Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

The past 20 years has seen an explosion in Internet services, but a fundamental (often unspoken) quality of these services is that they must keep individualized customer support costs very low in order to be profitable. I mean, just look at Google, which has billions of end users. You can argue that Google takes in a ton of money, but it's not hard to see that if every Google user just had a single support call requiring 30 minutes of a support rep's time a year, that Google's profitability would tank (never mind the difficulty in hiring that many reps in the first place).

So all these services invest a ton into automated support and systems to ensure the vast majority of users never need support from a real human. That usually works well, except when you get some of these edge cases, and, very importantly, these edge cases are usually the worst when the customer behavior, while totally legit, "looks" pretty similar to malicious usage.

So, in that case, I'm glad that these back-channel avenues still exist when someone gets stuck in the machine. I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be. The social media channel essentially acts as a filter, as only things that are real problems are likely to get upvotes or lots of visibility. A trade off for users being able to get tons of value for (relatively) very cheap prices is that the "tail end" of support requests is usually pretty nightmarish.

(This is a general comment; not directed at Stripe with whom I personally have had no dealings needing support.)

It's simple. If you can't provide useful customer service, then you can't provide a service at all. Similarly if you can't scale professionally, then in reality you can't (and shouldn't) scale at all.

Tech scales, and customer bases scale, but the real world doesn't scale with it. Professionals with morals, and standards, and pride in what they do, should self-limit their business to what they can realistically handle. And that includes the greedy behemoths across all of tech. If they truly cared about their customers they would accept that there is a limit to how many they can provide quality support for, and artificially restrict their own growth until they've ironed out enough issues that they can release the tap and scale a little bit more.

Of course financial imperatives beat both professionalism and pride in how the company operates, so that never happens.

There's no technical fix. There's no financial fix. There's probably no legal fix either. It needs an attitude fix.

The issue is that the vast majority of users receive excellent service, at a historically extremely low cost. The problems always arise at these edge cases where legitimate human behavior is often indistinguishable from malicious behavior without further information. But if a company decides to go with the solution of "we're not going to scale unless we have 100% of all these edge cases covered", that company would long be out of business from competition who is able to offer a lower priced product with better support for 99.9% of users.

This type of problem is essentially the same as classic externality issues, and after reading some of the other responses to my comment, I think the only way this can be solved is with government intervention requiring some level of responsiveness so that there is a level playing field for all companies.