Without making any arguments about this particular person's due diligence, I think it's clear that over the last couple of years, "raise a ruckus online" has become a reasonable tactic when dealing with companies that have poor customer support systems.

I'd prefer not to see this kind of thing on HN too. On the other hand, customer support does seem to be disappearing as a trend. I'm not sure what other recourse a customer has in cases like that.

(We once battled with Sage technical "support" on behalf of a client; we spent two days navigating various support channels, including paid support, before finally giving up and writing a post to our website, and then forwarding a link to that post to Sage's PR department. The very next morning we got a call from a technical specialist who was suddenly very eager to resolve our problem. Folks, this is not how you take care of your customers!)