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Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

This particular trend -- not only not asking for contributions, but openly denying them (often in advance, and when none were ever offered) for a better cause -- is a rising tendency across virtually all of Western society. Watch any challenge with a monetary prize and invariably they'll turn the sad music on and demand that the contestants regale a tale about the old grandma in the old country, or the kid's club they want to donate to, etc (obviously not the hot tub they really plan on buying, or the better SUV). If a kid has a lemonade stand they can't just want to buy a WOW membership, they have to promise that it is for some good cause. Etc.

Honest giving is great, but undermining the value of work to do so isn't always constructive. In this case presumably the hypothetical people who would have given him cash are also in a good place financially.

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Your analysis is good but there is one element you're missing: chargebacks. People who accept a lot of donations get hit with chargebacks from time to time and they can be so difficult to deal with that they actually cost the recipient money.

This is a common complaint among people who take donations for a living, such as Twitch streamers. If you ask any streamer, they will tell you they prefer Twitch "bits" over any one-off donation specifically because bits are non-refundable.

Unfortunately, there are people out there who go around donating and then doing a chargeback just to troll streamers they don't like. It's a really frustrating element of the system which happens to be set up to prefer the customer over the vendor in all disputes, making it ripe for abuse.

It seems like any dispute involving a donation should pretty much be lost by default. It’s not as if anyone delivers an inappropriate product for a donation...

You would think so, but that's not the case. The problem is that people who receive donations don't have any special status with the payment processor. They are treated like any other vendor, so chargebacks are handled the same way.

What if someone steals my credit card and "donates" $1000 to a nazi political party?

Chargebacks are for disputes, not fraud. Provided the merchant did not incur liability by doing something immensely stupid and insecure, the bank is on the hook. If the perpetrator is caught, they will pay restitution to the bank.

That's completely wrong. Chargebacks are _primarily_ for fraud. And any merchant that accepts credit cards over the phone or Internet ("card not present") is liable for fraud, not the bank.

> Provided the merchant did not incur liability by doing something immensely stupid and insecure, the bank is on the hook. If the perpetrator is caught, they will pay restitution to the bank.

Source? As someone who helps support an online credit card gateway, in my experience it is the merchant who has to shoulder the cost (plus an extra penalty fee) of the transaction. Perhaps there are different chargeback policies for card present transactions for physical products, but for online (and therefore card not present) transactions for digital products, I have always seen the merchant have to cover the cost of the chargeback (plus fee). There's a process for disputing the chargeback, saying the customer absolutely made the purchase and got what they were asking for, but almost every time the card would side with the customer, because there was no physical product.

This is one of the reasons when card companies pushed for chip cards, merchants pushed back for chip and pin like cards used in Europe -- to cut down on fraud, which they end up paying for. The only system I've seen where the cost of a chargeback is on the bank instead of the merchant is if the merchant has setup 3D-Secure/Verified by Visa with their products, giving the banks and card companies the opportunity to have an extra login for making the purchase. However, those verify pages are made by the bank, not the credit card company, and are widely unreliable. I tried to set it up for our payment gateway, only to find that some of the banks had completely broken systems for it, leaving customers at an error page instead of buying the product.

> The only system I've seen where the cost of a chargeback is on the bank instead of the merchant is if the merchant has setup 3D-Secure/Verified by Visa...

Verified By Visa is a nightmare, and was killing conversion rates by up to 60%. [1] I'm not sure if it's still the case, but when it first came out Amazon refused to integrate it.

[1] https://econsultancy.com/verified-by-visa-a-conversion-rate-...

Yes, that was definitely also part of the calculation. We expected clients would not use it, because every extra step destroys conversation rates, but we wanted to at least provide the option.

... But even providing the option was a non-starter, because of how many different banks had completely broken systems. We ended up ditching the feature entirely.

I hate the MasterCard verify page.

It took me giving up buying several products over the last year and complaining to the bank every time before I eventually had the correct key to that puzzle.

The details it asks for are not much better than random. Stuff like mixing your residential address and postal address, using a neighboring postcode, including random stuff like a building number or weird artifacts like " , ,".

How anyone is expected to figure out the frankenstein address that MasterCard want's by themselves is beyond me.

Chargebacks also occur for fraud. It's the merchant's responsibility to detect fraud, not the bank (though banks usually do their own screening too). Worth remembering that if your fraud rate goes above 1%, you can be blacklisted for life by Visa & MC. [1] [2]

You can avoid chargebacks by pro-actively refunding any transactions that look suspicious. And if a real customer asks for a refund, you should always give it to them since they can chargeback anyway. But if it's a stolen credit card that got through, the first you'll hear about it is when you get the chargeback from the real cardholder's bank.

Side note: back in the days of shareware, a few of the 'cracking' groups didn't do any cracking at all. They just used stolen credit cards to buy the software and post the licence codes online - no technical talent involved. I'm looking at you, Team OXiDE....

[1] https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/changes-to-visa-charg...

[2] https://chargeback.com/visa-chargeback-monitoring-program/

Often donation payments are used to validate stolen credit cards.

But why should the donee pay (in the form of penalties) for that?

to encourage merchants to do so minimal checks on the credit cards (like implementing 3d secure for example).

Does the streamer get hit by fees or something with chargebacks?

Yes. $15-30 per chargeback independent of whether you win or lose. So even if you “win” a dispute over a $5 charge, you’re $10 in the hole.

Accepting money isn't "free", and usually incurs a non-trivial overhead. If it's someones hobby it's easier to just not accept money and focus on the actual hobby.

Some kid getting pocket money from a lemonade stand is significantly different to accepting recurring donations as an adult. Dealing with either setting up some sort of non-profit, managing tax in your country, accepting international currencies or supporting largely unethical/hostile US based financial institutions like Paypal, it can be a rabbit hole that some just can't be bothered with.

It's also just really weird to critisise people for wanting their users to donate to worthy causes.

If someone doesn't want pay, or donations, then don't ask for it. Don't put a donate/buy button and it seems like the problem is solved. I mean this is a bit strange: it's hard enough getting people to pay for great projects when the makers clearly need it and ask for it, so I am surprised by the need to proactively reject it as if unsolicited donations are piling in their bank account.

However there is nothing weird with discussing this, and that claim is exactly the sort of "moral" short circuit that I find so unpleasant about the whole thing. I would wager few if any people have donated to a charity in lieu for this case. But by announcing such a moral standing they've undermined anyone else who does accept or even request compensation for their creations: Do they have an adequately bad situation to justify such a request?

"Accepting money isn't "free", and usually incurs a non-trivial overhead."

Is that really true? What if I say I only accept checks, or certified checks even.

Wouldn't depositing such checks be trivial?

Yes, you do have to pay taxes on the money (which in countries other than the United States can be very simple), but apart from that the other things you list such as setting up a non-profit, accepting international currencies, or dealing with corporations like Paypal are all optional.

> Wouldn't depositing such checks be trivial?

It would be, yes. But getting an appreciable number of people to donate via check instead of PayPal/Stripe would be highly nontrivial :)

> Wouldn't depositing such checks be trivial?

In Belgium? No, not really, nobody uses checks and I'm fairly certain that for most banks it will cost quite a bit of money to deposit.

Is that a "trend" when greed has been held up as a vice for thousands of years, with ideas like "if you want to be perfect, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven" ?

And of course, there are plenty of people like parents and employers who find it convenient to perpetuate these notions at times.

I don't have ads on my personal blog because I want to give my readers a pleasant experience, not one with ads all over the page, AVG compliance popups and cookie notice bars.

I "lose" about 10 euro per month in ad revenue but I have a good job, I don't care about 10 euro.

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