[explaingarlic]

If you make tens of thousands of dollars a month on YouTube with AdSense, you are effectively a business. And indeed, many of these YouTubers have setup businesses in their name that receive the AdSense funds, and pay themselves a salary out of that.

A company does not publicly humiliate a customer who makes a detrimental statement to its products - can you imagine the devastation from someone who is socially awkward and receives this kind of backlash for the horrific crime of speaking slightly out of line?

Does your employer have a "worst employee of the month" poster with enumerated examples of all of the fuckups they made in the last month? That would be a million times less harmful than a pop-culture hack doing the same thing to you because you said something out of line.

People should be free to abuse each other online, call each other all sorts of stuff and ESPECIALLY lie or stretch the truth, without facing offline scrutiny or embarrassment.

[invisible]

I disagree with your opinion that people should be free to abuse others online without any scrutiny offline. Especially when people claim to be experts and assert authority on subjects.

Also, what is with creating these fictional scenarios about an employer punishing a customer or employee? Even if “he” were a business, he’s free to react to criticism however he chooses.

My local barber chose to respond to negative reviews by chastising every single one. They still somehow have plenty of happy customers.

[dntrkv]

> A company does not publicly humiliate a customer who makes a detrimental statement to its products

This happens quite often.

It's very common to find reviews on Yelp where someone leaves a less-than-honest review and the company owner comes in and explains what a piece of shit that person was and how they aren't telling the whole story.

If you come into a store and act like a dick towards the staff, you will almost certainly be publicly humiliated.

It even happens with larger companies where someone goes to the media with some BS story, and then the company issues public statements about how that person is full of shit.

I see nothing wrong with what William did. It may be petty, but who cares. If you don't want to be called out, don't be a troll.

[explaingarlic]

There are three differences between what Osman Unincorporated and the companies that you describe have done.

# Number one is scope:

- They do not have the same amount of readers, evangelists etc. that could harass the person making the erroneous claim

# Number two is positioning:

- Reviews can be, by their very nature, points of discussion, therefore meaning that anything underneath a review, including a comment from the company that makes the product, is a point of discussion and thus necessary to protect in order to have a free and open dialog.

# Number three is punching power:

- William Osman published a fraudulent job application and got someone to sign a contract while promising him that he moving up in the world, only to pull the rug out from underneath him and instead shock him with the fact that he is now going to be harassed due to his uninformed "trolling" (which happens plenty of times from informed professionals even on Hacker News). This kind of bait and switch is mentally devastating, and the person is undoubtedly shocked from such an act of bullying which could be argued to be traumatizing. All of this happened because the guy spoke out of line on a specific technical issue on which both people were wrong.