| So, let's be clear: 1. The blogger signed up with DO and agreed to some TOS that prohibit certain types of activities. 2. He then, by his own admission, lurks in a chatroom. 3. He asks a Googler a question but does not disclose what he intends to do with it. By his own admission, he had no plans to write a piece. 4. He takes the Googler's comments, contorts them, and constructs a poorly written screed in which he, amongst various other calumnies against good taste, investigates the home address of the Googler and uses that to add dramatic effect to his hit piece. 5. The hoster -- whose TOS he explicitly agreed with at the start -- asks him politely to edit his piece to comply with the agreement. They seem to only require him to remove the personal identifying information. 6. Despite the fact that removing the name of the person would not really diminish the albeit half-baked and poorly thought out idea that the author is trying to get promote, he acts as though he is the one that should feel aggrieved and outraged for removing the Googler's name. 7. By doing so, he reveals his true intent. He isn't interested in making a point about Google; he is interested primarily in presenting the said Googler in a negative light and personally maligning him or inciting others to malign him. Or, the shorter version, the blog author is an odious and obnoxious attention-whore and troll who is trying to build a reputation by demolishing the reputation of an innocent engineer; and then who is so blinded by his desire to get attention that he doesn't realise that he looks like an ignorant jackass by whinging and whining that DO are asking him to simply adhere to the TOS that he himself agreed to. |
I don't know anything about DO, but it aggravates me that they are being disparaged here when all they did was make a reasonable request.
Most services frown upon posting identifying information in certain kinds of stories. Reddit, for example, had issues with vigilantism against innocent people after certain inflammatory posts.