BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)

Potentially unpopular opinion but ultimately it's a private service and they decided to disable payout methods which negatively affects Ukrainian users for the sake of integrating new changes/avoiding legal risk. They don't have to support all countries. I feel sorry for the users though, especially I imagine by asking supporters to move to another platform will result in some of them dropping which is the result of platform lock in..

You are right, they probably don't have to, or that would be basis for legal action.

Customers should also be allowed to expose shady stuff done by such private services, warning other people.

Sure, it's a private service and they can do whatever they want, but why block Ukraine? I spent an inordinate amount of time and resources over years blocking Americans from the casino I ran, so I can somewhat sympathize with the point of view that one wants to avoid legal issues. But the only reason I spent the energy to do that was that I needed to be on the right side of the law, personally, if I ever found myself physically back in the US. The only reason I blocked certain other countries (like Myanmar and Iran) was on moral principle because I didn't want to potentially help launder money to revolting dictatorships. I did not, for instance, research or give two fucks about online gambling laws in Malaysia, or a dozen other countries I'd never step foot in where I had players from. I certainly wouldn't have cut off a country that was under siege and partially eaten by a nasty dictatorship. If I were running it now, I'd have probably set up filters to block anyone conceivably in Russian territory, and that would be that. If one guy can do it against an onslaught of thousands of Americans trying to fake their IP addresses daily, I'm sure a good sized company can handle blocking Russian money laundering through a tip jar.

Of course, now imagine the reaction on hackernews if this had concerned the US or Israel. Now explain to me how this is different?

No. I closed down a commercial service I ran and took 6 months to do it in order to give people a reasonable chance to move elsewhere. I didn't have to, but I felt it was the moral thing to do. Maybe morals are out of fashion.

They haven’t “blocked Ukraine”. They had three payment processors, they cut two of them, and the remaining payout option is Stripe, which didn’t support Ukraine before the other processors were cut either.

When reading the title, in your head bold "silently" rather than "dropped support".

Right, just that from the article I get the vibe that the author makes the case Ukraine got blocked while it's the result of dropping a payment provider, not policy that singles out Ukraine

>but why block Ukraine?

Ukraine is on the one hand a fairly small market, on the other hand a very corrupt totalitarian country, where a huge part of the "donations" will be bribery, money laundering, fraud, buying illegal goods.

So, probably, the company simply decided that it was easier to abandon this market rather than to solve the potential problems.

>moral principle because I didn't want to potentially help launder money to revolting dictatorships.

It is quite applicable to Ukraine as well.

People are literally being grabbed off the street and sent to die in storm troop units. Massive corruption, the main method of protection of which is that those who fight against it (or all their male relatives) are simply sent to die.

But I think it's more about the legal problems created by a small, toxic market than about high moral standards.

No shit. Have you ever been to Ukraine? And by what metrics do you judge corruption and “totalitarianism”?

Briberies, illegal goods, sheesh…

> Potentially unpopular opinion but ultimately it's a private service and they decided to disable payout methods which negatively affects Ukrainian users for the sake of integrating new changes/avoiding legal risk.

"It's a private service so they can do what they want" is missing the issue. Every private service in the jurisdiction is under the same legal constraints, so if the law is creating the incentive for them to screw their users, that is a problem with the law. Because then they all have the same incentive and converge on the same behavior and the usual defense to customer abuse by private companies -- switching to a competitor -- isn't available as a remedy.

>> People are literally being grabbed off the street and sent to die in storm troop units. Massive corruption, the main method of protection of which is that those who fight against it (or all their male relatives) are simply sent to die.

This description sounds suspiciously similar to the situation in Russia for any male of fighting age or anyone who fights against corruption. I suppose a difference being that one country is forced to throw all its resources at stopping an invasion, and the other country is taking all its young men off the street simply to invade its neighbor.