Lovely, the Google classic "ban the world" approach -- I've been desperately trying to move my client off of vercel, this might just be the gasoline.

I followed this drama on Twitter. The author was breaking the terms of service and creating DMCA support burden for Vercel. They had proactively been in touch with him a few times to reach a solution.

I think it’s quite reasonable that they blocked the account rather than the project. You wouldn’t have got that level of service from big tech.

> I think it’s quite reasonable that they blocked the account rather than the project.

I’m just responding to your last sentence: why would you go out of your way to say it is reasonable to block the account rather than the project?

I can understand locking the account just as the “lazy default” but I would not call it in any way reasonable - but you did, so I’m curious.

If that is reasonable, what would you consider unreasonable?

(Because to me, the obviously reasonable thing to do would be to block the project and not his entire account.)

It’s just a matter of opinion. I think Vercel were acting reasonably with all of the context we have. Things like terms of business are at the account level, not project level.

Care to provide any links? The Twitter claim above is that their was no communication and the ban occurred on a Friday.

Perhaps, yet it is also reasonable to see this as a reason for anyone else to avoid Vercel.

Just because it's their right to conduct this way, doesn't mean it's not everyone elses exactly equal right to judge that and avoid.

One might consider Cloudflare as a very nice competitor to Vercel in terms of DX, although I suspect all companies use a ban the world approach, even banks.

Not the best time to recommend Cloudflare.

Maybe, but they've kept customers informed throughout the entire outage. https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/hm7491k53ppg

They just had a big outage. What’s the probability of having another so soon?

If outages don't depend on each other, the probability is the same.

Why would you assume independence? I'd expect an outage to put people "on edge" for a period of time following the outage, during which changes are scrutinized to a higher degree, and/or a greater engineering focus/budget is dedicated to reliability to reflect the changed business/image requirements.

Aside from this (which is already very shitty and would cause the same response in me) what are the issues you’re running into with Vercel?

- Support is failing us - I want my team to use you for vercel support, but it isn't there. - Support is failing our customers - when you fail, I end up reverse-depending your repo to tell us why it's failing -- just give us a clear answer, we all move away happy, bullshit and I go to lambda where I just accept it. - EOD: Vercel makes engineers happy to bullshit, but gives operations teams nothing acceptable - I want a deliverable product.

FYI you have to use two line breaks to start a new line with (HN's) Markdown.

Would love to dig into your support issues. Let me know: rauchg@vercel.com

And if the support team had done so, I'd have nothing to converse about :)

After digging upwards, additional support seems like an option delivered too late, and too outside of 'proper' channels - if you want a sanitized rant I can probably deliver it tomorrow, but too-little too-late is where vercel has landed in the operations team.

Always looking for the meta-feedback as well on how we can improve support. So, both pieces of feedback welcome!

Very disappointing that this was the path Vercel chose to take. This is something I would expect from Google or Amazon, but not a developer darling like Vercel. Seems like all companies shed their values is service of growth and capitalism at some point or another. A shame.

Why desperately?

I don't know why anyone trusted Vercel in the first place. The vibes of VC money funding an unsustainable offering for a relatively niche market are so strong, it doesn't make any sense.

Shows the importance of controlling your own critical infrastructure, or at least not being dependent for critical functions. Other examples include Github and Discord, both having shown the tendency do arbitarily ban users with little recourse.

Taking down all his projects (not just 12ft) is heavy-handed, but otherwise Guillermo’s response in that thread seems pretty reasonable to me:

> Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses.

> Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.

The 12ft guy doesn’t look so great in that thread. He admits to ignoring the email (gosh I was busy mmkay?) and then argues that Vercel is lying about the extra work they had to do.

> gosh I was busy mmkay?

Mischaracterization much? He was on Vacation.

How many of us read every email for personal projects that comes in when you're half way across the world and supposed to be relaxing.

Sure, but if you go on vacation and don't check your email for two weeks, you can't really claim “no warning”. If two weeks isn’t sufficient notice because of vacation it’s fine to say so, but it’s not the same thing as “no warning” just because you’re not checking email.

To take it even further, if you're a one man operation, not checking emails regarding your operation for two weeks is pure negligence, vacation or not.

I might ignore personal project emails while I'm on vacation, but I also won't complain if one of those emails says my billing method is out of date and I come home and it's been turned off.

But if you missed one bill for a service and your account was nuked for all the other products you had paid without issue, you'd be right to get mad, and that's exactly what's happening here:

> I’m sympathetic to vercel here. Honestly very reasonable to take down 12ft with no response in 2 weeks.

> Taking everything else is the weird part.

> but otherwise Guillermo’s response in that thread seems pretty reasonable to me

“Other than the completely unreasonable thing, they seemed pretty reasonable”.

I mean he's not being a complete asshole in the discussion here[1], but nuking the entire customer's account for a ToS violation on one specific product still isn't a reasonable move. Yes Google and Amazon do it routinely, but if you're not a trillion dollar monopoly and you care about your business' reputation, you shouldn't behave like those.

[1] CEOs behaving like assholes in Twitter discussions isn't supposed to be the norm.

If you violate the TOS of a free service, it’s not on them to surgically split your account into “offending” and “non-offending” parts, especially if they reach out to you to try to work with you to remove the offending parts and you don’t respond for two weeks.

There's no surgery involved and yes it is on them. Actually they retroactively did so when he complained, and as such they agreed that nuking everything was the wrong move.

Also, the “offending part” has been well known from them for several years (they even claim it costed them a lot in support over the years) so it's not like they received a DMCA and had to take everything down in a hurry, they knew exactly what product they wanted to stop because they did stop it because it was too costly. The fact that it violated their TOS is just the legal justification for the closure, not its source.