging in similar? Genuine question

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#85

Post by isoskeles »

qeternity wrote: post #68
zarkov99 wrote: post #16

They also reportedly shutdown Subscribe Star recently, when people started to use it instead of Patreon, in the wake of the Patreon banning of some prominent You Tuber. This isn't working. The free market doesn't seem to work well in the tech world, where we have all powerfull monopolies controlling what we say, what we know and what we buy. We need new laws.

> They also reportedly shutdown Subscribe Star recently, when people started to use it instead of Patreon, in the wake of the Patreon banning of some prominent You Tuber. This isn't working. The free market doesn't seem to work well in the tech world, where we have all powerfull monopolies controlling what we say, what we know and what we buy. We need new laws. This is not what a "free market" means. Paypal is not re…

Why quote the entire comment you’re replying to?

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#86

Post by MiddleEndian »

itchyjunk wrote: post #32

Regardless of weather the `THN` name is confusing or not and regardless of the speculations, does paypal need to give a reason for termination? Are they legally obligated? Is it something they should do for the sake of customers? Should one get mad at `THN` because there name overlaps HN and they supposedly are `real hack` or should we be mad at paypal because it's overreaching it's powers?

I honestly don't have a problem with PayPal dropping a customer. Even though I hate PayPal, if they don't want to do business with somebody they shouldn't have to. But holding their money for 180 days, that is suspiciously like theft

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#87

Post by outoftheabyss »

linkmotif wrote: post #75

Of all the legit PayPal outrage stories this one doesn’t seem outrage-worthy. Looks like a bad blog spam account trying to capitalize on this community’s name. Good for PayPal and for everyone really? What am I missing?

No rhyme or reason given, the other times Paypal have withheld funds from or barred others for less legitimate reasons, most recently substar. For me big tech actively sabotaging the careers and income of folks with whom they, often arbitrarily find problematic is a big problem, particularly given how reliant people are on the web for these purposes and the increasing lack of competition

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#88

Post by nicc »

zarkov99 wrote: post #16

They also reportedly shutdown Subscribe Star recently, when people started to use it instead of Patreon, in the wake of the Patreon banning of some prominent You Tuber. This isn't working. The free market doesn't seem to work well in the tech world, where we have all powerfull monopolies controlling what we say, what we know and what we buy. We need new laws.

I don't know if we need new laws. We need more competitors, for sure.

Jordan Peterson (if you know him) has partnered to solve the problem of PayPal and Patreon deplatforming people, and is starting a competing service that doesn't depend on traditional payment circuits.

No one knows much about how it will work, but it might prove to be a good alternative to avoid being at the mercy of these companies.

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#89

Post by madrafi »

chongli wrote: post #25
FrankDixon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, THN is actually about hacking. So if the name is confusing on anyones part, I would more likely be HN.

Hacker News is about hacking too, in the original sense of the word. It's a gathering place for people to indulge in curiosity with fellow curious people.

Hackernews is more of an echo chamber than a gathering of curious and etcetera people.

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#90

Post by iDemonix »

https://hackernoon.com/paypal-is-still-one-of-the-worst-onli...

I wrote this article on Hacker Noon 18 months ago or so, nothing has changed. The only good thing was the article going viral, which spawned a new golden level of PayPal customer service - they also had to disable account deletion for 48h, which was nice to know.

I've moved away entirely to Stripe and other services and it's been bliss.

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