Apple does not keep the 30% commission on a refund
twitter.com
twitter.com
This was a moderation failure too. We try to find out when stories are false and downweight them or at least change their titles. We want HN to be a place where erroneous claims, especially indignation-rousing ones, get fixed, not amplified, and it pains me that we missed such a clear case. I admire that people have been so proactive about correcting it, though. That is rare.
It clearly states that Apple is entitled to do what was originally tweeted, but, from a lot of anecdotal stories by developers that have actually processed refunds (I am not one. I have never processed a refund), Apple does not actually do this.
A few folks have pointed out that, even though the contract stipulates it, the practice may be considered illegal, or at least open to court challenges; which might be why it isn't enforced.
https://techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/apples-iphone-app-refund-p...
> In the event that Apple refunds any such price to an End-User, You shall reimburse, or grant Apple a credit for, an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application. In the event that Apple receives any notice or claim from a payment provider that an End-User has obtained a refund for a Licensed Application, You shall reimburse, or grant Apple a credit for, an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application. In such cases, Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User.
"an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application" sounds like we're on the hook for the full nut.
"In such cases, Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User." Sounds like they get to keep the 30%, no matter what.
Like I said, it may not be enforceable, in the real world, but that's what the agreement I have, says, verbatim.
> any notice or claim from a payment provider that an End-User has obtained a refund
From the customer side of things, calling their credit card company to have a refund and calling the merchant to have a refund may have the same result, however in the merchant side of things they are completely different with the former result in a penalty for the merchant (chargeback ratio).
I'm pretty sure that the "merchant," in this case, is Apple, so they would need to eat the chargebacks.
I don't think that anyone is well-served by refunds. It damages Apple's brand, it damages the developer's brand, it pisses off the customer, and generally makes life miserable for everyone. Even the payment processor is unhappy.
I suspect that if any knucklehead tried to "refund-bomb" a developer, Apple would step on that fairly quickly.
That being said, if we dig a bit this also shows how Apple is being seen as a bit of a villain by many people (again, including myself) nowadays and had no problems believing Apple was doing this because it pretty much aligns with their IMHO abusive practices when it comes to grabbing money from devs.
Apple will keep selling and having some bad PR isn't going to affect sales much I guess but I can't stop thinking that some day some competitor will show up, or some law will change and they'll be forced to lift the app store restrictions and most of the devs will fly. Maybe it's time for Apple to start considering reducing the greediness with the people who make their platform attractive when these kind of news pass all filters, even in communities like this.
The only thing worse than fake news, is probably taking real world actions based on fake news.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's how the US got itself into the mess we're in now.
Why would devs leave if restrictions are lessened? Devs are there right now, in droves, despite those restrictions.
So in order to have that option, there must be sufficient paying customers, but it can be argued that the paying customers are there because of Apple’s restrictions.
Unless someone came around and showed they have a better track record than Apple, I wouldn’t be interested in changing. But I suspect they would be just as restrictive as Apple is now.
Not worrying about malware and tech support is worth so much in saved time.
That’s why this piece of fake news was so easy to believe for those people tied up in that narrative: because they’d already built up an opinion that Apple was the evil empire through sensationalized editorial pieces. (e.g. Hey being pissed off and publicly complaining that their business model wasn’t compatible with App Store rules, and yet, we don’t see Fastmail having any issues).
In reality, Apple has a monopoly on absolutely nothing, and doesn’t really engage in anything particularly evil or abusive.
Apple has a 14% global market share in smartphones, even less for computers, 19% market share of streaming music: what I’m getting at here is that Apple basically isn’t a leader in nearly any of the segments it sells to except for smart watches and fully wireless earbuds (which are not the entire market).
That's when I swore off of walled gardens in general. I still use them sometimes, but I won't let myself become dependent on them. So, I use Spotify for exploration, but buy anything I would mind losing access to.
I feel like this is basically what happened to Microsoft in the 2000s. They developed a bad reputation and then came the then much cooler underdogs Apple and Google to use that in their marketing materials.
It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.
Corrections in newspapers don't run the same as headlines, nobody upvotes corrections to reddit or Instagram etc...
I'd suggest that as far as iterating in the direction of finding the truth, this is a best in class example of how to do it.
People not reading the comments will then have a way of knowing this is false information.
The main problem is that most of the original thread ballooned with upvotes because it became general "<big corporate entity> is bad" kvetching which is perennially popular and probably doesn't belong on HN at all. As long as these kinds of threads aren't modkilled, these things will happen, you just have to deal with it. Tagging them won't solve anything.
You want to fight that battle?
Edit: no, really, this is important: we're in the middle of the lesson of "social media can amplify things that aren't true and you should check them". Great. So, how do we verify things? What should we be doing? The counter claim link at the top of this thread is also just a random unsourced tweet!
"In such cases,Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User."
That being said, my understanding of 'notwithstanding' in this context would imply that Apple reserves the right to retain its commission even when they refund the price to the End-User.
There's also some other attack vectors I can think of that this renders less likely, like "let's get my big YouTube fanbase to all buy this one app today, then refund it near the end of the refund window, thus pushing this app to the top of the store at no cost to my YouTube fanbase but at cost to Apple!" This would give Apple the cover to keep enough commission to cover the attack. Given the known shenanigans played on the app store, this seems less like some bizarre far-out possibility and more like something that would be a routine thing done by sketchier app developers if the terms didn't make it a bad proposition like this.
But in a normal day-to-day transaction, the logic works out in favor of refunding it even if they do nominally have the contractual right to refuse to do so.
There is also the matter of prior probabilities; if you had asked me beforehand "How certain are you that if Apple refunds a charge, the refund is complete and they also refund their cut?" I'd have given you an answer in the 90%+ range, on the grounds that if they did something that nasty we'd have heard by now. Furthermore, if they did change that policy, I'd expect to hear about it precisely as a change in policy, rather than the sudden discovery that it's been like that all the time.
I am emphatically not holding these up as total answers to the question. I'm not sure there is such a thing. But these are reasons to consider this tweet likelier to be true than the original claim.
There is also the constant possibility "What if somebody knows about these signals and fakes them?" In which case the question is, who would have motivation to do such a thing? In this case I can't see how this Tweeter has any particular motivation to fake this matter, as this retraction mostly doesn't benefit them any. (I mean, I do respect them for it, but we still have the original error to consider. I don't have a concrete threshold, but you're still burning a bit of rep. To see it clearly, consider the strategy of "impress jerf by making lots of public mistakes and then publicly apologize for it"... I do respect the public retraction and maybe the first time it's even a net gain, but it's not a scalable strategy.)
Apple would clearly have a motivation to claim they don't keep the refund even if they in fact do, as clearly keeping that 30% would be bad PR, so this signal would weigh against them. Weighing for them, though, would be the sheer mass of people who could contradict them if they claimed not to keep it but in fact did; any app author of any significant size has direct experience with this and that's a large pool of people, which also includes some vocal people in it.
No, but not having a clear policy makes it very easy for inaccurate gossip about your policy to circulate.
It an interesting topic for many HNers and such seems appropriate that it'll get on to the front page.
That being said, downvoting dissenting comments in the thread are extremely problematic. And is a common theme in HN. Which I think stems from the implicit assumption by many people that upvoting a comment or item means agreeing with it.
I had heard rumours that Apple did not refund the 30% previously, and seeing a developer of respected apps post it (along with a graph, although actually that didn't prove anything lol) and doing a quick Google (where the top result is "Apple's iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers"), I thought made it seem legit enough to post, and thought it would get shot down quickly if it was incorrect!
Interesting lesson in the realities of post-truth as you say! Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched...
It seems so easy to spread misinformation with this way of thinking going on. My point is not to blame you, I just wanted to point out that as long as we accept believable data as true, we’ll see believable misinformation on top of HN.
On reading the original post my gut feeling believed that this could be or is quite likely true. Why? Because it aligns with the continuous declining customer experience I've had with them for the last 5-7 years. Examples include declining product quality, difficulty getting them to service properly, getting busted for impairing performance on older hardware (planned obsolescence) all that feels like tall poppy syndrome, dark patterns and arrogance.
While that may be true, for me the gut feeling was in line with the fake news, which makes it even harder to spot (confirmation bias).
I never worked on iOS apps, but my consumer experience with Apple was such that I would have expected exactly this kind of behavior. They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one.
I just assumed that a company that treats their consumers like this also doesn't treat developers fairly.
Granted, this is my experience from a decade ago. I've never bought anything Apple since. So maybe they've changed.
Do they regularly sell keyboard replacement parts? If not, why expect them to "sell you one"?
And the laptop was "out of warranty", wasn't it? How does "barely" change this?
Because we all want to live on this planet for a few hundred years?
I expect a company that produces things to either supply spare parts on demand, or allow a third party to produce them.
Even more so, when the device I bought costs >1000$
Sure, legally they don't have any obligation to do so, but many things are legal but ethically wrong.
I didn't expect it for free, but a lot of companies want to keep their consumers happy and will fix something that's just out of warranty, especially if it's a part that should last longer than 2 years, like a keyboard.
"Fake news" is a regular thing on the tech/HN community.
The whole hype around technologies (e.g. Mongo/NoSQL, etc) is just that.
As Alan Kay put it "Programming is a Pop Culture".
Do you have a reference for the original of this? I can find people quoting him on it but not the original. I'm also wondering: compared to what? What would it mean for programming not to be a pop culture?
Get nothing
Go back set second date to 2005 ->
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
Win?
As I read it, compared to hard science and engineering for example.
>What would it mean for programming not to be a pop culture?
Less cults, less subjective opinions, less influence of marketing and marketeers and brand names, less "fans" and "fanboism" of some particular brand/product/methodology, etc, for one...
https://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wi...
There is no hype for NoSQL or MongoDB on HN. In fact it is the complete opposite with every one trying to push SQL and PostgreSQL for every use case under the sun.
I wasn't giving an example of a current hype -- just of a hype.
Not trying to call you out, I just think the consistency + choice of hobby horse is funny, and you always stand out as the one person defending MongoDB: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I always wanted to know though: why? What compels you, threeseed?
Do you have a link for this?
https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/nachrichten/region/daumen-ho...
Many threads in HN reflect the tribalism that now permeates society. There are plenty of people on here that will upvote a comment or story simply because it paints Apple in a bad light. Same thing happens to Google, Oracle, and to a lesser extent these days, Microsoft.
It doesn't matter if a piece of information is true, it just has to align with someone's personal-conceived biases.
We have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are better than the people who get sucked in by political trolls on Facebook just because we work with computers.
it was pretty disturbing for me, i had held this place in very high regard prior to that experience.
Indeed we are, it's also the interesting thing about confirmation bias in communities. In any community, they seem to always believe any news that is immediately negative about the subject that they haven't researched about or want they don't like as the real truth.
It's up to us to do our own research with actual evidence rather than sources such as: 'X suggested', 'sources say', 'my friend who works at ABCXYZ' or because it has 1000+ retweets, upvotes, etc.
Generally, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed on social media content like FB, Twitter, HN, etc.
There have been a lot of articles where even the comments were entirely "nothing about this is right" and that's not counting opinion / perspective articles, like cold hard facts wrong.
It's really frustrating to see on HN.
Social media caters way too much to feelings and biases.
Maybe it's a lesson to temper outrage before knowing facts.
Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance?
If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information.
I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way.
So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?
And given Apple’s stance against the bread and butter of less scrupulous companies (privacy intrusion and data mining), it would be no surprise if there are many other people who are literally paid to make them look bad at any cost.
I have a similar shock or fascination when seeing how little the HN crowd understands the benefits of UBI (when tied to inflation + VAT) - there's seemingly been little critical thinking done from foundational principles, and the same common misunderstandings repeat. There's enough momentum of people with little understanding jumping to post that those comments all gain the most traction, and it's too much to jump into discussion with.
A good comparison of differences in abilities and then innate failure/mistakes that we can all make - Elon Musk, who understands exponentials and economies of scale via his success as a marker, and stating he decision makes from first principles, is in support of UBI. He says it's inevitable with technology-automation, and then comparing that to his tweeting some arguably misinformed or shallow on the details about COVID-19 - perhaps not having as full or clear as a picture as he should before someone with his reach posts about something so serious. To me however it's really all just signals for the state of the union, and these are canary moments that highlight how reactive people are and how ill-informed they are - due to not having a hierarchy of trusted sources that most of us follow. Is there someone who's as successful and trustworthy competence wise as Elon is with EVs (etc) but for viruses? It was supposed to be Fauci in the US, right? But he first lied to Americans saying masks don't work - and that lack of integrity is harmful and blinding.
Another word for this is groupthink.
Was it really better before? The cognitive biases behind fake news are not knew. Maybe there were there from the beginning, but we are just getting better at spotting them?
(Twitter is apparently experimenting[1] with the former approach)
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-un...
The downvote is just used as a very low effort sh.tpost without content these days. It's risk-free and even more detrimental to actual discourse than its sibling.
HN specifically prohibits remarking on this when it happens; the guidelines say: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' I understand that the intent of this is to create a polite environment, but the end result is one where uninformed opinions are welcomed.
It's even to the point that some people will proudly proclaim that they didn't read the thing they're responding to, often paired with a complaint that the linked content is too long, or that it didn't account for some gotcha (which it accounts for, just not in the first few paragraphs).
To be clear: you may be informed on a topic, but if you don't read what you're responding to, you aren't informed on what you're responding to. And over time, people whose only source of "information" is uninformed comments are going to be uninformed on topics as well, while believing that they are informed.
> It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.
But neither community consensus nor gut feeling have anything to do with truth. Primary sources, scientific observation, and to a lesser degree, logic and expert opinion--those are what we should be trusting.
I've also learned that intelligent people are a dime a dozen. There's no barrier to intelligence--you're just born smart, and fully half of people are born with above-median intelligence--so the relative value of intelligence is limited. Knowledge, on the other hand, is hard to come by: even if you're extremely well-informed on one subject, there are hundreds of subjects upon which you are completely uninformed. Intelligence can help you become informed if you apply it to learning, but as often as not, intelligent people just use their intelligence to skate by without having to learn things. I know that for a lot of my early schooling, I didn't apply myself to learning because I could get away without work due to my intelligence. This didn't pay off, and in my mid-twenties I had to really learn how to learn.
Nowadays I would rather be informed than intelligent.
EDIT: Note that in the "fixed vs. growth mindset" theory, "knowledge" is just the growth version of intelligence--I'm making a distinction between intelligence and knowledge, but that's not necessarily the terminology other people use.
/s
"Apple is evil" might be wrong, but "Apple reserves the right to be evil" is still closer to the truth than "Apple is not evil".
For all of this community's focus on civility, clearly it, too, falls victim to mob mentality.
HN as a community is far too accommodating to a lot of silliness simply because it gets votes. Remember yesterday's "news" that Intel was moving TSMC? And don't even get me started on the political nonsense HN upvotes. We should all be taking a good long look in the mirror. If we're not going to learn from incidents like this, at least a bit of self awareness would be nice.
It’s a literal breath of fresh air. I’m close to done with community sites that allow upvotes/downvotes.
(You'd think getting a refund is trivially verifiable, too, but who's going to go to all that work?)
Not that well.
He's saying the post claiming that Apple kept the 30% was fishy (and false). I don't know about a cult, but in this case, the criticism was unfounded.
Ironically, your comment is an example of a cult of the anti-cult - always looking out for signs of that other cult.
So kudos to that guy for doing the right thing.
As it turns out, there is a decade-old issue. Apple has a stipulation in their contract that allows them to do it, but they don't actually do it. He misinterpreted some kind of interaction.
Here is the tweet: https://web.archive.org/web/20200729052623/https://twitter.c...
Text:
> And this is minor in the scheme of things, but when a customer refunds your paid app, Apple doesn’t refund the 30% cut they took from you
> So you end up owing them money
Absolutely none of that tweet is correct. They don't cite the contract /at all/, they say very matter-of-factly "Apple doesn’t refund the 30% cut they took from you" which is 100% false.
Edit: a word
Be nice. That was uncalled-for.
I'm not a history revisionist, nor am I an apologist. In fact, we may have many areas in which we agree. You immediately, and intentionally, decided to make me an enemy, and I have no clue why.
I'll revise the comment a bit. Maybe that will make it clearer.
BTW: I took responsibility for writing an unclear comment, and fixed it.
THAT is the kind of thing we need to see more of. It absolutely stinks that people think of every forum in the world as some kind of gladiatorial arena.
I'll just say this, I think you have a pretty warped view of things if being called out of saying untrue things is the same a making someone your enemy or brings to mind a "gladiatorial arena".
I don't hate people or think of them as enemies just because they disagree with me or I disagree with them. If I get called out on bad behavior I reflect and adjust, I don't come out swinging and playing the victim card.
I don't think of you as my enemy, I think of you as someone who said something that I find to be a dangerous way of thinking/justifying and I said as much. Intent matters and the "truth" gotten to by invalid means is a problem even if it ends in "truth" (which again, this tweet did not even meet that bar).
I said I agreed with promptly admitting wrong, which was what the OP was all about. I could care less about the tweet. I revised the comment to reflect what I meant more clearly, after reviewing it, and agreeing with you that it could be interpreted ambiguously.
I also added that there is a legitimate issue, in that Apple has a very broad stipulation in their agreement (did you read yours?), that actually gives them the right to do exactly what the original tweet accused. Even though he was wrong about the facts on the ground, he did actually highlight an issue that has been present since the earliest days of the App Store (more than a decade).
And, yes, you are fighting, which is completely unnecessary. I would bet that, if you (not me) hadn't come out of the gate swinging, we might have found a lot of areas in which we could agree.
I'm actually a fairly decent chap. The chances are even that you are, as well. The Internet tends to bring the beast out in us. I am a reformed troll. I could have really come out swinging, but I don't do that, any more. In fact, as you can easily verify, I attach my name and reputation to everything I post.
In any case, we're done here.
Have a great day!
Most of the time you can lie, distract, and slander your way out of any sticky situation. The same biases that got everyone believing the original lie will take over and your support will be deepened.
Happens with people, companies, religion, and politics.
[edit: I believed it too without thinking]
What is really amusing in hindsight was the number of people willing to pile on and argue that this was in fact totally reasonable of Apple to be doing and that we shouldn't be surprised or upset at all about it.
Exactly, while I had doubts about this accusation on Apple, I was surprised about how many people were okay with it. These people (defenders of Apple) vote, but they're not even likely to be Billionaires (it's not wrong to be a Billionaire if you play fair). Why do they defend such an awful practice if it actually happened and wasn't fake news?
Stripe and other modern payment gateway makes pricing simple, but it's far from simple behind the scene. Most people on HN are probably using credit card for App Store, so it's easy to overlook that App Store offers different kinds of APMs: carrier payment[1], local wallet, stored value card, and local payment services[2]. I don't think Stripe supports half or even third of what App Store supports.
I've worked on local integration for few countries for different kind of payment methods. In some payment method they simply don't refund your fee. In some cases where currency conversion happens it's not possible to refund using the exact rate the charge was made. In some cases the fee is prohibitively high (e.g. 12% for carrier payment). In many cases there are contract fees, connection fee, infrastructure ("nah you have to have your own server cage and a direct fiber line from us") fee and many more. This, plus CDN, maintenance and everything, is one of the reasons why I don't think 30% is outrageous and will probably found it acceptable if they don't refund this fee, taking operational costs involved into account.
(do you mean "didn't really happen"?)
Controversialists work like that. There is no position in defence of power that people won't argue for, and have a little circle of people cheering them on.
I messed up (just edited the comment to correct), what I mean is in a hypothetical scenario where Apple really did this, why would you defend them?
I fell for it too, because it's not a far stretch to imagine Apple doing thing sort of thing.
Just yesterday I read that Audible credits expire, and the reason Audible provides is clearly just a veneer of PR over greed.
... means maybe.
Apple reserves the right to keep its commission and doesn't attach it to payment processing issues. It can do whatever it wants, and we can only guess.
People say all sorts of crazy things there if you follow active users on twitter. They are quick at deleting them too.
I mean there are startups to take screenshots of tweets - https://pikaso.me
Should tell you enough.
It's nice that we acknowledge that we were wrong... but we are doing the same exact mistake right now.
You might even say, the system worked. ;-)
As a society, we have a real problem when people deliberately push falsehoods that they know to be false. This is not such a case, however.
I, for one, upvoted both threads on the basis that this is playing out as a peculiar display of groupthink; a microcosmic martyrdom of truth tellers in the wave of internet points.
If you create yourself a nice echo chamber (which social media and internet allows you to do so) you can triple/quadruple check to your heart's content and still consume "wrong" information.
That makes sense. I worked for a big mobile games company and refunds happened all the time.
It was a classic that people will buy in-game items and ask, int our case, Facebook for a refund. They will keep the items and get the refund, until we created a tool to manage refunds and that cheat saw its due end.
As to generate in-game items has zero cost, it was not a loss per se. But it was a lose in potential earnings if it becomes common place. If Facebook has make us pay for their % that would have been a disgrace from the beginning.
What's more likely: That Apple has been sneaking a 60% cut under thousands of companies' noses for a decade and they're all super chill with this because of...what, charity? Or that a handful of business owners on Twitter are just not great at interpreting figures?
Original take was 'customer refund', which I interpreted as a 'chargeback'.
A refund and a chargeback are very distinctive things.
Exactly! Both posts are showing how reactionary and ignorant these supposedly brilliant entrepreneurs & engineers can be. At least on this thread, the second highest voted thread actually explains the issue clearly without hyperbole.
Apple can be good or bad or irrelevant. The facts should still be the facts, and HN got the facts very wrong in this case.
Apple is pointing a loaded gun at developers and we are praising them for not pulling the trigger.
Apple simply chooses to not enforce (from the anecdotes known so far), but the menace still lingers in their ToS.
"From a payment provider" means a chargeback, e.g. a customer calls their credit card company the charge was fraudulent, and the credit card company files a dispute code against payment provider (usually Visa 83/JCB 546/Mastercard 4853/Mastercard 4863 depending on the case). In this case it's not uncommon to not refund the fee. In fact, many payment providers will also charge you extra fee for the dispute (e.g. Stripe charges $15[1]).
There's also filing fee in case the merchant trying to fight the dispute and lose. The fee varies by network: $500 for Visa, at least $600 for Mastercard.
And the sentence above that covers the regular refund too. Not sure why you left this part out of your quote unless it is your point that at least the practice in case of chargebacks is fair (to which I agree).
As some of the comments point out here, people who tried to correct the claim with data from their experience or cite directly or indirectly Apple, they were downvoted to oblivion.
If HN isn’t guarded against fake info, I guess no one should be expected to.
Part of me wishes there was a better way to model retractions, corrections, and certainty of claims within social media platforms.
I almost feel like by default a post or tweet should be marked as uncertain/not serious, and in order for someone to mark it as certain, they require some form evidence like a link or a picture.
Then people browsing on the platform should by default only see posts made with certainty unless they manually select to view uncertain or unserious posts.
This might also stop the community backlash when someone says something stupid and people take them too seriously and start a flame war over it.
For those browsing in serious mode, if one user has their evidence discredited too often then they lose privileges and rights on the serious platform.
1. Apple has a monopoly on sales of iOS apps. If PayPal does something you don't like, you can leave them for their competitor and still keep providing the same products and services to your customers. If Apple does something you don't like, you need to either put up with it or abandon your iOS customers.
2. PayPal's fee is an order of magnitude less than Apple's fee.
3. PayPal usually has actual costs when someone buys and refunds something, since most consumers don't keep a balance in their PayPal account. Apple usually doesn't, since a lot more consumers do keep a balance in their iTunes account (from, e.g., gift cards).
Someone quoted an Apple contract that appeared to indicate this was a real Apple's policy, which I also found sourced on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/apples-iphone-app-refund-p...
> In the event that Apple refunds any such price to an end-user, You shall reimburse, or grant Apple a credit for, an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application. Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the end.
But I'm unable to find that on Apple's current site, so hopefully it's been removed. TechCrunch's link to the referenced document is on "docstoc.com" and no longer exists.
From now on I will be more careful about what I upvote.
Not only upvoting the story but also downvoting posters to minus-12 who tried to counteract it with correct information:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hn_check
[ footnote: his profile was -12 at the time I wrote the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hn_check ]
[ another edit:]
Sorry for confusion. I wasn't trying to say that _one_ comment got downvoted to -12. His 2 top-level comments ("and this submission is just farcically wrong" and "This isn't correct at all.") ... were at various levels of grey so those 2 comments contributed -4 or -5 or more to the -12. I do agree his tone (especially the [dead] comments) contributed to negative scores but it can simultaneously be true that downvoters thought he was incorrect.
This was how his downvotes looked early this morning: https://imgur.com/a/GuTffzP
The top-level comments have since been upvoted so they are no longer greyed out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderation_system#User_moderat...
So no. No civil tone.
You've misunderstood how downvotes work. That person's account has multiple downvoted and flagged comments in other threads. (You can see these if you have "showdead" set to "on" in your profile.) I don't think an account gets to -12 on one downvoted comment, I don't think that's currently possible.
(Generally speaking, I know the user discussed has commented more than once.)
Edit: Maybe shadow-banned for the most part of 3 months.
I think the bigger question we should be asking ourselves is why people who had counter claims weren't higher up in the thread. May not be a fault of the community, I'm not sure.
The way credit card processing fees work is that there are two kinds:
1. Per transaction fees, and
2. Percentage fees.
Not all per transaction fees apply to every transaction but if one does it is the same amount on every transaction. Not all percentage fees apply to every transaction, but when they do the amount is a percent of the charge amount, with the percentage the same for every transaction.
The big transaction fee is the "authorization fee". For a small merchant this might be $0.25-$0.30. If you are bigger they might give you a lower fee. I work at a company that is small now, but had a brief period of high sales and we were given $0.20 which thankfully has stuck. I've read that this can go as low as maybe $0.15 and perhaps even lower for really big merchants.
Another transaction fee is the AVS fee, which is $0.02. You are hit with this on any transaction where you supply address information and ask the card processing system if that matches the on-file information for the card. MasterCard has a $0.0195 fee called the NABU fee, which stands for something like "National Brand Use", which we apparently pay for the privilege of using the name MasterCard.
For the percentage fees, there will be a certain base percentage you are always hit with, and then various others that apply to some transactions. For all but very large merchants the base might be around 2% or so. I'm not sure what it is for the very largest.
(The above is if you have a merchant account yourself and directly use a payment processor like Authorize.Net or Merchant e-Solutions (MES). If you go through someone one step removed they might simplify it into one fixed fee per transaction plus either a fixed percentage fee or a tiered percentage fee system where a given charge gets one of the tiers. Apple almost certainly does not go through an intermediary like that. They either go through someone like Authorize.Net or MES, or maybe even are big enough to have access at an even lower level).
Anyway, the thing about this is that when you process a refund all that is guaranteed is that the credit card user gets their money back. Those fees you paid to have the charge processed? Some of them stick, such as the authorization fee. Furthermore, the refund itself is a transaction that will incur some of the per transaction fees (I don't think it incurs any of the percentage fees but I'm not absolutely certain--credit card processing bills are often extremely confusing and I've never been able to figure out from looking at the bills from at least 5 different processors we've used exactly what fees apply).
Assuming that most Apple app sales are $0.99, and taking into account the processing the refund will incur at least some fees, and allowing that Apple certainly gets better rates than I've ever seen, I can still easily believe that the net fees Apple pays on a combined $0.99 charge and $0.99 refund are in the ballpark of $0.30.
And since the whole freaking credit card system is set up, or at least appears to be from a merchant's point of view, to make sure that of all the parties involved in a transactions--the customer, the merchant, the merchant bank, the payment processor, the credit card companies, and the issuing bank--it is the merchant that bears the costs when anything happens that is going to cost someone money, nearly everyone who accepts credit cards as payments reacted to the claim that Apple keeps the 30% with "...and in equally unexpected news, the Sun rose this morning".
1. Say something that clearly will make the news, regardless of it being true/false.
2. By the time people try to debunk it, it has already made its impact and served its purpose.
3. Even when the truth comes out, since it's usually boring, it won't make the news that much.
4. Congratulations! Now you have further strengthened the Internet "echo chambers," which means those who heard the false news are not even interested in hearing the truth.
Another thing that worries me is that "quiet people have the loudest minds" (by S. Hawking), which I interpret as the silent, lurking community members who don't stand up to correct a wrong (e.g. out of fear of getting downvoted/grayed_out, or simply because they don't want to get involved in discussions, etc.) IMO, they are just as blamable as those who publish lies.
I certainly do not equate votes to truth, and I hope most HN readers do not. Voting on HN is just a way to avoid adding shallow comments. I always assumed that most of the people on here are used to treating the popular opinion with a grain of salt.
I believed this particular story because it seemed like something Apple would do, which maybe is a bigger problem in Apple's image. Or maybe I'm just cynical.
Imagine if this happened in more mainstream, more polarized communities where this Tweet would get posted, immediately and undeniably be taken as fact, and then promoted/upvoted without being taken down. And debunking something popular with facts will lead to it being parodied, downplayed, or ignored in favor of keeping the false narrative.
No wonder a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth puts its shoes on.
I'm not certain it works for all flagged comments, but it definitely shows you more than you'd see otherwise.
That's a pretty efficient way to handle errors. I wish mass media worked the same way. My 2c.
Judging from your screenshot I'd say that comment was styled as .commtext.c5a:
.c5a, .c5a a:link, .c5a a:visited { color:#5a5a5a; }
Anyway, discussions on downvotes are boring and guidelines-breaking, and even worse when it's misinformation, as a single comment could only contribute -4.
I've emailed the mods to detach this thread.
Edit: And... this comment has promptly contributed -4 within ten minutes. I don't really give a crap since I've got enough points to withstand a scratch like this. But the irony of being heavily downvoted for correcting misinformation on a thread supposedly correcting misinformation...
> Is this community this clueless?
going through his history, like 50% are gray -- fair or not, didn't bother reading -- but I don't think its from this one event.
I have learned, as most of us have, that communication technique has everything to do with how well information is received.
But IMO we need to stop acting like that’s a good thing. It’s an unfortunate reality.
Niceness in not a virtue. We should be careful not to elevate it to such.
Truth is more important that how something makes you feel. Honestly is more primary than politeness.
The problem with believing people based on how well they communicate should be obvious: if someone can communicate well, it might alter the chances towards more expertise, but it is not a guarantee.
At a certain point we start fetishizing polite communication.
This isn’t wholly different from liking people more because they are good looking.
It’s inevitable that people act that way, but we shouldn’t celebrate it, should try to resist it.
Like you wrote, the words used can promote truth to a greater or lesser extent. Almost always a polite but confident phrasing increases the transmission and replication of truth.
It does take more work. It does take increased linguistic and emotional skill (and work). It gets easier with practice.
This is their bio:
"HN was created as an example of how to foment Dunning-Kruger among a community. Nowhere else will you find such a wonderful collection of imaginary "experts". Today's outrage -- someone who is clearly wrong about how refunds on the App Store work, yet the overwhelming majority of HN are too profoundly stupid/ignorant/myopic to see the error and just run with it.
Top of the front page, thousands of comments...original guy retracts it. Hours later the story is still here and still getting comments from the idiot base.
I'd be embarrassed to be herding this collection of dumbshits."
That sort of approach to talking with HN is going to be downvoted. And I would argue deservedly so.
Sometimes people become toxic because they weren't treated fairly.
We need to remove downvoting temporarily for next 6 months. See how things pan out.
Cancel culture. Dissent and attack on free speech. Smearing of truth. People are afraid to speak up. Chilling effect.
@dang - this is urgently needed. It’s raising alarm bells like no other to me.
Occasionally you get "Boston Bomber" moments, and something true gets downvoted. That is on the poster to figure out why and how to present it in a way that will be accepted.
(I have 60k karma, so I know how to play ranked competitive HN, but even I still get downvoted occasionally if I'm lazy about sourcing or needlessly confrontational)
(edit: first downvote received in less than thirty seconds. Walked into that one, I suppose. Now leaving the edit window at +3. Sorry, +8. You're not really supposed to threadsit your own comments like this, but since we're talking about the voting system I thought I'd mention it)
If you go against the grain of HN on Elon Musk, Tesla, India or the US (and many other topics) then your comment, like this one, is tanking. Which also shows as many regulars from 5 years ago have left, I seldom see someones comments I recognize.
So I do object your argument.
Comments are good to get some opinions on a topic if you dont know about the topic of the linked post. I still read topics therefor.
But in the end I don't know if it'll make much of a difference, a bad community will always manage to push bad content to the top, a good one will manage to reward insightful content. Technical solutions can only go so far to fix what is essentially a social problem.
Side A: 1000+ voted story, with Apple’s recent App Store sentiments, emotionally engaging. This is the mob.
Side B: A lone fact checker. The comment posted by this fact checker was not ambiguous. It literally said that this whole thread is false. That kind of gravity in a comment is different from your usual discourse.
Side B is overrun by Side A. I am seeing this in our society, not just on this forum.
I feel like it’s different than you and I discussing whether tabs or spaces are better. It’s being overrun by emotions. We need to allow criticisms to surface and counterpoints to be heard when they’re devoid of attacks/trolling. Downvoting is creating a rather reinforcing mechanism for the mob the feel good about their stance. Further fueling it.
I am spooked by the current atmosphere on the internet. And I’m spooked by many instances of mob mentality in our society. Note: I am not talking about US protests.
Slashdot had a better moderation system ca. 20 years ago - you needed a reason along with the downvote and people would think twice about downvoting for "comment says something that may be factually right but somehow hurts my feelings or aligns with orange man". Meta-moderation also helped.
The moderator here is doing a good job, but perhaps he's being overwhelmed lately by the polarization and extreme groupthink on many issues.
A number of experiments were made and abandoned; Slashdot's different types of up/down vote that users could weight themselves, Advogato's trust network, and so on.
Software 101, something 10 years old has some sort of proportional to 10 years worth of work in it.
It's also not cancel culture here yet, flagged and dead are viewable.
Part of the reason HN has defences against cancel culture is they don't make changes.
This may be an argument for its correct functioning in the technical sense but is blatantly ignorant on changes in society and communication. If a mechanism becomes misused and exploited after a community grows and welcomes people from other communities, it has to be reconsidered. Social interaction definitely doesn't scale smoothly.
How do you know he was correct?
This whole "cancel culture" thing is a 2020 thing, while HN has operated like this since when? 2005? HN has been "cancelling" comments since forever, and it's suddenly a problem? It's part of the rules of the game here :-) You play or you don't.
Such people should be accountable and loose their ability to downvote (and to a lesser extent to upvote) As they actively hurt the epistomological quality of HN comments
So here's the idea: we should be able to call a moderator/contributor, explain to him why you think the downvoting is unfair and he will give retroactions.
I think some limits on downvoting might be useful (some of which might already be in place, I can't remember).
e.g. You can't downvote replies to your comment. (Already in place).
A limit to downvotes to a particular comment. (I thought this was in place but can't find a reference)
Time limit on downvotes. (I think this is already in place).
X downvotes use up Y karma.
I would also like a guideline that you should only upvote or downvote based on the quality of the comment rather than whether you don't like what you think of the commenter...
> This is scary.
That a profile where half the comments are rude gets downvoted? If I want to get called an asshole and read rude, barely intelligible comments I'll go to 4chan. You can disagree and present well-reasoned arguments without devolving to "LOL WAT? U IDIOTS"
> We need to remove downvoting temporarily for next 6 months.
"Need" is an overstatement if I've ever heard one, wow. Sort of an arbitrary timeline, too.
> Cancel culture.
Equating downvoting and community moderation with "cancel culture" is pretty far off base.
> Dissent and attack on free speech.
You have absolutely no right to free speech on HN, nor should you, nor did you ever, nor is that what free speech actually means.
The number of people who equate "the government shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech" with "I can be an asshole in a private forum and you're not allowed to call me an asshole" is astounding, and that is the real problem here.
> Smearing of truth.
By downvoting rude comments?
> People are afraid to speak up.
They're demonstrably not.
> Chilling effect.
Word salad.
> @dang - this is urgently needed.
It's not.
> It’s raising alarm bells like no other to me.
By most news accounts the US is careening toward a totalitarian apocalypse, China is literally sending train loads of Uighur muslims to re-education camps, and we're in the middle (or start, in the US) of a global pandemic, but HN's community moderation standards and practices are what's got your spidey sense tingling?
Hold on...so where did he get it? Surely it wasn't a figment of his imagination?
The fact that Apple reserves the right to keep the commission is very old news:
https://www.imore.com/apple-charging-developers-100-app-refu...
I have heard anecdotes that, at least in some instances, Apple did keep the commission:
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/50181
That might of course be an assumption, not based on proper accounting.