Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The post clearly says both a credit card and an alternate Paypal account were on their file and they even accepted the Paypal account to pay the fine.

Some people can't wait to victim blame every time these posts of obvious business stupidity come up.




You can't just switch to another payment method when the customer explicitly set up the credit card as payment. That argument goes out of the window if you ask me.


Only if you make certain assumptions - that Godaddy tries only one payment method, and that user hasn't set up a backup method.

As it turns out, Godaddy has a backup payment method option: https://godaddy.com/help/set-a-backup-payment-method-724

Like I said, in all these posts, there's a tendency to victim blame by making convenient assumptions to show the victim must have somehow been at fault. The GP even jumped straight into "if X, then it must be your fault" without even bothering to check with OP if X is true.

Additionally, despite all our insider observations of snafus as software engineers as well as personal experiences as customers, there's a tendency to implicitly assume that all software systems are designed perfectly and the entire chain of people that run them are 100% correct and ethical 100% of the time.

I termed this "the tech just-world hypothesis" because of how often I keep seeing it.


How is this obvious business stupidity?

Domains go into a redemption period because they expire. Having a card or paypal on file is meaningless if you don't have auto-renew.

People lie. People lie all the time, and always spin the story to somehow make them the blameless victim.


Godaddy's also run by people. They even have the financial incentives and the legal leverage to lie. If you believe people lie "all the time", by your own logic, perhaps you should consider the possibility that the people in Godaddy lie "all the time."

It's obvious stupidity in multiple ways:

They failed to account for the customer's long and positive track record. They must be having a CRM. About time they started using it instead of acting like a script that wakes up and shuts down without any context.

Despite being web and mail hosting experts, their architects failed to design their systems for the scenario that their critical mails end up in spam.

Their UX people failed to title the mail in a way that would grab attention.

The post says that apart from this single email and its 2 hour deadline, there weren't any notifications in the past, something that other people here have assumed without checking.

====

In all such posts, it becomes obvious again and again that tech businesses are failing to design their systems for corner cases. This is not that surprising given all the communication and decision-making complexities anybody who's worked in tech would have seen.

Victim blaming is the laziest and most useless approach because it just denies that the real world is more complex than the ideal use cases the designers assumed. And neither helps improve anything nor holds anybody accountable.


I'm going to give my honest feelings too.

There's just too much superfluous information in the post that's not relevant to the problem. I don't care that OP uses Couldflare as DNS. I don't care what OP's email provider of choice is. I don't care he forgot about his GoDaddy account.

Also I think it's the government he should be complaining too, because it looked like GoDaddy reactivated his account for free.

Not saying GoDaddy is a good business, just stating that OP probably might not be as innocent as it seems.

This is purely an opinion.


This happens so often it's not even funny - the lack of "what the domain is" in the post makes me suspicious that if you did a whois history you'd find that it expired some time ago and finally went down.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: