[kbenson]

I don't question that. Yet doing things based purely on their effectiveness for your goals without any regard to the consequences for other parties is semi-sociopathic behavior, which is why it's frowned upon. Whether something is effective or not should not be the only metric by which we decide whether it's the action we should take.

[ploxiln]

A small-time developer asking a big company to be reasonable practically never works. Likely first response is from a low-paid customer support person who has no idea what you're talking about, likely second response is from an aggressive business or law type in the company.

Public shaming on twitter+blog is 50/50. It often gets the attention of an engineer and sometimes even a founder, and when it does the response is often reasonable. Why would you ever try anything else?

I've had a crazy technical issue with AWS that our account representative proved useless for about but a tweet got it fixed. Also see news articles about people suffering the most ridiculous treatment from comcast/timewarner/verizon/at&t until they get in the news and everything is finally sorted out. This is a totally standard thing you should already be familiar with. The problem is that these big companies get too many queries from crazies and people who have no idea what they're doing, they're inundated with stupid support requests. So a legitimate support request will never be noticed by anyone who knows anything. So you need a sort of public vetting process. You need the "shaming" part to express the priority in large companies where business people have all the power.

I'm not sure there's a better way, that's just how it is.