alt Hacker NewsI think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a hard time grasping the scale of these services.
Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone using gift cards will have their account locked.
These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare occurrences. The majority of people who use these services will not have any experience like these stories you read.
To be honest, I think the average person is probably better at estimating their risk of using these services than a lot of these HN commenters.
It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.
It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.