This was a moderation failure too. We try to find out when stories are false and downweight them or at least change their titles. We want HN to be a place where erroneous claims, especially indignation-rousing ones, get fixed, not amplified, and it pains me that we missed such a clear case. I admire that people have been so proactive about correcting it, though. That is rare.
I was actually surprised that no one else posted excerpts from the Apple Developer Agreement[0]. There's millions of copies out there.
It clearly states that Apple is entitled to do what was originally tweeted, but, from a lot of anecdotal stories by developers that have actually processed refunds (I am not one. I have never processed a refund), Apple does not actually do this.
A few folks have pointed out that, even though the contract stipulates it, the practice may be considered illegal, or at least open to court challenges; which might be why it isn't enforced.
It's good to see that a chunk of HN (the ones who upvote/downvote, including myself) see that HN is formed by humans and therefore it has its own biases and that fake news aren't an external evil that can't just appear here.
That being said, if we dig a bit this also shows how Apple is being seen as a bit of a villain by many people (again, including myself) nowadays and had no problems believing Apple was doing this because it pretty much aligns with their IMHO abusive practices when it comes to grabbing money from devs.
Apple will keep selling and having some bad PR isn't going to affect sales much I guess but I can't stop thinking that some day some competitor will show up, or some law will change and they'll be forced to lift the app store restrictions and most of the devs will fly. Maybe it's time for Apple to start considering reducing the greediness with the people who make their platform attractive when these kind of news pass all filters, even in communities like this.
More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news. I don't mean this in a judgmental way, when I saw this posted I thought "that doesn't sound right, but I guess if it has so many upvotes on HN it must be true".
It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.
Apple's opacity leads to this kind of thing. The "rebuttal" doesn't have a citation either. How do we know that it itself is not also fake news? Apple should have a nice clear page we can all link to that explains how this works. But nobody seems to have found one.
Edit: no, really, this is important: we're in the middle of the lesson of "social media can amplify things that aren't true and you should check them". Great. So, how do we verify things? What should we be doing? The counter claim link at the top of this thread is also just a random unsourced tweet!
I don't see upvotes as being a form of agreement. I often upvotes things I have no knowledge about and sometimes even things I don't agree with that I think would be interesting to hear more about from the HN community.
It an interesting topic for many HNers and such seems appropriate that it'll get on to the front page.
That being said, downvoting dissenting comments in the thread are extremely problematic. And is a common theme in HN. Which I think stems from the implicit assumption by many people that upvoting a comment or item means agreeing with it.
My bad for posting the original tweet up without proper fact-checking... I've emailed the mods to ask them to correct or delete the original to avoid confusion in future.
I had heard rumours that Apple did not refund the 30% previously, and seeing a developer of respected apps post it (along with a graph, although actually that didn't prove anything lol) and doing a quick Google (where the top result is "Apple's iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers"), I thought made it seem legit enough to post, and thought it would get shot down quickly if it was incorrect!
Interesting lesson in the realities of post-truth as you say! Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched...
To be fair you say "our gut feeling" as if everyone shares the same 'gut feeling', i.e., that Apple would not do such a thing.
On reading the original post my gut feeling believed that this could be or is quite likely true. Why? Because it aligns with the continuous declining customer experience I've had with them for the last 5-7 years. Examples include declining product quality, difficulty getting them to service properly, getting busted for impairing performance on older hardware (planned obsolescence) all that feels like tall poppy syndrome, dark patterns and arrogance.
>I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling.
While that may be true, for me the gut feeling was in line with the fake news, which makes it even harder to spot (confirmation bias).
I never worked on iOS apps, but my consumer experience with Apple was such that I would have expected exactly this kind of behavior. They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one.
I just assumed that a company that treats their consumers like this also doesn't treat developers fairly.
Granted, this is my experience from a decade ago. I've never bought anything Apple since. So maybe they've changed.
While voting is now getting considered a statement of ideological alignment (see Reddit banning people based on their vote for unsavory posts, and people in Germany being prosecuted for 'liking' a violent crime), my vote on the original post was to signal my interest, encourage posts of that sort on this website and to raise awareness, to encourage potential corrections.
More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed
Many threads in HN reflect the tribalism that now permeates society. There are plenty of people on here that will upvote a comment or story simply because it paints Apple in a bad light. Same thing happens to Google, Oracle, and to a lesser extent these days, Microsoft.
It doesn't matter if a piece of information is true, it just has to align with someone's personal-conceived biases.
We have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are better than the people who get sucked in by political trolls on Facebook just because we work with computers.
Indeed we are, it's also the interesting thing about confirmation bias in communities. In any community, they seem to always believe any news that is immediately negative about the subject that they haven't researched about or want they don't like as the real truth.
It's up to us to do our own research with actual evidence rather than sources such as: 'X suggested', 'sources say', 'my friend who works at ABCXYZ' or because it has 1000+ retweets, upvotes, etc.
Generally, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed on social media content like FB, Twitter, HN, etc.
Yeah there's certainly a factor of "title seems about right, I'll up-vote" out there.
There have been a lot of articles where even the comments were entirely "nothing about this is right" and that's not counting opinion / perspective articles, like cold hard facts wrong.
Where people think they are well educated and well informed. You give us a lot of credit. Most of us are ignorant about a lot of things we have strong opinions on.
That's what happens when you want to believe in symbols more than taking the time to investigate the complicated facts. And the symbol here was Apple as the big bad evil company trying to exploit developers.
Maybe it's a lesson to temper outrage before knowing facts.
And what if a more radical piece of demonstrably false information ended up being believed by enough people that they'd rise up to take corrective action?
Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance?
If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information.
I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way.
So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?
One of Apple’s main adversaries, Samsung, has been taken to court for paying students to manipulate social media against their competitors.
And given Apple’s stance against the bread and butter of less scrupulous companies (privacy intrusion and data mining), it would be no surprise if there are many other people who are literally paid to make them look bad at any cost.
Perhaps it was in part good timing for the false information, with the top tech CEOs hearing that Apple/Tim Cook was involved with as well - it would seemingly be the time for such an unreasonable behaviour of keeping 30% fee on refunds to make it to the surface for public viewing.
I have a similar shock or fascination when seeing how little the HN crowd understands the benefits of UBI (when tied to inflation + VAT) - there's seemingly been little critical thinking done from foundational principles, and the same common misunderstandings repeat. There's enough momentum of people with little understanding jumping to post that those comments all gain the most traction, and it's too much to jump into discussion with.
A good comparison of differences in abilities and then innate failure/mistakes that we can all make - Elon Musk, who understands exponentials and economies of scale via his success as a marker, and stating he decision makes from first principles, is in support of UBI. He says it's inevitable with technology-automation, and then comparing that to his tweeting some arguably misinformed or shallow on the details about COVID-19 - perhaps not having as full or clear as a picture as he should before someone with his reach posts about something so serious. To me however it's really all just signals for the state of the union, and these are canary moments that highlight how reactive people are and how ill-informed they are - due to not having a hierarchy of trusted sources that most of us follow. Is there someone who's as successful and trustworthy competence wise as Elon is with EVs (etc) but for viruses? It was supposed to be Fauci in the US, right? But he first lied to Americans saying masks don't work - and that lack of integrity is harmful and blinding.
Was it really better before? The cognitive biases behind fake news are not knew. Maybe there were there from the beginning, but we are just getting better at spotting them?
At least the correction also made the front page. That’s more than can be said for normal media outlets who seem to broadcast the lie with a megaphone and bury the correction in a footnote.
Now we wait for all the justifications.
I really enjoy HN but there is a large number of politically indignant ready to punish who they disagree with rather than allow debate.
Do you think that asking people to read -- and potentially answer a simple captcha-like comprehension question -- about content before amplifying it could help in situations like this?
(Twitter is apparently experimenting[1] with the former approach)
The upvotes of false information, based on random Tweets meeting negative bias towards Apple, worry me less than the malicious downvoting of corrections, of opinions diverging from the echo chamber's collective bias, of meta-comments addressing these issues.
The downvote is just used as a very low effort sh.tpost without content these days. It's risk-free and even more detrimental to actual discourse than its sibling.
I'm not really sure where the impression that HN is particularly well educated and informed comes from. My experience here is that people don't read what's linked, they just opine on the title (which may be clickbait) or other people's comments (which are also opining on the title or other people's comments--it's uninformed opinions all the way down). There are a few posters who are knowledgeable in their fields, but overall, I get the impression that HN users are remarkably uninformed on the topics they choose to opine on.
HN specifically prohibits remarking on this when it happens; the guidelines say: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' I understand that the intent of this is to create a polite environment, but the end result is one where uninformed opinions are welcomed.
It's even to the point that some people will proudly proclaim that they didn't read the thing they're responding to, often paired with a complaint that the linked content is too long, or that it didn't account for some gotcha (which it accounts for, just not in the first few paragraphs).
To be clear: you may be informed on a topic, but if you don't read what you're responding to, you aren't informed on what you're responding to. And over time, people whose only source of "information" is uninformed comments are going to be uninformed on topics as well, while believing that they are informed.
> It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.
But neither community consensus nor gut feeling have anything to do with truth. Primary sources, scientific observation, and to a lesser degree, logic and expert opinion--those are what we should be trusting.
This is a good example of where a strong belief in something (in this case Apple greedily taking a huge cut of developer earnings) that something that sounds patently false is believed automatically and instantly.
Happens with people, companies, religion, and politics.
At the time it made no sense as a business practice, and seemed painful enough that I should have heard about it long before this. My immediate reaction was "really? I'll have to see confirmation before I treat this tweet as authoritative".
What is really amusing in hindsight was the number of people willing to pile on and argue that this was in fact totally reasonable of Apple to be doing and that we shouldn't be surprised or upset at all about it.
I am disappointed in myself that I believed this information without any evidence. I wanted to believe it because it confirmed and amplified my bias. I hope this gets more points than the first post.
This will serve me,and many others on HN as a lesson on how easy it is to fall for false information. I did read the related post yesterday and there were lots of emotions, mainly negative. Now I don't even know whether they take the money or not, so I'll put a question mark until proven otherwise for time being.
I posted earlier how HN is highly susceptible to both groupthink as well as confirmation bias [1]. Check yourself and ask yourself if what is posted is actually true or is rather something you WISH was true, and also if what is posted is something that you would prefer to go with the herd than to try to run against the stampede. But humans are humans.
The scariest part of this for me is "I don’t know where I got the idea that it worked the way I thought it did". If it was based off of incorrect sources or whatever I'd understand, but how can you make such a bold claim in a public social medium and forget where the idea came from within 1-2 days?
I wonder how many of the upvoters of this post similarly didn't bother fact checking the correction. Not commenting on its veracity, however I think the truth is somewhere in between (Apple has the right to hold onto the 30% commission, but hasn't invoked that in practice yet).
I, for one, upvoted both threads on the basis that this is playing out as a peculiar display of groupthink; a microcosmic martyrdom of truth tellers in the wave of internet points.
There is no such thing as a trusted source, and there never has been. Before you act on information, always double- and triple-check, if at all possible. Treating Twitter, of all things, as a trusted source seems especially risky.
> Apple does not keep the 30% commission on a refund
That makes sense. I worked for a big mobile games company and refunds happened all the time.
It was a classic that people will buy in-game items and ask, int our case, Facebook for a refund. They will keep the items and get the refund, until we created a tool to manage refunds and that cheat saw its due end.
As to generate in-game items has zero cost, it was not a loss per se. But it was a lose in potential earnings if it becomes common place. If Facebook has make us pay for their % that would have been a disgrace from the beginning.
What's more likely: That Apple has been sneaking a 60% cut under thousands of companies' noses for a decade and they're all super chill with this because of...what, charity? Or that a handful of business owners on Twitter are just not great at interpreting figures?
The rush to clear Apple's name, and the inflated indignation surrounding this mistake is embarrassing. Tesla is the only other brand where I see this behavior. I don't understand the evangelism of brands by people with seemingly no direct connection. The dude was wrong (Edit: turns out technically he wasn't wrong, Apple just "chooses" to not enforce it), get over it, Apple doesn't need your help - they have an army of attorneys who can squash any legitimate threat to their empire.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
This was a moderation failure too. We try to find out when stories are false and downweight them or at least change their titles. We want HN to be a place where erroneous claims, especially indignation-rousing ones, get fixed, not amplified, and it pains me that we missed such a clear case. I admire that people have been so proactive about correcting it, though. That is rare.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
It clearly states that Apple is entitled to do what was originally tweeted, but, from a lot of anecdotal stories by developers that have actually processed refunds (I am not one. I have never processed a refund), Apple does not actually do this.
A few folks have pointed out that, even though the contract stipulates it, the practice may be considered illegal, or at least open to court challenges; which might be why it isn't enforced.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510
[+] [-] outime|5 years ago|reply
That being said, if we dig a bit this also shows how Apple is being seen as a bit of a villain by many people (again, including myself) nowadays and had no problems believing Apple was doing this because it pretty much aligns with their IMHO abusive practices when it comes to grabbing money from devs.
Apple will keep selling and having some bad PR isn't going to affect sales much I guess but I can't stop thinking that some day some competitor will show up, or some law will change and they'll be forced to lift the app store restrictions and most of the devs will fly. Maybe it's time for Apple to start considering reducing the greediness with the people who make their platform attractive when these kind of news pass all filters, even in communities like this.
[+] [-] duopixel|5 years ago|reply
It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|5 years ago|reply
Corrections in newspapers don't run the same as headlines, nobody upvotes corrections to reddit or Instagram etc...
I'd suggest that as far as iterating in the direction of finding the truth, this is a best in class example of how to do it.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
Edit: no, really, this is important: we're in the middle of the lesson of "social media can amplify things that aren't true and you should check them". Great. So, how do we verify things? What should we be doing? The counter claim link at the top of this thread is also just a random unsourced tweet!
[+] [-] Illniyar|5 years ago|reply
It an interesting topic for many HNers and such seems appropriate that it'll get on to the front page.
That being said, downvoting dissenting comments in the thread are extremely problematic. And is a common theme in HN. Which I think stems from the implicit assumption by many people that upvoting a comment or item means agreeing with it.
[+] [-] tomduncalf|5 years ago|reply
I had heard rumours that Apple did not refund the 30% previously, and seeing a developer of respected apps post it (along with a graph, although actually that didn't prove anything lol) and doing a quick Google (where the top result is "Apple's iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers"), I thought made it seem legit enough to post, and thought it would get shot down quickly if it was incorrect!
Interesting lesson in the realities of post-truth as you say! Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched...
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thelittleone|5 years ago|reply
On reading the original post my gut feeling believed that this could be or is quite likely true. Why? Because it aligns with the continuous declining customer experience I've had with them for the last 5-7 years. Examples include declining product quality, difficulty getting them to service properly, getting busted for impairing performance on older hardware (planned obsolescence) all that feels like tall poppy syndrome, dark patterns and arrogance.
[+] [-] carlmr|5 years ago|reply
While that may be true, for me the gut feeling was in line with the fake news, which makes it even harder to spot (confirmation bias).
I never worked on iOS apps, but my consumer experience with Apple was such that I would have expected exactly this kind of behavior. They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one.
I just assumed that a company that treats their consumers like this also doesn't treat developers fairly.
Granted, this is my experience from a decade ago. I've never bought anything Apple since. So maybe they've changed.
[+] [-] coldtea|5 years ago|reply
"Fake news" is a regular thing on the tech/HN community.
The whole hype around technologies (e.g. Mongo/NoSQL, etc) is just that.
As Alan Kay put it "Programming is a Pop Culture".
[+] [-] UweSchmidt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
Many threads in HN reflect the tribalism that now permeates society. There are plenty of people on here that will upvote a comment or story simply because it paints Apple in a bad light. Same thing happens to Google, Oracle, and to a lesser extent these days, Microsoft.
It doesn't matter if a piece of information is true, it just has to align with someone's personal-conceived biases.
We have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are better than the people who get sucked in by political trolls on Facebook just because we work with computers.
[+] [-] rvz|5 years ago|reply
Indeed we are, it's also the interesting thing about confirmation bias in communities. In any community, they seem to always believe any news that is immediately negative about the subject that they haven't researched about or want they don't like as the real truth.
It's up to us to do our own research with actual evidence rather than sources such as: 'X suggested', 'sources say', 'my friend who works at ABCXYZ' or because it has 1000+ retweets, upvotes, etc.
Generally, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed on social media content like FB, Twitter, HN, etc.
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
There have been a lot of articles where even the comments were entirely "nothing about this is right" and that's not counting opinion / perspective articles, like cold hard facts wrong.
It's really frustrating to see on HN.
[+] [-] natch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nojito|5 years ago|reply
Social media caters way too much to feelings and biases.
[+] [-] supernova87a|5 years ago|reply
Maybe it's a lesson to temper outrage before knowing facts.
[+] [-] nonbirithm|5 years ago|reply
Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance?
If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information.
I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way.
So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?
[+] [-] Razengan|5 years ago|reply
And given Apple’s stance against the bread and butter of less scrupulous companies (privacy intrusion and data mining), it would be no surprise if there are many other people who are literally paid to make them look bad at any cost.
[+] [-] 0xfaded|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malwarebytess|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolco|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimliu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loceng|5 years ago|reply
I have a similar shock or fascination when seeing how little the HN crowd understands the benefits of UBI (when tied to inflation + VAT) - there's seemingly been little critical thinking done from foundational principles, and the same common misunderstandings repeat. There's enough momentum of people with little understanding jumping to post that those comments all gain the most traction, and it's too much to jump into discussion with.
A good comparison of differences in abilities and then innate failure/mistakes that we can all make - Elon Musk, who understands exponentials and economies of scale via his success as a marker, and stating he decision makes from first principles, is in support of UBI. He says it's inevitable with technology-automation, and then comparing that to his tweeting some arguably misinformed or shallow on the details about COVID-19 - perhaps not having as full or clear as a picture as he should before someone with his reach posts about something so serious. To me however it's really all just signals for the state of the union, and these are canary moments that highlight how reactive people are and how ill-informed they are - due to not having a hierarchy of trusted sources that most of us follow. Is there someone who's as successful and trustworthy competence wise as Elon is with EVs (etc) but for viruses? It was supposed to be Fauci in the US, right? But he first lied to Americans saying masks don't work - and that lack of integrity is harmful and blinding.
[+] [-] AmericanChopper|5 years ago|reply
Another word for this is groupthink.
[+] [-] paulintrognon|5 years ago|reply
Was it really better before? The cognitive biases behind fake news are not knew. Maybe there were there from the beginning, but we are just getting better at spotting them?
[+] [-] josefresco|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christophilus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter_retief|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jka|5 years ago|reply
(Twitter is apparently experimenting[1] with the former approach)
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-un...
[+] [-] lazyjones|5 years ago|reply
The downvote is just used as a very low effort sh.tpost without content these days. It's risk-free and even more detrimental to actual discourse than its sibling.
[+] [-] kerkeslager|5 years ago|reply
HN specifically prohibits remarking on this when it happens; the guidelines say: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' I understand that the intent of this is to create a polite environment, but the end result is one where uninformed opinions are welcomed.
It's even to the point that some people will proudly proclaim that they didn't read the thing they're responding to, often paired with a complaint that the linked content is too long, or that it didn't account for some gotcha (which it accounts for, just not in the first few paragraphs).
To be clear: you may be informed on a topic, but if you don't read what you're responding to, you aren't informed on what you're responding to. And over time, people whose only source of "information" is uninformed comments are going to be uninformed on topics as well, while believing that they are informed.
> It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.
But neither community consensus nor gut feeling have anything to do with truth. Primary sources, scientific observation, and to a lesser degree, logic and expert opinion--those are what we should be trusting.
[+] [-] mabbo|5 years ago|reply
So kudos to that guy for doing the right thing.
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|5 years ago|reply
Happens with people, companies, religion, and politics.
[edit: I believed it too without thinking]
[+] [-] sulam|5 years ago|reply
What is really amusing in hindsight was the number of people willing to pile on and argue that this was in fact totally reasonable of Apple to be doing and that we shouldn't be surprised or upset at all about it.
[+] [-] Ghostt8117|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmodisk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rexreed|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23846631
[+] [-] raziel2p|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 91edec|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elwell|5 years ago|reply
I, for one, upvoted both threads on the basis that this is playing out as a peculiar display of groupthink; a microcosmic martyrdom of truth tellers in the wave of internet points.
[+] [-] tempodox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
That makes sense. I worked for a big mobile games company and refunds happened all the time.
It was a classic that people will buy in-game items and ask, int our case, Facebook for a refund. They will keep the items and get the refund, until we created a tool to manage refunds and that cheat saw its due end.
As to generate in-game items has zero cost, it was not a loss per se. But it was a lose in potential earnings if it becomes common place. If Facebook has make us pay for their % that would have been a disgrace from the beginning.
[+] [-] filleduchaos|5 years ago|reply
What's more likely: That Apple has been sneaking a 60% cut under thousands of companies' noses for a decade and they're all super chill with this because of...what, charity? Or that a handful of business owners on Twitter are just not great at interpreting figures?
[+] [-] BluSyn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DevKoala|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the-dude|5 years ago|reply
Original take was 'customer refund', which I interpreted as a 'chargeback'.
A refund and a chargeback are very distinctive things.
[+] [-] josefresco|5 years ago|reply