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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a hard time grasping the scale of these services.

Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone using gift cards will have their account locked.

These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare occurrences. The majority of people who use these services will not have any experience like these stories you read.

To be honest, I think the average person is probably better at estimating their risk of using these services than a lot of these HN commenters.

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It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.

It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.

> It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.

This captures the Hacker News style misjudgment of risk very well.

First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.

Second, eating M&Ms is a silly analogy because it's so easy to dismiss. Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid. Using a mainstream service keeps your overall conversion rate higher and prevents losing customers who don't want to sign up for something new.

Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.

Finally, this is the key point that everyone misses when they say "Just don't use any Apple products" and other dismissive comments:

> It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.

It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational. I know it brings some people comfort to feel like they've avoided some risk they saw in headlines, but claiming that nothing is given up or that it's easier to choose an alternative is blatantly false.

> First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.

If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever, which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death. This happens with enough regularity that I know multiple people that this has happened to, and the risk is enough for me to never rely on PayPal or its partners for my income.

You seem to understand this with the following:

> Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid.

> Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.

I used a variable X so you could make it sufficiently large enough that you don't have to rely on the multiplier to understand the analogy.

> It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational.

I've lived my entire life without relying on an Apple account, and the few instances that I used one, I hit that risk myself[1] and now have an expensive paper weight instead of a tablet, and a bunch of app purchases I can never use again.

This isn't some hypothetical, it's something that's literally happened to me and people I know. The lesson I learned is not to rely on Apple or PayPal, and believe it or not, that's really, really easy to do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252971

To my knowledge, PayPal does not hold funds “forever”. They penalise the account holder by locking it away for 180 days. At that point, they can withdraw the balance to a bank account. I have multiple friends and clients who had this happen to them, but in all cases, they were exposed to higher risk by accepting payments through donation forms, or a marketplace where they sell directly to customers. (Despite what feels like an anecdotal high failure rate, somehow I’ve never had an issue running my own marketplace for the past decade.)

> If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever, which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death.

Losing business funds is not equivalent to death, no.

> I used a variable X so you could make it sufficiently large enough that you don't have to rely on the multiplier to understand the analogy.

I was commenting on the "in 1000" part, not the X part.

Sorry, I just can't engage with this level of hyperbole and exaggeration. This isn't a life or death thing.

Utterly perplexing you've backed off with a scathing 'Sorry, I can't engage' after literally contracting yourself plain as day a few comments up.

I think you can't understand his analogy no? Without taking it literally to the point of making it your entire life's purpose to counter the point?

How about this: You have a 1 in 100,000 chance of eating an M&M which literally drains your bank account and you have to eat hundreds or possibly thousands of M&M's per day.

(some of your dreaded hyperbole for transactions)

Would you dig in to that bowl? There's shouldn't be a miniscule percentage chance of your entire livelyhood being ripped away and locked forever without recourse simply by using a certain payment platform. Is that fair? Or are you still intent on stepping on the cosmic merrigoround of potential ruin without a care in the world?

How about instead of cyanide, the M&M is made of feces.

Would you still risky eating from that jar?

The problem is not the risk itself but the inability to resolve the issue. This way, it's not just an "inconvenience" but sometimes a lifes work lost.

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