
Paypal is evil - joshowens
http://cooking.fourbeansoup.com/post/322154074/paypal-is-evil
======
breck
PayPal is not evil.

I can't think of a company that has done more to democratize banking than
PayPal.

Setting up a Merchant Account can be a real pain (and I too hope PayPal
improves in this regard), but I really hope the author thinks harder about the
title next time before making such a generalization.

If you want to know why PayPal is not evil, try this experiment:

Go to your bank and try to open a checking account with a debit card with _no
minimum balance_ , a positive interest rate, ability to transfer money
instantly without writing a check (basically a wire transfer) for free, _no
insufficient fund charges_ , no monthly fees, free online and mobile banking,
etc.

PayPal offers this to everyone, regardless of how rich or poor you are. If you
don't have a lot of money other banks such as WellsFargo, Bank of America,
etc., could care less about you and will try and take as much as they can from
you in the form of ATM charges, monthly fees, overdraft charges, etc. Of
course, I may be making my own over generalization here, but suffice it to say
that I don't think PayPal is evil.

~~~
joshowens
breck,

I disagree, to me when you don't offer customer service availability to
departments and don't offer any real explanations for denial of service, that
is bad.

Just because a "big bank" is worse, doesn't make Paypal "good". Credit Unions
are the only true "good" in the banking industry. The credit unions are non-
profit and thusly they don't try to gouge you.

~~~
scott_s
What you describe is ineptitude and inability to provide service at a massive
scale. That is bad, but it is not "evil."

------
dbz
I'm on the side of PayPal is evil.

I'm tempted to ask everyone who has been affected by PayPal's "security
measures" (a frozen account) to write a post and submit it to a blog. -But I
don't want to waste anyone's time. Anyways. Aye. I have been affected.

~~~
billclerico
paypal's security measures can seem draconian, but they are necessary in many
ways. the relative ease with which you can open an paypal account (versus
another type of merchant account) makes them vulnerable to fraud. i'm not
saying it couldn't be improved, i'm just saying that it's necessary in many
ways.

where paypal falls on its face (in my humble & biased opinion) is that they
are pretty inflexible and unaccomodating with customer service. this turns a
frustrating situation into an "evil" one.

disclaimer: i cofounded wepay.com, which competes with paypal (in a few
limited ways)

~~~
dbz
Well. I hate to be like this -but- you are now my friend. You go competitor!
You go!

Okay. Now for the "ness" which makes this post not spam.

" _they are pretty inflexible and unaccomodating with customer service_ "

Yes. That is a problem. Another problem is that they freeze accounts almost to
the point of "seemingly randomly". In my opinion. It's not uncommon either.
It's not rare enough to be forgiven as a mistake. Paypal has problems with (I
guess?) flagging "spam". If the problem is viewed as originating because of
the ease of access (easy to sign up), then Paypal should make it harder to
sign up.

However, if you build a fence, you must consider the consequences for when it
falls down. Anyone who has personally been affected by Paypal is also at fault
for not considering it might happen and planning ahead. That statement is my
opinion and I stand by it. There is a reason why I don't have a Paypal account
with ten thousand dollars in it. The reason is that I will need those ten
thousand dollars and I expect Paypal to take it away from me. My paranoia,
however, is founded from experience.

Okay. I ranted. I apologize =/

------
nhebb
The problem with these stories is that the millions of PayPal users who have
never had a problem aren't heard from, so there is no sense of perspective or
balance.

That said, I have a low trust tolerance of payment processors, so I (1) have
alternate payment methods setup and available, and (2) transfer cash out
frequently.

------
Subgun
The evil part of paypal is that they don't learn from their mistakes very
quickly and they seem to not realize they are affecting peoples MONEY. Kinda
silly but true. It's business as usual over there regardless of $1 or $100,000
they just tied up of your cash.

I went through the same scenario in 2003 with paypal with tens of thousands of
dollars locked up pending a review... Thankfully we had a back up plan (credit
card processing)

The plus side of paypal... when you and if you can process some serious loot
through them you get treated like a rock star and you get access people and
help you wouldn't otherwise get.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
tens of thousands of dollars is not serious loot?

~~~
Subgun
It wasn't to them at the time... not until we had processed about 80-100k did
things settle down.

I think they have a hard time with their risk management protocol. Keep
customers happy and loose a lot of money or piss off customers and loose less
money from scammers...

------
aseidman
Concerning that posts with the word "evil" in them seem to rocket up towards
to the top of Hacker News. This post totally abuses the word "evil"

~~~
derefr
Hackers (and I do think that, by and large, HN is still populated by
"hackers") are aesthetes. When we say that something is "good" or "evil,"
we're not making a _moral_ judgement, but rather an _aesthetic_ one.

Consider, for example, that most people here would consider the famous MIT
pranks to be "good." There is no argument that can be made that they are
_morally_ good—but they are certainly aesthetically pleasing, and we respect
that. This article points out the contrapositive: PayPal, no matter its
ethical implications (which breck pointed out above), is aesthetically
displeasing—it offers a bad communicative interface to the developer (a bad
API), and the rules governing it cannot be elegantly described (a bad design).

This also explains quite a bit of what HN seems to love or hate. We love Apple
because they care about aesthetics, but we hate the App Store because it is
capricious and seemingly internally shoddy/"crufty." We love Google because
they're open about everything they do, and so they're predictable—they give us
a sense of being a controllable force, even if they're too large to actually
control.

None of this has anything to do with whether their actions are helping or
harming us. It's purely a matter of subjective Quality, with no quantitative
measurements going on behind it. No one here ever shuts up and
multiplies[1]—and _that's okay_. Humanity is pointless without subjective
experience. But it's good to be conscious that that's what we're really
talking about here.

[1] <http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Shut_up_and_multiply>

------
sucuri2
That scares the shit out of me. I am planning to start offering a paid option
on my startup and using Paypal (so far it was free to everyone)...

Is there a simple solution (at least as a backup) to paypal? I am not in the
US, so most of the recommended solutions I see only work for US companies.

------
xsmasher
In the most recent PayPal horror stories I've read the common denom has been
digital goods. PayPal doesn't seem to know what to do when there's no physical
product being shipped, and no tracking number. Do similar problems happen with
physical items?

------
CalmQuiet
Perhaps there is a _reason_ for the interesting Google "suggestions" when you
start your search with "paypal is"

[ following the strategy on boy-/girlfriends at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043476> ]

Although there are customer service horror stories about Google itself, the
stories about PP seem to keep on coming (as, apparently, do their
policies/procedures).

I make a practice to process only that $ amount through PP that I am
comfortable losing.

------
radu_floricica
With all the horror stories around I'd say they're simply not a professional
choice as a Merchant Account. Simple as that. They do a lot of other stuff
very well.

------
marknutter
What's evil is offering Twitter software that lets people auto-follow
followers and auto-tweet rss feeds. The former helps perpetuate all the
follower spam out there and the latter fills Twitter with yet more redundant
content.

