Tell HN: Stripe closed my GPT-3 G.Sheet addon because they think I “sell essays”
Apparently Stripe is closing GPT-3 tools because they "are unable to accept payments for the sale of essays and other academic work". I tried to appeal but no luck. What can I do? The tool is EndType.com and I obviously don't sell academic work
66 comments
[ 13.3 ms ] story [ 1733 ms ] threadThis call for help rubs me the wrong way.
Payments are a critical part of your business and it's a disaster to be switched off at zero notice.
Yes, the obvious mitigation is to support two providers, but that can be a big investment when you want to integrate with your book keeping, fulfilment systems etc.
And if customer service was a bit more proactive then people wouldn't have to come to social media to flag when they have been treated unfairly.
I'm happy that people have an escalation path through social media noise as I've had to rely on it myself many times.
I haven't seen a case where Stripe doesn't retain 1-2 weeks worth of revenue "to handle refunds".
OP also is subscription based, and if he used Stripe's tooling to implement the subscription process, they're holding a lot of customer data hostage.
(Which is why you shouldn't touch these "helpful" all in one solutions in the first place, but it's an easy enough mistake to make.)
Perhaps someone with better insight can educate me on this matter?
Alternatively, it could be a category of transactions that eventually almost always see high fraud (e.g. kids paying for essays using parent's money, parents reporting the transactions afterwards).
There are certain categories of transaction that see a lot of disputes.
Payment processors, banks, and card schemes (like Visa/MasterCard) don't like disputes - they are costly to deal with.
I can understand if they're saying "we think you're about to get a lot of disputes, and you may not be able to pay for all of them, so we're going to hold some of your money for a few days just to see".
But that isn't what they're saying.
Essay mills fall under the category of "deceptive" products and services. It's clear we made a mistake here in looking at this particular business and we've re-enabled the account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34802504). In particular, we didn’t correctly distinguish between augmenting the ability to write content vs. buying essays to commit academic fraud. We'll be revisiting our internal policies to better dilineate between these categories.
We also work with our partners to relax or remove unnecessary restrictions where we can. Being overly restrictive towards legitimate businesses flies in the face of growing the GDP of the internet—it's a precondition for us to operate. A small component of that is being reactive: seeing where we make mistakes and noticing where our processes need to be adapted. (As we saw today with essay mills!)
And if you know the constraints of classifiers where recall and precision are a tradeoff, and consider that basically fraud cannot happen for economic reasons, you can imagine that yanking up the recall (loss avoidance) at the expense of precision (stomping over innocent false positives) is tempting and lucrative, at least on short term.
Like I said before [0], perhaps it is better to go on multiple gateways. At least then you can continue your hustle / grift on another payment processor rather than complain here and use HN as Stripe customer support.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747526
Also, they are likely using the OpenAI API which is not a "chatbot", and was built exactly for the purpose of building apps like this
Yes. Selling AI snake oil is indeed a grift.
It also doesn't surprise me that with the recent hype of AI all over the place, Stripe would be taking extra steps in cracking down on new so-called AI companies and scams selling their snake-oil re-packaged as 'AI' to ride the hype cycle.
This one is just low hanging fruit.
> Stop using such loaded trendy vitriolic language and take this for what it actually is.
Exactly. It is actually a 'grift'. Just like the rest of the low effort so-called AI companies sitting on someone else's APIs. It is another plain old confidence trick which is as old as the hills.
We support a bunch of AI businesses on Stripe and I'd like to take a closer look. (What you're describing doesn't sound unsupportable to me.)
Really there’s many tech companies guilty of the “so complaining on HN is the only way to fix it” but in my experience this is not the case with Stripe.
Disclaimer: I work in fintech and sometimes partner with Stripe.
Why is it that we don't see 1+ posts/month regarding AWS? Seems to me that there is an incentive to closing cases in companies like stripe, regardless of actual resolution.
I have seen this pattern a lot with HN. Stuff gets upvoted based on the external perception of how things “probably” work.
Another example about stripe from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760887
Guy complains his business was shut down by stripe; you dig into it, you find that he was proxying payments in a way that bypasses KYC for his customers (and was even aware of the issue and fixing it but chose to grandfather existing customers into the old system). In other words, if a customer wanted to sell deeply illegal stuff on his platform, they could do so untraceably. No wonder he got hit by a massive fine.
Just as you’d be dubious if you encountered a customer saying “aws shut down my account for no reason and won’t talk to me”, I am similarly dubious when people say this about stripe. That’s not to say they’re flawless; they’ve definitely been getting worse as they keep scaling. I just don’t think it’s fair to put them in the same category as Facebook or something.
My guess, this was a mistake, and a resolution would have easily been possible through any of the support channels (faster if using the external ones probably) iff indeed it is a mistake.
Stripe seems to be doing a pretty good job at that.
Practically, you gotta thank the person for the role they're taking on.
Holistically, they're not really part of the system, so that role doesn't exist. They're certainly not getting paid to do that and it needs to not scale up to where it's interfering with their real job.
We're going to take a closer look at our policies for businesses tangential to "essay mills" and how we can better delineate between them so that this doesn't happen again.
If you want an actual solution, look at FedNow. This would enable direct bank account payments, like in most of Europe, with a government-run intermediary in the place of MasterCard/VISA. This changes the censorship situation from "four out of four must accept" to "one out of thousands must accept".
And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically.
> And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically.
No. Payment providers like Stripe have to comply with the rules placed upon them by the card networks. If you only have to deal with European payment systems + FedNow, you don't have to worry about things like the MATCH list. This removes 95% of the censorship issues.
Great, except each country is tiny and cross-border commerce common, so you end up having to implement all of them…
Or, much more likely, you give up and just go with Paypal + Credit Cards again, especially since more and more banks in Europe are rolling out Mastercard Debit as their regular banking card (on top of Apple Pay and whatever Google is pretending to be supporting today), making credit/debit card payments more popular than ever.
> If you only have to deal with European payment systems + FedNow, you don't have to worry about things like the MATCH list.
I'm not aware of any payment provider that gives me all European networks, but not credit cards.
Not that it would be helpful, since most people use credit cards anyway.
> This removes 95% of the censorship issues.
Together with 95% of your customer base, realistically.
Yes, and this can be done by software firms. You don't need to roll your own solution, but taking the payment networks' fees out of the equation drastically reduces costs.
> I'm not aware of any payment provider that gives me all European networks, but not credit cards.
That's true, since most sellers can access credit cards. But for EU-only sellers of "sensitive products", of course there is a market. (It's an open question if people on the MATCH list can use those payment providers as long as they don't accept cards.)
> Together with 95% of your customer base, realistically.
Most people where I live are comfortable using mobile payments and use it on a regular basis. I see mainstream retailers offering to take it (alongside cards) very often.
Fed No.
The US is not the world and the rest of the world is certainly not on FedNow, and never will be.
At least with stablecoins like USDC on Ethereum, Stellar, Solana, etc it is available today 'right now', worldwide, 24/7 and with instant, same day transfers with low fees.
I wonder why USDC is currently being used on these blockchains today from all over the world, 24/7 in the billions of dollars daily and has been integrated into business like MoneyGram, Stripe, VISA and Coinbase Commerce and even the United Nations using it for donations and humaritarian aid, who are not 'Nobody'.
"Nobody" is using FedNow 'right now', and there is a obvious reason why nobody outside of the US cannot use and will never use FedNow.
How is it obvious that you don't sell academic work and/or a paid tool to write essays for kids? It looked like 'have GPT-3 write stuff in Google Docs, but more so' to me.
What are people going to be doing, journaling?
The Stripe thing is a separate issue, I'm calling out your 'I obviously don't sell academic work'. Oh come on. Really? Who's gonna pay for this?
It doesn't really matter what you want your product to do. It's what people do with your product. Intentions are easy to fake, it's the outcomes that people care about.