I feel that HN needs some kind of "right to reply" feature on these stories now - something like a pinned comment right at the top of the discussion for an official response from the business in question.
It is obviously of interest to many in the community if services they might use or consider using themselves are having problems or letting their customers down. I personally have no problem with leveraging the publicity that social media affords to get a problem resolved if those services haven't got their act together within a reasonable amount of time.
However there is a serious risk of unfair or just plain incorrect reporting when one side gets to set the agenda and the other side either can't respond for legal/regulatory reasons or has their response buried among the other comments. People can be far too quick to reach for the pitchforks in these discussions before knowing all the facts and on sites with voting mechanics there is a danger of mob mentality distorting the subsequent discussion as well.
In this case it looks like Stripe probably did handle some aspects of this situation poorly (bad and people deserve to know it can happen) but are probably also taking steps to avoid screwing up the same way in future (good and people deserve to know that too). Then everyone can form their own opinions and discuss the issues but at least starting from a relatively balanced and well-informed position.
To be fair here, I believe that most people on HN are fans of Stripe (I'll admit that I am) and this isn't going to cause me to write them out of anything. BUT nothing is worse that feeling ignored and we all can empathize with that. Stripe's promise to us in tech was that they were/are different. Patio11 has written some great articles from inside Stripe explaining how the payment systems work. PC and JC show up at conferences and chat with other devs. This is inherently different that what you can expect from the CEO of Paypal or Authorize.net.
Now we're asking that to stay true to that part of the company. Not because we want to see them fail but because we want to see them succeed.
It is obviously of interest to many in the community if services they might use or consider using themselves are having problems or letting their customers down. I personally have no problem with leveraging the publicity that social media affords to get a problem resolved if those services haven't got their act together within a reasonable amount of time.
However there is a serious risk of unfair or just plain incorrect reporting when one side gets to set the agenda and the other side either can't respond for legal/regulatory reasons or has their response buried among the other comments. People can be far too quick to reach for the pitchforks in these discussions before knowing all the facts and on sites with voting mechanics there is a danger of mob mentality distorting the subsequent discussion as well.
In this case it looks like Stripe probably did handle some aspects of this situation poorly (bad and people deserve to know it can happen) but are probably also taking steps to avoid screwing up the same way in future (good and people deserve to know that too). Then everyone can form their own opinions and discuss the issues but at least starting from a relatively balanced and well-informed position.