I actually wrote in to Digital Ocean about this incident, twice, over the course of the last year.

The first time I wrote in, I received a bullshit response from some support peon saying exactly the wrong thing "we support our CTO, blah blah blah."

The second time I wrote, curious about their offerings once more, saying how perverse I thought his actions were and asking how I could trust such a company...

then, to my surprise, I had one of their co-founders write me back saying that such a thing would never happen again and that it was more or less inappropriate abuse of power. A sufficient response. We've yet to switch to them, or try 'em out, but at least they're now in the running again.

The problem is that the equity holders that allowed this to happen in the first place now have capital to hire people who aren't shitheads, but they themselves set the culture and hired the early shitheads in the first place.

Doing business with people like that, even if their business isn't shitheads now, sends the message that "it's okay to have no moral compass whatsoever, as long as you win and raise money/become profitable, and then fix it before you are too large".

That's not acceptable.

I sincerely don't believe in that, and would encourage more of the world to forgive-- more. No changing the past, only the future...

I publically _hate_ on a lot of companies, at the semblance of a fuck up, but if they fix their shit-- I'm not going to continue hating.

Yeah he/they screwed up massively, like a lot of companies do, but I'm willing to forgive them should they actually change. I'm not going to post the full email here as I don't think it's appropriate, but I've gotten past it as the reply is sincere and addresses my concerns.

... that's not say we shouldn't tease 'em a bit down the road about it ;-) "remember that time your ass and your brain were the same thing?!" haha. ... Hopefully, the HN humor police don't come down on me...

And on that note, I'd like to post this video, of a man not so great with words-- except this one time where he's perfect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ux3DKxxFoM

So... maybe they'll fool me once, if they've outright lied to me, but they ain't gonna fool me again ;-)

If you think this status quo is unacceptable, then don't use these proprietary web services. Take control of your web presence and your "interactions with the entire world." Support projects like Diaspora and Pump.io, and run your own instance of their federated platforms. Your username cannot be taken away when you are the service provider.

That's all fine and good but there's no way to interoperate with the predominant (centralized) microblogging platform (Twitter) if one does this. It leaves you out of the conversation and puts you at a disadvantage - a non-starter.

Idealism like this is nice in theory, but fails hard in practice.

I'm not saying they are legally wrong, or violating anyone's legal rights, or that the government should do something. I'm saying that it's still wrong and unacceptable, and they deserve criticism.

Or we need more, and better publicized, instances of people getting screwed for relying on privately-owned social media infrastructure.

In some ways this make me think of towns that improve the interaction of cars and pedestrians by reducing, rather than increasing, traffic signs and traffic control signals[0].

When people think their best interests are being provided for they tend to become lax and too trusting. When (in the case of street traffic) pedestrians and drivers realize that the onus is on them to make things right they are more mindful.

People using assorted profit-focused Web tools need more reminders that no one is looking out for them except to the extent it raises the bottom line for someone else.

They need reminders that they are the product, not the customer.

They need reminders that they have near zero claim on anything and have no reasonable expectation of fairness.

As it stands, sites like Twitter, Facebook, et al, have the best of both worlds. People use their sites as if it were forever their own personal property (and so become deeply invested in it) while the actual ownership remains with the site.

0: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/controlled-chaos...

The funniest part is another response to your comment, defending this simply because it's the status quo. Of course it's technically/legally possible, the status quo is after all a self-reenforcing system.

Due process is where I disagree. It would inevitability be too heavy handed, too much of a kangaroo court or possibly both. The root cause is the attitudes of the people perpetuating it, or those rationalizing them to others.

Rendering someone's content inaccessible without any means to get it back is outrageously insidious. It violates the implied social contract you have with your users. It's gross.

This would be just about tolerable had they renamed it – preserving all of her social network links – and then told her about it. Frustrating and possibly even humiliating, but at least not actually destructive.

"A few months ago while tagging my wife “at”Kathleen on Instagram I noticed her username was no longer displaying as “@kathleen”, but rather “_____kathleen”."

Edit. Sorry again that wasn't you.

But this is a very steep legal hill to climb (and I'm simplifying the issues considerably, at that). It's not that I think Instagram's actions here are reasonable; it's a terrible policy in a lot of ways. But ultimately it's the consumer's choice to sign up with a service or not.

There's nothing new about this "class system." Instagram's servers are the property of Instagram (and therefore Facebook), so they can do essentially anything they like with them, including things that make them look really bad from the outside like this incident (assuming everything happened as was implied).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith_(law)

This (if it happened as described) would be a violation of this.