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Comment by abofh | Hacker News Reader

Lovely, the Google classic "ban the world" approach -- I've been desperately trying to move my client off of vercel, this might just be the gasoline.

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I followed this drama on Twitter. The author was breaking the terms of service and creating DMCA support burden for Vercel. They had proactively been in touch with him a few times to reach a solution.

I think it’s quite reasonable that they blocked the account rather than the project. You wouldn’t have got that level of service from big tech.

> I think it’s quite reasonable that they blocked the account rather than the project.

I’m just responding to your last sentence: why would you go out of your way to say it is reasonable to block the account rather than the project?

I can understand locking the account just as the “lazy default” but I would not call it in any way reasonable - but you did, so I’m curious.

If that is reasonable, what would you consider unreasonable?

(Because to me, the obviously reasonable thing to do would be to block the project and not his entire account.)

It’s just a matter of opinion. I think Vercel were acting reasonably with all of the context we have. Things like terms of business are at the account level, not project level.

Care to provide any links? The Twitter claim above is that their was no communication and the ban occurred on a Friday.

Perhaps, yet it is also reasonable to see this as a reason for anyone else to avoid Vercel.

Just because it's their right to conduct this way, doesn't mean it's not everyone elses exactly equal right to judge that and avoid.

One might consider Cloudflare as a very nice competitor to Vercel in terms of DX, although I suspect all companies use a ban the world approach, even banks.

Not the best time to recommend Cloudflare.

Maybe, but they've kept customers informed throughout the entire outage. https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/hm7491k53ppg

They just had a big outage. What’s the probability of having another so soon?

If outages don't depend on each other, the probability is the same.

Why would you assume independence? I'd expect an outage to put people "on edge" for a period of time following the outage, during which changes are scrutinized to a higher degree, and/or a greater engineering focus/budget is dedicated to reliability to reflect the changed business/image requirements.

Aside from this (which is already very shitty and would cause the same response in me) what are the issues you’re running into with Vercel?

- Support is failing us - I want my team to use you for vercel support, but it isn't there. - Support is failing our customers - when you fail, I end up reverse-depending your repo to tell us why it's failing -- just give us a clear answer, we all move away happy, bullshit and I go to lambda where I just accept it. - EOD: Vercel makes engineers happy to bullshit, but gives operations teams nothing acceptable - I want a deliverable product.

FYI you have to use two line breaks to start a new line with (HN's) Markdown.

Would love to dig into your support issues. Let me know: rauchg@vercel.com

And if the support team had done so, I'd have nothing to converse about :)

After digging upwards, additional support seems like an option delivered too late, and too outside of 'proper' channels - if you want a sanitized rant I can probably deliver it tomorrow, but too-little too-late is where vercel has landed in the operations team.

Always looking for the meta-feedback as well on how we can improve support. So, both pieces of feedback welcome!

Very disappointing that this was the path Vercel chose to take. This is something I would expect from Google or Amazon, but not a developer darling like Vercel. Seems like all companies shed their values is service of growth and capitalism at some point or another. A shame.

Why desperately?

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