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Comment by VoidWhisperer | Hacker News Reader

The title feels a bit disengenious. Technically, yes, it was increased by 50% of what it was, but it is a shift from 1% to 1.5%, not up to 50% of each transaction.

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The title is correct. But I agree that saying "50% increase" conveys less information than saying "1% to 1.5%" (because you don't know 50% of what), and seems to have been used only to make the title more dramatic.

I interpreted it as a increase in the fee.

I think people who know/use Stripe will have no confusion about this.

Although rare, I use instant payout for my small business. It's a lovely convenience and the extra 1% hit (on top of the usual transaction fees) can be a worthwhile tradeoff. I can't explain it, but the new 1.5% fee killed the motivation to use it entirely.

That is what a 50% increase means.

Percent increases are kind of a weird metric in a lot of cases. This is one of them. It's not particularly informative.

If you are a stripe user, it tells you exactly by how much you can expect your fees to increase =)

You'd also get that information by showing start and end values.

The goal of a headline is not to tell you everything that you want to know, it's to make you click it.

Kinda. To the degree that the object of increase is also a percentage the statement “increasing X (where x is quantified as a pct) by Y %” could mean that X of 20% is increased to 70% or to 30%. It would be more clear to state “X increases from Y% to Z%.”

No, not kinda. In the example you present, if 20% increased to 70% the appropriate description is either a 250% increase or a 50pp ("percentage point"[0]) increase.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage_point

Math doesn’t do “kinda”. If you are paying $100 for something, and then it is $150, that’s is a 50% increase and is an undeniable fact.

20% to 70% would be quite the fee increase, but I suppose that is a way of thinking of it.

Yes, it's editorialized. The actual title is "June 2024 pricing update for Instant Payouts for businesses in the United States"

I understand why companies want to bury bad news under generic titles but that doesn't mean we have to play along. This is a case where "editorializing" the title seems helpful.

Percent vs percentage points. It's slightly confusing but the title is correct.

A rule of thumb: if it is really bad it will not be reported by the actual company doing it. It will be buried in the TOS and then discovered by angry users, and picked up by media.

It's a common problem when reporting on changes of some percentage value. I guess it's more dramatic to say "increased by 50%" rather than "increased by 0.5 points"

Common example headline: "Inflation up by 100%" when it went from 1% to 2%. The headline implies goods & services are now 2x more expensive than before, which is not the case.

Choose between “now 1.5%” or “50% increase”

I don't feel it's disingenuous at all. When I read the title I instantly understood it to mean multiplying the fee by 1.5. In what world would anyone take this to mean that they're charging 50% of each transaction?

I don't feel it's disingenuous at all? They're increasing the fee by 50%... of the fee, obviously. In what world would anyone take this to mean that they're charging 50% of each transaction?

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