“Heavily integrated into eBay” except it isnt any more.
Firstly the article is a year and a half old but although you can still use PayPal on eBay to say it is heavily integrated is bullshit. EBay started moving away from PayPal years ago and at this point have integrated their own systems linking to your bank account to take the place of what they used to use PayPal for.
PayPal was acquired by Ebay for 1.5 billion in stock. Group that benefitted from that transactionmost already included musk, thiel, etc. They are intrinsically tired together forever. You also see PayPal as an option for all transactions in eBay, the very recent addition of alternative options, after decades of socializing people on PayPal as the default option doesn’t change much.
Imagine your side of this “argument” being the hill someone dies on… I sure hope you’re a bot, because otherwise you seem a pretty sad, confused human
You mention that PayPal was bought by eBay (in 2002) but not that it was spun off again in 2015. They’re separate companies. If anything, Venmo is a competitor of PayPal.
If anything, Venmo is a competitor of PayPal
Yes, just like how Coke is a competitor to Diet Coke and Sprite.
If anything, Venmo is a competitor of PayPal.
PayPal… owns Venmo?
Again, you are weird to spend energy defending semantics around this corporation… are you okay, bud? Temporarily embarrassed millionaire?
Correcting misinformation isn’t defense of the entities involved. You can hate eBay (or any entity) and correct misinformation about them. There’s no conflict there.
Maybe one of these options are good?
https://alternativeto.net/software/paypal/
https://alternativeto.net/software/venmo/
While we’re at it:
Looking through Amazon alternatives… they all suck so far. Though this Etsy alternative looks interesting:
Never saw a .coop before. Unfortunately chicken.coop is reserved :(
Idk much about it, but what about DecentraShop?
It looks like it might be one of those blockchain-based marketplaces. I noticed there were a handful of those on AlternativesTo. I skipped em because I have no interest in supporting blockchain stuff.
Any alternatives to PayPal?
Depends on which function you want to replace?
This site provides absolutely no evidence of any of its claims and even includes the following little gem in the FAQ section on that page:
Is PayPal Safe?
Yes, all Paypal transactions are encrypted. Plus, it has two-factor authentication and fraud protection.
Safe for its customers, or safe for PayPal?
The site was a quick roundup of info to link to. Post isn’t an endorsement of the site and doesn’t try to be, it’s an endorsement of the broader idea. I didn’t say to eat a bowl of horseshit and smile about it, I said PayPal owns Venmo and the implication is that a lot of decent people will stop using Paypal in protest and say, “I’ll just use Venmo instead”.
So helping some of the younger folks realize that separation doesn’t exist in many large brands - a thing that a lot of us do know and consider, but don’t be so arrogant as to assume people aren’t learning these things every day.
See, this isn’t viable.
This is the “ban plastic straws” of late stage capitalism. Overrepresenting individual action to distract from the need of structural reform.
Stop voting with your wallet, it’s pointless. Consumption is not expressing support. Vote with your votes, if you’re in a place where you have a chance to do so, find other ways to organize collective action if you don’t.
If you’re in a country with a two party system then voting has even less impact that than giving your money to a more worthwhile company.
Consumption is not expressing support.
You may not support them with your words but giving them money is literally support. Like giving a horse an apple and then saying you’re not feeding it.
No, it’s like giving the horse a sugar cube where you own exactly one of the grains of sugar, taking your grain of sugar away and pretending you’ve made a difference.
Or, you know, banning plastic straws.
You’re absolutely wrong about two party systems in any case, even those have tons of elected roles in different layers of governance where changes matter. And that’s also where the collective action comes in. Your feel-good token choices of companies and services to avoid haven’t done anything in the past thirty years and aren’t going to start now.
Now apply that logic to voting. Your vote is a grain of sugar, yet it somehow does have an effect, doesn’t it?
Yep. Because your vote is not based on how much capital you have, but assigned (more or less) equally across the population.
I did the math. The average US-ian’s vote counts as much as Elon Musk’s (if they live in the same state). On average their “wallet vote” counts 0.00002% as much as Musk’s. Even before he bought the presidency, by the way, just as a matter of purchasing power.
Where do you think you have more of an effect?
Again, voting with your wallet has exactly zero value. Your money is a rounding error compared to your vote and your direct political action.
A lot of people own a gram of sugar and make up a lot of sugar cubes. Informing them and motivating boycotts can have an accumulating effect.
But I’d say vote with both anyway. Your democratic vote and your money.
No, it can’t. It’s an ultraliberal fiction about a self-correcting market we know for a fact doesn’t play out in reality.
This would require wealth to be roughly evenly divided, it would require enough supply to always have a supplier available who brands on whatever issue the consumer is trying to push on every market and it would require the consumer to research every issue and track it throughout the corporate ownership chain effectively.
It just doesn’t work like that. The way it works is I don’t like to pay Microsoft OR Google for their crappy office suites, but the open source alternatives are bad and the people I work with require using those for compatibility reasons, so I pay both.
What I can do, though, is set up a social democratic state where I don’t have to make an ethical or political statement with my choice of office software, I have a government in place that will fine the crap out of them for their infractions.
And if that’s not working, my action can be placed on pressuring the government, for which I have way fewer constraints and way more agency.
If it makes you feel funny to pay for a thing absolutely pay for something else. That’s all well and good. But don’t fool yourself and others by pretending it’s an effective form of political action or a moral responsibility. It’s neither.
So you’re saying that the 1965-1970 Delano Grape Strike and subsequent 10-year supermarket grape boycotts were useless and didn’t cause any real change? Or the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
Had to look up Delano, but I’m not surprised to find that it was apparently not a boycott, but a larger organized, ongoing labor conflict. I knew about Montgomery (which in itself is a crazy sign of cultural imperialism, because I have no business knowing that), and the same applies.
You can set up a genuine boycott of something as part of a larger set of organized actions, particularly in a local conflict. You can’t rely on consumers worldwide spontaneously abandoning a global oligopoly as a way to enact any meaningful change. At most you’ll get a PR response. At most.
But the boycott is still an important part of the social movement, isn’t it? Even if, as in the Delano Grape Strike, it takes a decade or more to force change, with plenty of activists disappearing, arrested, tortured, or killed.
Individually we do not make much of a difference in anything but that’s an excuse to avoid searching for a better company and often tolerating a worse offer (e.g. a fair trade product that costs more, or lacks modern features).
Change in politics certainly matters but your individual support of a political party in terms of one vote has practically no affect on the result in a winner-take-all/first-past-the-post voting system. Your individual “vote” in support of a company is at least a non-zero value, and sometimes is multiple “votes” per year.
People often say it would be better if just more people voted, but that’s only helpful for them because they imagine they would vote for the main party they like the most. I doubt that’s the case. The most important structural reform imo is to increase the representation of the public in government - and it’s not a main party’s self interests to do that. Voting is unlikely to change that.
Yes it is. What other company for payment management will you find? It’s an extremely narrow oligopoly, and that’s even counting the credit card agencies that suck just as much as PayPal.
You have zero agency as an economic player. Exactly zero.
You won’t impact PayPal getting richer by researching a different coupon provider than Honey. That’s not how this is going to play out at any point in time.
You don’t enact change by leveraging the breadcrumbs of an income you have as a salaried worker. You do so by leveraging real collective power in an organized, effective manner. As a player in government (by voting or holding office, because running is also part of democracy) or as a non-government organization. Those are your options. Anything else is whatever the equivalent of greenwashing is for activism.
There are no good options sometimes. I place my hope in GNU Taler as a means to send and accept payment in the future (it’s anonymous for the buyer but the seller is identifiable for tax reasons).
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the effectiveness of voting with wallets.
What would you call an example of ‘real collective power’?
We don’t have to agree to disagree, it’s measurable. You just don’t have enough capital to make a dent before large numbers and market forces make it impossible to have an effect. That’s why we have governments and regulations in the first place. “Vote with your wallet” is part of the anarchocapitalist fiction that free markets self-regulate by way of the public acting on them through their consumption choices affecting supply and demand. It just doesn’t happen, demonstrably.
Real collective power is, ideally, enacted through those regulations under a rule of law. Governments made of people and acting on their behalf get to coerce rich assholes into following rules. It’s also collective action, like collective bargaining through unions enforced by a right to strike protected by the government.
If your republic has failed to do these things it gets trickier and you get into the territory of forcing reform through protest, mass disobedience or general strike. And yes, in extreme cases eventually revolution, but man, people online sure like to misrepresent how quickly or effectively through revolution because waiting for revolution is easier than actually doing the work.
I find Americans in particular are surprinsingly reticent to acknowledging this for a place that sacralizes both their foundational moment and several key historical landmarks, all enacted through these means. Nobody ever remembers the Great Burker King Boycott of 1972 or whatever. How is this even a debate.
Naw sorry, I tried that this last election and got embarrassed. Went hardcore Democrat, Coconut-pilled, blah blah blah.
I genuinely tried to believe in it, voted early, got friends and family to show up and vote too. Not only did the dems lose, they lost worse than they have in decades.
And to make matters worse, the Democratic party largely has completely missed why they lost so badly to the most pathetic excuse for a president in American history.
It’s too late for large scale positive structural change with the current political parties in the USA. The Dems must be torn apart and re-shaped into a populist left-wing party to have any chance of meaningful change. Until that happens, voting with your dollar is the only kind of vote that will be taken seriously.
Extremely local elections, sure, vote for a leftist candidate that might actually win some small office. But unless it’s that, vote with your dollar and engage in direct action to serve your community and build genuine solidarity.
I just have opted out overall and literally use as little as I can across the board.
Zelle is separate right?
From wikipedia
Zelle (/zɛl/) is a United States–based digital payments network run by a private financial services company owned by the banks Bank of America, Truist, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Bank, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo.
So PayPal does not seem to own an interest in Zelle, but the group of owners isn’t necessarily better than PayPal.
It’s capital all the way down, man.
A group of different bad people behind Zelle. But maybe enough to stop supporting those few South African ghouls working to role America and then the would beyond. You’ll need to decide where your line is, but deleting PayPal account and uninstalling their apps is a start. Maybe you go to Zelle and use that while you research if there is something decent somewhere.
Maybe it means going back to small credit unions? paper checks? Direct bank transfers with friends/family? Not sure what best alternatives is currently. Banking in general is just not really ever going to contain good people - maybe if we allow personal banking at the post office one day - but that’s a pipe dream as fascists are denying judges rulings and releasing January 6 criminals who tased a cop in the neck and admitted to it under oath.
With iOS app of paypal, you are forcefully giving honey as well, luckily, you can disable the safari plugin
what did PayPal do?
It’s an early specimen of “unregulated bank”, founded in part by Trump buddy Peter Thiel and merged with Elon Musk’s X.com in 2000.
They have a history of locking accounts under false pretenses and seizing the money. It’s screwed over many a Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Early in Minecraft history, Notch lost access to over half a million dollars. They’ve failed to pay rewards in their software bug bounty program.
Edit: The usual antics for Musk and friends for 20 years.
Also, I checked my records. I’m biased (a word that the current US administration is erasing from all government documents) because of an early Amazon third-party seller plus PayPal experience; the item I was sent was wrong and 5% of the value of what I ordered. Returned sealed cheap item, seller wouldn’t refund. PayPal ruled in the seller’s favor and Amazon did not care because of third-party seller terms and conditions. A young person out a few hundred bucks doesn’t forget that.
Braintree, Honey, Paydiant, Tradera, Xoom, and Zettle all owned by PayPal.
Not the modern X.com to be clear; Musk just has a weird fetish for the letter X like an edgy teenager.
Now you got me started on X… 😂 While true, Musk is no fool and bought such a simple and recognizable domain back from PayPal in 2017 for an undisclosed amount.
He’s a successful businessman, no doubt. Problem is that billionaires are pulling up the ladders behind them as wealth inequality is increasing (power is concentrating).
Twitter was well-known to be infested with bots when Musk purchased it. Turns out, that made it more valuable to someone rich who wants to sway elections…
Shop local, use smaller local services (credit unions), drop services owned by or purchased by billionaires (Too busy ranting and I haven’t actually read this article yet 🤣)
Decentralization, power to the people and not just the few, as the founding fathers intended. To our European viewers… He’s coming. (You know who. Not talking about Jesus who the churches have replaced with culture war nonsense.)
right. I just thought they’d made the news today or something.
Nah. News… Uh, in an adjacent saga, billionaire Kanye West is selling swastika t-shirts. So that’s where we’re at with these people…
Oh boy… Look up peter thiel, elon musk and david sacks to start - three stains on humanity working very actively to end it as we speak. They were the basin founding faces of PayPal (I mean, I think musk came on after the fact or was pushed out early or something, continuing the trend of him never actually creating anything). Currently they are alll very active in the trump admin - two with officially appointed positions, one in the shadows. Vance is also created by thiel. Look up that “Dark Gothic maga” video (musk’s stupid name) that’s been shared often recently.
Then separately, PayPal owns Honey, and it turns out has been scamming millions, maybe billions away from online creators for years, probably some of your favorites included in that list. Active lawsuit ongoing - look up legal eagle’s video maybe as a start.
All these billionaire fucks made their fortunes through Paypal and still likely hold stock and maybe board positions, can’t recall?
Hear, hear. It fucking sucks that we created these monsters. At least I did, for simply wanting to use eBay.
